Interesting post about the omnipresence of grief here in the age of contagion, over at the Harvard Business Review. Emotions need motion. It’s important we acknowledge what we go through. One unfortunate byproduct of the self-help movement is we’re the first generation to have feelings about our feelings. We tell ourselves things like, I feel sad, […]
I’ve put my weekly newsletter on hold for the holidays season, scheduling a return date in 2020 that just so coincides with the release date of These Strange & Magic Things on January 8. One of the recurring features in my weekly missive is a list of seven interesting things I wanted to share with […]
Last week, I ventured out into the streets of Brisbane to see Garth Nix in conversation with John Birmingham at the Brisbane Square Library. The in-conversation was nominally about Nix’s new book, Angel Mage, which got described as “Three Musketeers meets Joan of Arc with Angelic Magic and Kick-Ass Heroines.” As these events are wont […]
I spent a good chunk of last week writing about symbolic capital in the publishing industry, then read Nic Mamatas Ask Nick column over on LitReactor where he answered about why some writers get multiple failures on their resume and still draw advances. The answer, of course, is that publishing isn’t an even game and […]
I found myself falling through a blog hole over at Kristine Katheryn Rusch’s blog yesterday, going back and reading earlier posts she kept referencing. Along the way, I discovered a three-paragraph section that was immediately snagged for my thesis: Then there were the series that I had to abandon because of the changes in publishing. […]
Mike Shazkin’s recent post about the 7 Ways Book Publishing will change is a great read (albeit one that’s influenced by his relationship with the distributor Ingram). I wanted to pull one entry out for here because it’s a really useful way to look at the the shifts in book retail: Books have a ton […]
Craig Mod’s latest Roden Explorer newsletter features excerpts from a long speech he delivered about dopamine, smart phones appholes, and the social contracts of entertainment. You can check it out via his newsletter archive, and I’d suggest it’s as required reading if you’re an author trying to forge a living in a social media world. […]
I’ve been having an anxious week this week, which is not exactly a surprise given I had a big weekend of socialising and navigating responsibilities around devoting time to GoPlay, but it’s interesting to look at what boundaries have been crossed recently and where I’ve been letting myself make choices out of a place of […]
From a recent (re)post at Warren Ellis Ltd: Capitalism is lately cast as that Lovecraftian force that some people should not look directly at for fear of going completely mad and being banged up in the Arkham Sanitarium. Maybe meditating upon it as some Dark God From Beyond Space that is crushing the world into new […]
Every Friday I go through my well over-stocked folder of blog posts, articles, and other online produce that’s been marked “To Read” and clear out a handful. The best of them–aka those that still seem interesting or useful here in 2019–get posted here (and you can see the previous instalments using the Vintage Links tag). […]
It’s Friday, September 30, and so I launch into the fifth instalment of my Vintage Links series. It’s been an interesting week clearing the To-Read folder, as i’ve had my first run of posts/articles that were either a) no longer online, or b) now taken over by godawful spam sites that have camped on the […]
The Vintage Links series is an attempt to clear 600+ bookmarked links I compiled over a period of six years, mostly coinciding with the period in which I worked for Queensland Writers Centre. It involves a lot of stuff I flagged because it would be useful at work, in my own process, or just plain […]
