Lee Battersby

Thursday Linkfest

PETERMBALL Smart Advice from Smart People , , , , , , , , , ,

Over-tired, very busy, and generally lazy this week. This is not so much a weeks worth of interesting links (which I’ve started doing as I go along) as stuff I remembered with half-hearted accuracy sometime this morning.

  • Via the ever-entertaining villainous_mog – photographs of Japanese Factories at night (as VM puts it: they look straight out of Final Fantasy 7.)
  • Tansy Raynor Roberts on writing time, with much on the notion of draft-speed.
  • Clarion peep Ben Francisco has posted his latest article at Fantasy, grading last years big comic-book company crossovers. (In the interest of self-confession, I must admit that my primary response was “thank god I don’t read comics” anymore, even though that’s something of a misnomer – it was big crossovers that drove me towards the discreet stories of the graphic-novel format).
  • Speaking of Clarion Peeps, both Lyn Battersby and Daniel Braum have posted their thoughts on the 2007 experience at tutor Lee Battersby’s blog.
  • Kate Eltham has two posts full of notes about Building Online Communities from the Tools of Change for Publishing conference in New York. If you’re a writer and you’re not reading Kate’s blog, you really should – it’s chock-full of stuff about the relationship between writers, the internet, and emerging technologies.
  • This week’s mind-meld over at SF Signal talks about the Hardest Part of Being a Writer
  • A few weeks back I loaned my friend Kathleen a copy of Space Train (aka the actual worst SF novel, rather than the so-bad-it’s-amusing worst SF novel ever). Like many people who have heard me hold forth on the horrors of Terence Haile’s story of sabotage, misogyny and class warfare (with bonus space crabs) she remained unconvinced that it was as bad as I claimed – behold her capitulation, in which she shares the pain (with bonus snark)… For those of you intrigued by all this, bear in mind that I’ve already made this book sound better than it is.
  • Clarion peep (and owner of the most awesome boots in existence) Chris Green shares his own list of links and bookmarks. I’ll just send you to his blog rather than posting them all here.

Thursday Linkfest

PETERMBALL Smart Advice from Smart People , , , , , , , , , ,

Yesterday was busy and thus thesis-less, plus I got very little sleep thanks to some very unfomfortable shoulder pain, so odds are I’ll be saying little of interest today. Instead, I’ll entertain you with links to stuff that I’ve found interesting over the last week (or so):

  • My good friend Chris Slee reflects on the Edisonade (aka the pre-history of Science Fiction) and what was the best thing *before* sliced bread.
  • The ever-stylish Ben Francisco cherry-picks the SFnal highlights of the authors@google youtube series and gathers them together in a single handy post (although he’s missing Neil Gaiman in the line-up). If you’ve not seen these, particularly the John Scalzi, I recommend going and taking a look.
  • The Aurealis Awards are announced and the results posted on their website. Cat Sparks has posted photographs of the night, in which a bunch of writer-types have scrubbed up pretty well (and I show up looking marginally less shabby than usual in the vast flicker list of the night.).
  • Mick Foley (aka Cactus Jack, Mankind, Dude Love) reviews Aronofsky’s The Wrestler.
  • Steve Kenson on the lack of randomness in contemporary RPG character creation. (My first reaction to this post? To go roll up a Marvel Superheroe’s Character and convert it over to the point-by driven system of Kenson’s near-perfect supers RPG Mutants & Masterminds)
  • And, as if there’s not enough of me on the internets already, I sneak on over to Lee Battersby’s blog and guest-post my memories of the first week of Clarion South 2007.
  • John Klima bids farewell to the recently shut down Realms of Fantasy over at Tor.com, but also wonders where all those stories that used to go RoF’s way will end up (For my money, you can’t go past Fantasy magazine if you’re looking for fiction with an RoF-like feel)
  • Scientists discover that fiction can drive social evolution – which seems a little like overcomplicated the obvious, to me, but there you go.

Today

PETERMBALL Works in Progress , , , ,

I’ve done a short guest-post over at Lee Battersby’s blog to kick off a short retrospective about Clarion South 2007. I talk a little bit about what makes clarion great and a lot about the influence one of my classmates had on the first draft of what would eventually become Horn (formerly known around these parts as the untitled Unicorn novella). Go check it out, if you’re so inclined.

The rest of the day was pretty busy, by my standards. A trip to the Gold Coast to discuss a subject I start co-teaching in a couple of weeks, a brief fight with the university library about fines for books I’ve already paid fines on, and a trip out to the movies to see The Wrestler. The latter really deserves a post all on its own, since it’s a solid and enjoyable movie (and I say that rarely), but suffice to say that I’d recommend it. Micky Rourke is as good as you’ve heard, the film itself is very engaging, and it’s probably the first film about wrestling ever that didn’t make me furious by condescending to either the sport/performance or the fans.