“Cotton swab” sounds like an archaic term for a sailor with a pleasant temperament.
“Aye, I remember Jim. He was a cotton swab if e’ere there were one!”
Monthly Archives: November 2011
Just started “Pearls Are A Nuisance,” the next story in Raymond Chandler‘s The Simple Art of Murder
In the writing world, I read Mark Vun Kannon‘s explanation of why he changed the title of his book (and why you might also want to), and BookEnds Jessica‘s very helpful description of the various edits that occur after a book has been picked up. Oh, and it looks like when have yet another fraud scandal in literature, this one involving a bizarre series of sentence pilferings.
The science news seems dominated by follow-ups to stories about the asteroid fly-by and failed Russian Mars probe, but there was this neat piece on mollusc camoflage explaining how deep sea squids and octopuses switch from being red to transparent based on which direction a threat approaches. Why? Read the story!
Also, I found this picture online of an otter holding a baby otter (a pup?) and decided it needed LOL-ifying. Resistance is futile.
Yes, I have not been reading much the past two days. I spent most of yesterday scrubbing hard copy edits into On The Head Of A Pin. However, I did finish “The King in Yellow,” a story in Raymond Chandler‘s The Simple Art of Murder
Juliette Wade at Talk To YoUniverse has a good piece for fantasy and sci-fi writers about designing dialects. This was especially intriguing to me, since the Murshy dialect (more of a creole) plays such a prominent role in the Observer stories. Also in the writing world, Diana Pharoah Francis at Magical Words discusses flawed characters,
I checked out a some space news like the failed Russian Phobos mission and the recent asteroid fly-by, some paleontology news about an ancient mite caught hitching a ride on a spider, and a strange study that seems to indicate the contact high urban dwellers get from inhaling carbon monoxide helps alleviate the stress from noise pollution.
[Late entry at 1530, a great piece by Alexandra Sokoloff on translating the eight-sequence screenwriting approach to writing novels. Now, I would object that this approach is better suited to novellas (which is why film adaptations of novels have to leave so much out) but the basic parallels are still valid.]
Still working my way through “The King in Yellow,” a short story (or maybe a novella, I haven’t been counting words) in The Simple Art of Murder
An inside view of how one of the Jessicas (not sure if it’s Faust or Alvarez) at BookEnds LLC edits her clients’ work.
Elizabeth Spann Craig‘s analysis of why it is a good tactic to move right on to a new writing project after finishing your last one.
If I were going to have a “best read” and a “most fun read” the latter honor would go to “10 Wonderful Fake Books By TV Characters” at Flavorwire.
BEST READ OF THE DAY: Jeff Cohen at Hey There’s A Dead Guy discussing dialogue tags, specifically the crazy rule about only using the tag “said.” Best line: “Reading ‘said’ all the time, even when it’s being done by a master … is like being hit lightly over the head with a hammer every few seconds.”
[Non-literary afterthought: Today, I also read about the curious spike in earthquakes in Oklahoma and Arkansas, the White House’s statement on extraterrestrial intelligence, the massive solar flare heralding next year’s sunspot climax, and the naming of three new elements.]
Today I’ve been polishing up a novella for submission, tweaking language here and there, adding a few touches for flavor and to give the narrator a bit more dimension.
(Also on my daily agenda: running my iTunes “Least Played” playlist so I can appreciate songs neglected by random shuffle, burning through the last of my hookah tobacco, enjoying a few nice hard ciders, and running The Lord Of The Rings special edition DVDs n the background on my XBox, silenced with the Spanish subtitles on. I’m weird.)
So, I come to a chapter in which my protagonist, a hardboiled detective hired to locate the missing angel of Despair, makes a bold assertion about his audience, specifically that most readers are women. Normally, I would just let this pass as part of his “unreliable narrator” charm. Or obnoxiousness, depending on how you take it.
But, On The Head Of A Pin is about, among many other things, the relationship of the heterosexual male psyche with the broad range of female archetypes. All of the angels are female (or at least they appear to him that way) as is his client. It’s essentially a “Man In A Woman’s World” story.
In light of this, I decided to do a little research. Here’s what I came up with: Continue reading
In honor of my friend Ron Gullekson‘s blog post, “Ten Rumors I’d Like To Start,” let me offer my bookish version: Continue reading
“The King in Yellow,” a short story in The Simple Art of Murder
Erin Mitchell‘s discussion at Hey There’s A Dead Guy about what it really means when someone Likes your Facebook author page. At the same site, Robin Agnew asks “Do Men and Women Write Differently?” (If you’re not satisfied with her answer, try dumping some of your own writing into the Gender Genie and see what it has to say!)
Still thinking about Les Edgerton‘s “mystical place” anecdote, and looking for it in the stuff I’ve written and stuff I’ve read. Such places abound in fantasy fiction, but could the river Mattie Ross crosses to follow Rooster and LeBoeuf into Indian country be considered a mystical place? What about the oil fields in The Big Sleep where you-know-what is hidden?
“I’ll Be Waiting,” a short story in The Simple Art of Murder
A science piece at Reuters about the end of a 520-day isolation experiment intended to simulate the psychological pressures of a manned mission to Mars. Best line in the story: “A previous 420-day experiment ended in drunken disaster in 2000, when two participants got into a fistfight and a third tried to forcibly kiss a female crew member.” Which one of these two experiments do you think would make a better story?
A story at Jacket Copy about right-wing terrorists taking their cues from a wannabe author’s online manuscript cum “field manual, technical manual, and call to arms.”
Best-sellers “… are promotional jobs based on a sort of indirect snob appeal, carefully escorted by the trained seals of the critical fraternity, and lovingly tended and watered by certain much too powerful pressure groups whose business is selling books, although they would like you to think they are fostering culture.”
– from “The Simple Art of Murder” in The Simple Art of Murder
BEST LINE OF THE DAY (from The Rejectionist’s review of Anonymous): “I find complaining about scholarly inaccuracy in a Roland Emmerich film to be analogous to expressing displeasure that Transformers does not correctly represent the mechanics of the internal combustion engine.”
“Spanish Blood,” a short story from The Simple Art Of Murder anthology by Raymond Chandler.
“Habeas corpus,” an ironically titled essay on the non-necessity of murder in crime fiction, by Lynne Patrick at Hey There’s a Dead Guy In The Living Room. And, in the same vein, I’m catching up on the shenanigans at Slushpile Hell.
A science piece at the New York Times about how causing senescent cells to self-destruct could prevent many of the symptoms of aging. Sounds like forced retirement for the microscopic set!