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 anthology. 

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.]