News, the Good and Bad » Sommer Leigh

Talking About Race

May 232012

I want to share this with everyone because I think it’s one of those things that should be embraced and talked about at length.

We have a lot of problems in this world – seeing other human beings who are different than us as somehow less human is a big ugly one. Whether we’re talking about race or gender, religious choices or sexual choices, we have a major problem with accepting people for who they are.

When Hunger Games went up and Cinna and Rue were cast as being black, a lot of discussion happened because of it. Good discussion, bad discussion, maybe some surprising insights for some people into how they view the world.

Now it looks like Finnick may be cast with a black actor and all the same confusion and disbelief and discussion is building again. It’s not an easy topic for a lot of people to talk about – but I am a big believer that talking about it is the only way to take its ugly power away. We are a beautiful crayola box world and I long for a world where you are who you are and there aren’t restrictions on caring about things based on color, sex, gender, body type, or ethnicity.

We should be able to turn to someone who is not like ourselves and say, hey, I have questions. Is it ok if I sound stupid for a minute and just ask them? I don’t have any black friends and I’m confused about some things. I don’t know any one who is Asian, who can I talk to if I don’t understand something? I need to know more about girls. Boys seem really weird to me, why do they act like this? I think we need to get to a point in the world where we can do this. Just talk.

I also hope more authors keep talking about this topic – about writing characters not like us and reading about characters not like us and how a book with a black character doesn’t have to be a story about a character not being white. I think it’s the dialogue that will get us to a new place in our society. Not talking about it is why we have to have a Tumblr called HungerGameTweets specifically designed to highlight the non-discussion we haven’t had so we can start having the ones that need to happen now.

And clearly this topic is too big for one post, so I hope to revisit it again and again and again. Until we don’t need to anymore.

Tips on Writing Race from a Teen Writer

Kate Hart dissects the 2011 YA covers with gender and race in mind

The problem isn’t just covers

Why The Pretty White Girl YA Book Cover Trend Needs to End

The Ongoing Problem of Race in Y.A.

A Complete Guide to ‘Hipster Racism’

The Whitewashing of YA Literature

Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is

Queer Women and (In)visibility

All the White Girls

Cover Your Dreams in More Dreams

Race in YA Lit: Wake Up & Smell the Coffee-Colored Skin, White Authors!

Avoiding LGBTQ Stereotypes in YA Fiction, Part 1: Major LGBTQ Stereotypes

I have numbers! Stats on LGBT Young Adult Books Published in the U.S. – Updated 9/15/11

Supporting character whitewashed in film adaptation of “Warm Bodies”

Talking to Teens Who Tweeted Racist Things About The Hunger Games

In which I swear a little

My Life in Action, News, the Good and Bad 23 Responses »

Sep 162011

I’ve been battling a great, inexplicable sadness in my heart this week. I’m not generally prone to depression, but this week has been one heartbreaking day after the next. I feel the global strain of weariness and darkness on my shoulders and despite the best of my abilities, I cannot shake it. I debated whether or not to post this because it is not uplifting at all in any way shape or form, but I feel like I need to get it off my chest. I feel weighed down by it.

I’m not explaining this because I need sympathy and support. (Edit to add: You’re welcome to comment of course! I just didn’t want anyone to think that’s the only reason I wrote this. I just…wanted to talk about this.) I honestly don’t think kind words would uplift me anyway, this is an internal thing that needs some recalibration of the heart muscles and some tinkering with the synapses and maybe a little experimentation on the tear ducts before I will feel right as rain again. I say this because sometimes these things just need to be said, because the worst thing we can do for ourselves is to pretend we don’t give a fuck.

There have been terrible events in my life, and instead of disappearing into the abyss to wait out my long years at the back of my mind, I went to the other far side of the spectrum. I find my greatest happiness as a champion. I believe in the power of pay-it-forward. The better we treat each other, the better the world becomes as a whole, and the happier we personally can be. I believe it is impossible to live your life in a bubble with blinders on to others and be honestly happy. It is not just the morally and ethically right things to do, to take care of each other, our community, our society, our world, but it is spiritually (regardless of religious beliefs) the best personal medicine we can give ourselves.

There have been too many events this week that have made me feel small and insignificant. Maybe the majority of the country agrees with how I see the world, and maybe many of them wish they could do more for people. But those who make the most news, the most impact on a greater number of people, the ones with the most power, seem to believe the exact opposite and I feel personally betrayed, somehow.

It started Tuesday when I got home from work and read the news and my mail while I waited for the oven to heat up for dinner. There was a news article about the republican debate that had been held the night before. A question was asked of Ron Paul that went something like – if an otherwise healthy 30 year old man was brought to the ER and would remain in a coma for six weeks, but did not have health insurance, should he be treated. I don’t remember exactly what Ron Paul answered with, something about choosing to take a risk by not taking personal responsibility for your own health care and that it is not the government’s problem. What he said was mostly political rhetoric. And why I am telling you this has nothing to do with politics. It’s about what happened next.

The person asking the questions followed up by saying something like, so since he has no health insurance, he should be left to die in the ER?

That’s when voices from the crowd rose up screaming “Yes! Yes!” followed by cheers.

I felt like I’d been socked right in the gut. I don’t understand such savagery. Even the politicians stumbled in response to the crowd. I’ve tried to write this kind of behavior into characters before, and it always sounded completely implausible. How could anyone believe that if you don’t have enough money to pay for insurance you deserve to die? Why is money the exchange for life? It makes my characters sound unbelievable and yet…and yet.

That wasn’t all. I made the horrible mistake of reading the comments to the article and there were too many people saying that they don’t want any of their tax dollars going to help the uninsured. That they don’t want to help save someone’s life, they have their own family to worry about. It was a darkness I didn’t think I could comprehend on a large scale. It was sick and horrible and I hated reading it but couldn’t stop. I felt poisoned by it.

I’m a writer, so I wondered what could be next. Private police force? If you can’t pay for protection, you’re on your own? Private firefighters? Right now my tax dollars go to pay for public schools of which I have no children attending, so what if I could revoke my tax dollars from that? What will become of us if we are a nation that only takes care of ourselves individually, our families, and no one else?

Horrible. Horrible. Horrible.

If that wasn’t bad enough, then I got my email update from GalleyCat featuring an article about a program developed by a journalism department at some college, I forget now, that has been picked up for use by 20 unnamed companies. The program writes stories, journalism for now – politics, finance, sports sort of stories – based on compiled facts. The program writes in complete sentences, strings facts together that make sense, but have no heart, no life, nothing human about them. The 20 companies are dropping writing staff. Why pay a writer when a computer program will do a mostly good job at the same thing? Have we devalued the art of writing so far? Will I ever be paid for my talent? I do not want a world built out of bloodless words.

Another article tells of a Harper Collins deal commissioning writers to rewrite (like a movie remake) classic novels, starting with Sense & Sensibility. Sick. Bloodless. Heartless writing. If it wasn’t written by Jane Austen, it is no longer Sense & Sensibility. Why do this? Why?

Other things came up this week. My husband is a teacher and gets a first hand look at parents behaving like monsters and children, children, taking on some twisted appearance of narcissistic teenager and responsible adult, being terrible at both. His school is bled dry by drugs, crime, gangs, and worthless parents and I think, it’s not fucking fair. These are good kids and they don’t deserve this. And they don’t deserve a callous world turning a blind eye because they don’t have enough money to pay their way out. Health insurance? Are you kidding? Try food. A place to sleep while dad’s on a bender.

I listened to a coworker talk about returning to her flooded house for the first time in months this week, discovering several feet of water still in the basement and tell-tale signs that the water had been chest deep in the living area. Mold spreads across every surface and dark gunk leaks from wall sockets. There’s no electricity, nothing survivable. A year ahead of gutting drywall, ripping up carpets, replacing wiring just to exist, and that’s if the claims agent isn’t overworked and apathetic. Oh yeah, and this week congress refused to pass a measure to put more money in the FEMA banks. After Irene, the coffers will be empty. When the water finally fades, there won’t be any help for the flood ravaged Midwest.

I’m a positive person. I believe the glass is half full because I’m still adding water to it. I work in a hospital for a reason. My blog is a gateway for taking care of the spirits of other writers. I give blood regularly. I participate in as many community programs as I can. I think the argument that life isn’t fair, it’s just the way it is, just the way it has always been, is a lie people who can’t be bothered tell themselves to feel better about doing nothing. Life is fair, people are not. People set systems in place that create unequal playing grounds. Life and the karmic fairness of it, has nothing to do with anything.

I feel a little bit like I’m waving around my fire and brimstone sword to lay waste to the non-believers. Maybe I am. Maybe I’d like to. Mostly I’m just tired of seeing human beings replaced by robots, beaten mentally to within an inch of their life, lost, forgotten, ignored by the classical “haves.”

I hate feeling like this. I am not in the business of despair.

Why are we still obsessed with Dystopian fiction?

Dystopian, News, the Good and Bad, Speculative Fiction, Stranger than Fiction 23 Responses »

Aug 292011

News from 2011:

Human Alterations and Phenomena

Disasters

Scary Nature

Medicine and Genetic Research

Invention

ROBOTS and Technology

End of the World

Is it starting to make sense now?

Our Great Disaster

My Life in Action, News, the Good and Bad 9 Responses »

Aug 162011

When we first heard the news, the sky was bright and cloudless, the color of blue painted on the opening credits of The Simpsons. A kind blue, and so we didn’t believe.

Within 24 hours, then 48, there could be no doubt. The river that borders Nebraska from Iowa was creeping steadily higher at a rate most were calling “alarming.” It had become a thing, a living, breathing, monstrous thing and it was angry.

On May 28^th the first spotters could see the shimmering, oily beds on the horizon. There was a lot of hurry up and waiting going on, and on our side of the river not much was happening. Further up stream near Blair and the Nuclear Power Plant, preparations were underway at lightning speed. We were lucky it happened when it did – the plant had been shut down for annual maintenance and upgrades when the water started creeping up. A great disaster was averted even though over the next few days the river would rise to the edges of the plant itself like some kind of post-apocalyptic moat.

And then – it happened very quickly.

Where there once was no water, suddenly it was seeping up through the over-saturated soil far from the river itself creating inland seas that used to be farmland and subdivisions. June 8, June 12, June 17 were all milestones of peak rises. Levees collapsed under the weight of the swelling reservoirs and our own presumptuousness that we could ever consider taming the Missouri River. Over those twelve days, the great leviathan reared and taught us what it feels like to be wrong.

In hours houses were gone, their families already having fled just before roads sunk under the waves, created islands where there had been communities. Whole pieces of our state were lost, tiny red neck Atlantises, and others became inaccessible but by boat or plane.

Each day, another bridge was compromised and shut down. As of June 20, 129 miles of river had become impassable as the bridges were barricaded against travel. The ground they are rooted to was too saturated to hold their weight and the water continued to rise until parts of the bridge were under water too. The strength and rapid current had begun eating away at the shore line.

With every state north of us already under water and every state south of us preparing for what we cannot hold back, we are very nearly completely cut off from the East.

Because we just never get tired of disasters in the Midwest, we’ve decided to have ourselves a good old fashioned Old Testament style flood. When we do things in the Midwest, we go big or go home.

There are a lot of people arguing right now about whose fault it is that the Missouri river has flooded and taken out towns and homes and interstates, but I’m kind of in the camp of Who the Freck Cares? Maybe this wouldn’t happen to this degree if we’d quit altering the routes of rivers and pretending like we can control the flow of water from one state to the next. A might bit presumptuous of everyone to even consider taming a creature like the Missouri River.

The awesomeness of our flood is breathtaking – though in a disastrous I-can’t-believe-what-I’m-seeing sort of way. There are whole sections of our state that are simply untouchable because of the wide swaths of waterbeds that have formed almost overnight. Many people have been forced to flee, others are simply cut off. A close friend of mine has been issued a Zone number for evacuation. Other friends are being told they may not be able to come to work because there is a better than average chance the parking lot will be under water in the next few days. Some sections of the drowning city are being told their sewer will be shut off and when sewage begins backing up in basements, it will be time to leave.

All of this is happening to my city and around my city. The vastness of this disaster is catastrophic, and yet there aren’t a lot of screaming, crying or taking to the streets. Everyone is relatively calm about it because there is nothing to be done and Midwesterners aren’t much for panicking. The waters will come, people will leave, the waters will disappear, and the people will go back. There won’t be much to go back to, but they’ll go back. Tenacious, these Nebraskans, for better or for worse.

I am not near the water. I am pretty centralized in my city and so it is unlikely I will be directly affected. It is bizarre to be so close to so much destruction and be mostly untouched by it. I could drive twelve minutes northeast and be told to turn around, the roads are impassable. That’s how close.

They tell us the water will be here for a long time, months, into the fall at least, and years before certain bridges are usable again. Years before roads and homes that were washed away can be rebuilt. Years. I am heart sick at this thought. I know enough people who will be unable to get to their house for at least that long and until then, until October or November, they will be left wondering what, if anything, is left of their homes. That level of tragedy kills me a little and I cannot come close to imagining these implications. I know people who are living the summer in campers parked in driveways, in guest rooms, at motels. That’s not living so much as surviving, and that is something few of us really know how to do.

This fall, there will be no harvest for these farmers.

Oversaturation has caused swaths of trees to collapse. In some flooded areas, the water is so deep and powerful that it has formed its own currents where there were once houses and fields.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my own little world and how some days I get annoyed because the 1500 words I wrote suck completely and I need to rewrite them, or the dishwasher breaks and I have to spend money I don’t have for the service guy to come out, or that my neighbor’s ridiculously large R.V is blocking our driveway. Again. I think about these things and I feel small and obnoxious and petty because at least my house hasn’t washed away.

Here are some aerial shots of locations around my city and of the power plant. Like I said, when we do things in the Midwest, we do them big. Pictures via Lee Valley Auctions who have hundreds of pictures from fly overs. Click to see more and Larry Geiger’s pictures. Click to make any of them bigger.

These are three pictures from Wyoming that the Army Corps took that demonstrates why we are facing the problems we are. Their unexpected snow fall this year is melting…

Heroism in the face of great devestation

News, the Good and Bad, Things Worth Sharing, Videos 6 Responses »

Jun 152011

I live in, what is fetchingly termed, Tornado Alley. If you open up an atlas spread of the United States, my city, Omaha, is at its very center. I’ve heard jokes about how we don’t have our own weather, we have everyone else’s weather – cold dry from the north and wet humid from the south and so during the spring and sometimes the fall, we are threatened often by dark, ominous skies and all eyes watch the weather alerts carefully for tornado watches and warnings as these two weather fronts vie for control of the skies.

I haven’t been in an actual tornado since I was a little girl and my memories are fuzzy about the actual events of what happened. We were at my family’s cabin on the Missouri River and I know I was under seven years old at the time because my parents were both there and not yet divorced. The little community of cabins and weekend vacationers had no emergency services and we had no tornado sirens. Savvy neighbors kept weather alert radios and when the sky looked positively terrifying, we watched and waited.

Here’s where my memories go in and out. At some point we knew the tornado had arrived. I don’t know in what direction or where it was coming from, but we had waited too long to get to safety. None of the cabins had basements – some of them were little more than mobile homes on the water front where the owners could dock their boats. It was raining and the dirt road was a pit of mud I sunk to my knees in. I remember all our neighbors running down the street for the one cabin smart enough to build an emergency shelter underground with its well. I don’t know why it took us so long to go there, but my mom was carrying me and I was carrying my Barbie Doll and I don’t know where my dad or grandparents were. My mom fell in the mud and her knee was badly injured. I remember, years later, her showing me the scar where she’d had surgery to repair the damage. I remember how loud it was and the way the trees moved unnaturally. I remember that the color of the world was all wrong – muted yellows and grays and blues and to this day in the minutes before a storm when the world changes colors I have to check myself from panicking.

I remember that somehow we all made it to the well just in time but I do not remember who eventually carried me down the ladder into the cramped cinder block shelter. I remember a radio and a lamp and I remember playing with my doll and I do not remember fear. Maybe I was too young to have a well formed sense of Very Bad Things.

On May 22, 2011, a town not all that far from where I live, came to understand its own Very Bad Thing. I heard a little bit about the tornado that hit Joplin, MO that night, but it wasn’t until I got to work the next day did I really understand the full devastation. The tornado was a monster – an EF5 on a scale that only goes up to 5 and, as I understand it, more than a mile wide on the ground moving at 70 miles an hour. What this means is – there was no outrunning it.

At work we poured over accounts of what happened and emails were being passed around very quickly because the hospital in this town was completely destroyed. I know many nurses who went down to volunteer in the days and weeks following the event, but in those first few days we were learning about what could happen to us if something so catastrophic were to occur and we were looking at our own emergency procedures to figure out – have we done enough?

This was the article that first left me in tears. It is an account of an ER doctor on staff that night and he describes the 45 second nightmare and the aftermath of what happened when he stepped out of the office he’d been hiding in. When he wrote about the noise of the tornado, I had had an involuntary reaction to cover my ears and a new memory – my doll being gone and my hands clapped over my ears to drown out the sucking, breaking, popping, grinding, locomotive above me.

YA speculative fiction has been thinking a lot about apocalyptic destruction these past few years and what it takes to survive the aftermath. Reading this account, looking at the pictures, remembering that day of my childhood long ago, I understand why we write these Very Bad Things in the first place. We want to know that in the face of such devastation, we can, and will, survive. We want to read about ordinary people surviving the extraordinary and the terrible. We need to know we can do it, too.

Within these events we hear tales of ordinary heroes in extraordinary situations and we want to believe that we have it in us to be miraculous. For all our darkness and ineptitude, for all the political fighting and differences, for all the trouble and hate we bring to the world, I am forever drawn to the unknowable capacity we have for great and extraordinary kindness, selflessness, and self-sacrifice.

We want to know that, like the doctors and nurses in Mercy Hospital in Joplin, MO, we will stay behind in the dark, flooding, destroyed hospital to help those who are injured even at the possibility of our own peril.

We heard a loud horrifying sound like a large locomotive ripping through the hospital. The whole hospital shook and vibrated as we heard glass shattering, light bulbs popping, walls collapsing, people screaming, the ceiling caving in above us, and water pipes breaking, showering water down on everything. We suffered this in complete darkness, unaware of anyone else’s status, worried, scared…

…The floor was covered with about 3 inches of water, there was no power, not even backup generators, rendering it completely dark and eerie in the ED. The frightening aroma of methane gas leaking from the broken gas lines permeated the air; we knew, but did not dare mention aloud, what that meant…

…I immediately moved on to the next patient, an asthmatic in status asthmaticus. We didn’t even have the option of trying a nebulizer treatment or steroids, but I was able to get him intubated using a flashlight that I held in my mouth…via

Finally, I would like to share with you two more videos from the tornado in Joplin, MO. They are taken on a cell phone and honestly, there’s not much to see. Flashes here and there of images, but it is the recording that kills me inside. The video is taken at a gas station convenience store where customers and people on the street rushed to seek shelter. There is electricity and no good place to hide so they huddle at the back of the store and wait. When the tornado hits the building and the building begins to collapse, the group makes it just in time into a walk in cooler where they ride out the scariest few seconds of video I’ve ever seen. I cried from about 1:35 in the video until the end. The second video is from the same person who recorded the first revisiting the gas station a day or two later to show the world what is left of the convenience store and to show everyone the walk in cooler the survivors took shelter in. Honestly, the walk-in cooler probably saved their lives.

Here is one of many places you can donate to the Joplin, MO relief if you are so inclined, and here too at the American Red Cross.

W is for Wicked & Tricksy

Blogging, News, the Good and Bad, Wicked & Tricksy 30 Responses »

Apr 272011

It started with Margo and I in a furious chain of emails that began by asking the question, “What if?” and somewhere in our brainstorming, dreaming, mad scientist creation we’d manhandled two of our friends into the email chain too.

Because that’s what friends are for. Hiding bodies and embarking on social media experiments.

We’ve been working tirelessly for the past couple of months, Margo, Claudie, S.B., and I on this thing. This project. Our project. A blog, but not exactly a blog. More than a blog. It will become a collection of discussions on the craft of writing, the art of speculative fiction, theory, voice, a whole wild cast of characters, but most importantly – community.

Imagine four writers from different genres and sub-genres working out the trouble with villains, with strong female characters, with technology and research, with speculation and pushing the envelope on believability.

I am so excited to finally share Wicked & Tricksy with you. I’m so proud of what we’ve accomplished, what we plan to do, and the space we are preparing to open. We met on Nathan Bransford’s forums, which is incredibly appropriate, and while we each have our own personal blogs, we found ourselves playing off each other’s topics, expanding, questioning, and discussing further what one had already said. Creating a blog space specifically for other aspiring writers with a particular focus on speculative fiction seemed natural.

Serendipitous.

Absolutely and completely meant to be.

In a very succinct little nut shell, Wicked & Tricksy is:

…a group blog by four aspiring speculative fiction authors.

We seek to provide resources for fellow aspiring writers on writing craft and theory. While we focus on all things speculative fiction, there will be plenty of craft talk for writers of any genre to use. We hope to create a community of aspiring writers who can share ideas, ask hard questions, and offer insights we as individual writers may not have had access to otherwise.

Forget the writer’s solitary journey. At Wicked & Tricksy, we pool our energy together to turn it into a social adventure!

There are four of us and the neat thing is that we all have history with our own blogs. We each own very successful, positive spaces where we explore many topics across the board. Wicked & Tricksy is very specific. If you are a writer, Wicked & Tricksy will become a one-stop-shop for lots of great resources.

I post every Monday, S.B. posts on Tuesday, Margo on Wednesday, and Claudie on Thursday, and (this is my favorite part, drumroll please…) every Friday we turn the stage over to one of you – other aspiring authors, whether you have your own blog or want to try it out for the first time – and everyone is welcome to our writer-geek party. Margo at margo@wickedtricksy.com is our Guest Blogger Coordinator.

Now for the details:

The site goes live May 9th with our first week dedicated to Community since that is what brought us together in the first place over at the Bransforums, and it is what we are eager to promote. We are strong champions for building open, inclusive, welcoming, and cooperative writing communities.
The address is www.wickedtricksy.com but you’ll discover that it currently goes to a launch page with a count down clock on it. On May 9th the site will come alive. The site foundation has been built. Now we are putting finishing touches on it and preparing content.
You’ll hear regular updates from us in the next 12 days, but I think it would be awesome if you would follow us on Twitter so you can be notified when the site goes live:

We’ll be doing some giveaways in the first two weeks and other fun things we are currently masterminding. I suspect there will be some cool stuff dedicated to each of our particular spec-fic sub-genres: science fiction, historical fantasy, fantasy, urban fantasy, horror….
We’d love your support. Of course we would! We want to bring lots of blogs together. We want to be able to say, “Hey you write historical fiction? So do these four awesome bloggers…” It’s hard to ask for support, but I feel so passionate about this project. I think it is going to be amazing. I hope all the writers who visit my blog will help support us in our adventure and become part of it. I’m crossing fingers and toes and wishing on all the stars in the sky that this launch is successful as I’m dreaming it could be. I hope you’ll be there. I really hope you’ll be there on our first day!!

(I’m already having nightmares – you know the first day of school nightmare where you show up and realize you forgot your pants and everyone is laughing at you? And you were supposed to memorize the entire collected works of William Shakespeare only you forgot to do it? And now you’re standing mute at the front of your class without pants? It’s like that, only my classroom is the entire blogosphere. Please don’t let me be standing alone at the front of class on Monday, May 9th. I promise to wear pants.)

With no further ado, please allow me to introduce the writers:

Sommer Leigh (that’s me!) hides out in her secret lair in the Midwest where she creates superheroes, supervillains, and zombies. She has a degree in English and a minor in communications. Sommer writes YA, reads all the time, collects comics, and plays (too) many video games. She’s passionate about the Oxford comma, serif fonts, XBox, Nerdfighters, and saving the world. Her favorite genres are science fiction and horror.

You can find Sommer at Tell Great Stories or on Twitter:

S.B. Stewart-Laing is a Scottish-Carib marine biologist who enjoys distance running, cooking, and fiddle music. When not baking cookies for the office or running around outside, S.B. writes historical fantasy with infinitely patient coauthor Michael Jay Chernicoff.

You can find SB at Writing the Other, or on twitter:

Margo Lerwill nests in a windowless cubicle of a dark government hive, furtively scribbling out plans for the destruction of civilization disguised as harmless urban fantasy. Epic fantasy alternate weekends in months containing the letter ‘r’. She enjoys Caravaggio paintings, South Park humor, and movies where the monsters stay dead at the end.

You can find Margo at Urban Psychopomp!

Claudie A. is a biochemistry student from Quebec City, up north in French Canada. She enjoys collecting microbe plushies, cramming sugar in her body and geeking out. Oh, and writing political and high fantasy. Especially writing fantasy.

You can find Claudie at her personal blog, or on twitter:

Blogosphere News: It’s Worth Mentioning.

Stranger than Fiction 5 Responses »

Mar 042011

You have until Monday to enter the Donald Maass “The Breakout Novelist” book giveaway. Hurry! Go now and enter!

This one is a little dated but a quick (and accurate) read: The Writer’s Holiday by Seanan McGuire. I usually take my laptop to dinner parties and holidays.
“From where I sit, you can’t actually sell an e-book” by Mark Shatzkin is an interesting discussion on print vs. digital books that often doesn’t come up in conversation when consumers are complaining about e-books. Take a look.

You can’t have a discussion of any length about ebook sales and pricing and DRM in any sized group of digital publishing observers before you hear that it is somehow wrong or unfair that a “purchaser” can’t do everything with an ebook they’ve bought that they do with a print book they’ve bought.

How to Create Your Own Government 101 is a fun little article about greed, government, and human nature.
This is a little bit on the political side, and I definitely don’t want to offend anyone, but I thought these poems were really beautiful and I wanted to share. It is called God Loves Poetry and the group takes Westboro Baptist Church’s crazy hate letters and blacks them out except for certain words that create poetry filled with love and peace and faith and honesty. Very cool.
Word Bubbles is evil. And wonderful. But evil. And you won’t be able to stop playing. Give your soul to Word Bubbles. I did.
Live the Language are a set of beautiful videos that deliver you to another country, another world, another life, and it is a lovely place. The Paris video reminds me of Stephanie Perkins’ book Anna and the French Kiss.

EF – Live The Language – Paris from Albin Holmqvist on Vimeo.

EF – Live The Language – London from Albin Holmqvist on Vimeo.

Blogosphere News – 2/18/11

Blogosphere News, News, the Good and Bad, Tools and Resources 12 Responses »

Feb 182011

The Great Gatsby has been turned into an old school Nintendo game and I gotta tell you, it’s really a lot of fun. I’ve been playing it on and off all day and while some of the controls act wonky sometimes, it’s just cool as hell. I’ve also started thinking that any day now we’re not going to be able to reference NES games or 8-bit graphics because few people younger than me are going to know what they even mean. That freaks me out. Play the game anyway.
Borders filed bankruptcy. Pimp My Novel has a great post about it here. I’m pretty sad about it because I liked shopping at my nearby Borders. They carried a huge library of YA books that I am now afraid will be trimmed way down. Borders is a big deal in book distribution and I don’t want to see them fail, even if they are big corporation.
My secret sister Margo over at Urban Psychopomp has a very cool post this week about the Plot Scratchpad. It is a very good writing tool. I use something similar.
Over at Amanda Plavich’s blog, another blogger I love (and whose blog has a really great design look. I’m so jealous) Amanda posted some goregous steampunk inspired author pictures of Susan Dennard. Go see! Very inspiration. Amanda is clearly a very talented photographer as well as a cool blogger.
EDITED To Add: Hey card receivers, I hope you’ve received your cards by now (except maybe the Canada one. I have no idea how long it takes to get there.)
It’s a light news week, mostly because I haven’t been reading blogs regularly all week. I’ll be back on track next week!

Bitch Magazine isn’t prepared for the wrath of the YA community. Also, Supernovas and Cory Doctorow

Awesome Nerd Things, Books, News, the Good and Bad, Stranger than Fiction, Stranger than Fiction, Things Worth Sharing, Topics in Writing, Videos 2 Responses »

Feb 042011

Ok, sci-fi kids. This one’s for you.

Betelgeuse is a red super giant in Orion’s nebula that is quickly losing mass. This is a good sign that it is about to start collapsing in on itself, and when that happens, according to Dr Brad Carter, Senior Lecturer of Physics at the University of Southern Queensland, things are going to get very cool for sci-fi geeks everywhere.*

See, that it is losing mass quickly tells us Betelgeuse is about to go supernova (“but you and I will never die the world still spinning round and I don’t know why, why, why, why…”) and become so bright in the heavens that for a few weeks we’ll see two suns in the sky. There is even a very weird possibility that during those few weeks there will be no night time.

Ok blog friends, try and wrap your imaginations around that.

As sensational and amazing as this sounds, and believe me I think it would be about the most fascinating and neat thing to happen to any of us in our life times, when I say that it is “about to go supernova” what I really mean is that it could happen between tomorrow night and a hundred thousand years from now. Whoops. This story is being smeared around the web at lightening speeds because of some poor journalism that tied the supernova to 2012 and suddenly End of the World Thrill Seekers went crazy over it. The fun facts, provided by this awesome article and this one too quote Dr. Carter as reassuring us that the supernova will have absolutely no harmful effect on Earth. It’s just too far away. It will provide some really weird nightless days and cool stories to tell our grandchildren, but we’ll come out the other side in one piece. Starry-eyed and filled with wonder, but in one piece.

Still, this would make for a cool story idea, wouldn’t it?

*Dr. Carter did not say this. I mean, he confirmed that it is losing mass and probably collapsing in on itself, but he didn’t actually use the word “cool” nor did he specifically give a shout-out to sci-fi geeks. I think he probably wanted to though.

Bookstove posted a list of 100 Novels All Horror Fans Should Read
Bitch Magazine posted a list of 100 Young Adult Books for the Feminist Reader, which was really cool, until it created its own apocalyptic storm by pulling books off the list when certain commenters criticized certain books being on the list. Once the pulling started, authors mentioned on the list started asking to be removed because they found the whole thing a little too close to book banning and a lot of other good reasons too all of which you’ll have to read about to really understand. Most of the discussion is A++. I personally think that if you are going to put a list like that up (especially when you are so popular and widely read) you better be prepared to stand by your decisions. Waffling will only bring trouble. The books removed from the list, btw, half of which I have read and I can immediately recommend. Especially Sisters Red by Jackson Pearce. The authors who came out to voice their outrage give very good discussion points and I’m proud of them, especially Scott Westerfeld and Maureen Johnson. You can read my comment at the end of the second page.
The amazing Cory Doctorow has a story up for podcast listening called Scroogled, read by Wil Wheaton. Be careful,your brain might actually explode from too much cool. Wil Wheaton and Cory Doctorow? Oh man, oh man.
Elizabeth Bear posted a really wonderful article on her blog here that discusses public persona and how little control you have over how people see you. She references the crazy awesome/creepy YouTube video F*ck Me, Ray Bradbury which I admit I’ve listened to several times and kind of love and fear all at the same time. I think it is a worthy read. Via Elizabeth: “Sometimes, it’s a little like dealing with 5,000 high school crushes. Sometimes it’s like dealing with 5,000 high school enemies. Sometimes, I learn things about myself I did not know from my Wikipedia page.“

My darling husband brought me home a Jolly Rancher sucker today. It looks like my Smitten! banner. Isn’t he sweet? I thought this would be a good time to remind people to sign up to receive a handmade Valentine card from me by going here or clicking on the banner in the right sidebar under Featured Articles. Also, get involved in the Smitten! Blogfest and sign up for the contest to win Neil Gaiman’s Harlequin Valentine! Hurry! Only like, ten days left! Spread the word! I will promise to love you forever. I promise. Also, the sucker was delicious.

A very beautiful animation I discovered via Jezebel. You know how I love beautiful animation.

UN TOUR DE MANEGE from alexis liddell on Vimeo.

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