Lovely review

By Nat | Published: March 18, 2010

Lovely review for Bedknobs and Beanstalks, courtesy of Whipped Cream Erotic Romance Reviews. 4.5 cherries!

Swan Made: Gorgeous, gorgeous story, set against a backdrop of modern despair. A man living a grey life of quiet desperation finds passion in the most unlikely place. His inability to face what his visitor truly is nearly costs him the love of a lifetime. Of the serious stories, this one, along with the Merman’s Tale, was the most emotionally engaging and heart-wrenching.

^______^

(what I’m especially loving is how so many reviews interpret it slightly differently. You could write a hundred different stories and get a response no more varied)

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Motivation Monday

By Nat | Published: March 15, 2010

I’ve managed to get hold of John Wyndham’s Plan for Chaos, which is the book he never published. There’s a reason for that, but it’s a Wyndham and I am naturally smitten. This week’s links have a bit of a Sci Fi theme as as result!

Publishing: eBooks are looking more like the future than ever, with book apps overtaking games on the iPhone. The Kindle’s looking at introducing a web-browser, and in addendum to last week’s interest-piquer, academic publishing is simultaneously seeing strong growth in eBook sales while at the same time eReaders are declared ‘not for students’. Nice.

Interest Piquing: HG Wells and Orson Welles interviewed together:

InsPiring: My sister is writing her dissertation on Algae biofuels, and whether it’s commercially viable to produce them in the EU. She’s very kindly let me read some of it, and I’m kinda blown away. I can’t shake the feeling oilgae’s more magic than science: it’s the ultimate enrivonmental panacea. You can grow it in sewage, it doesn’t take up areas used for food production like other biofuels, it’s biodegradable, it produces oxygen and devours CO2, you can use it in a diesel engine without modification (there was an interesting Boeing 737 experiment last year), you can burn it for heat, GM modifications are out-competed by natural so it can’t easily pollute the wild stocks, you can persuade it to produce hydrogen, and you can even eat the byproducts. Soylent green isn’t people!*

There’s some great diagrams (including this one and this) from oilgae.com and HR BioPetroleum, which have quite a bit of interesting info too. Useful for near-future research and general “Huh. Why aren’t we doing this already?”-ness.

Procrastination: The Hubble telescope’s gallery of images. I’ve been using it for research lately for the space romance, but frequently I’ll just go and browse because the images are so beautiful.

*Soylent, of course, being a name smoosh of Soya and Lentil as explained in Make Room! Make Room! In the film this is skimmed over and they aredescribed as high energy vegetable concentrates, while soylent green is supposedly high energy algae concentrate. Which would have more protein and vitamins than people anyway…

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Monday Motivation

By Nat | Published: March 9, 2010

I had a ton of Inspiring links this week, and not much of anything else. Tells you what kind of week I’ve had…

Publishing: Macmillan CEO John Sargant talks about the Agency model.

Interest-Piquing: Princeton pilot the Kindle. The academic market ought to be perfect for eReaders, but eReaders aren’t pefect for the market yet.

InsssssPiring: Snake fossil found eating dinosaur eggs. Snake under the surface of Elizabeth I portrait. Pet snake becomes Ouroborus.

Procrastination: Scary Go Round. Addictive, adorable, and slightly surreal; a very British webcomic. Vaguely relted to Bobbins, and followed now by Bad Machinery, it’s received accolades from the Sunday Times and the Morning Star and one Web Cartoonist’s Choise Awards in 2003, 2005 and 2007.

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Tease resubmitted

By Nat | Published: March 9, 2010

Sorry for the radio silence yesterday; I’ll rectify that shortly. I’ve just finished revising Tease (which really shouldn’t have taken this long) and resubmitted it to Loose-Id. Fingers crossed!

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Motivation Monday

By Nat | Published: March 1, 2010

Publishing: There’s been a nice little flurry of plagiarism scandals recently. Helen Hergmann’s cult teen bestseller is a patchwork of other people’s writing - she defends herself against the claim by claiming she’s “mixing”. Marie Darrieussecq lifted passages from Camille Laurens’s account of losing her baby in childbirth, and accuses Laurens of exhibiting “a crazed desire to be plagiarised”. Zachery Kouwe plagiarised the Wall Street Journal for the New York Times. Nick Simmons plagiarised Bleach and other famous mangas for Incarnate. Do these things really come in waves, or is it just the noticing of them? We find one plagiarist and we’re more cautious for a while in what we read, and start seeing more.

I think there is a problem (obvious in a lot of comments to the above articles) with confusing plagiraism and copyright violation. Some people plagiarise works that are out of copyright - legally, there’s not a lot that can be done, but they’re still passing someone else’s work off as their own. Sometimes accidentally, sometimes without knowing that what they’ve done constitutes plagiarism. Cassie Edwards plagiarised non-fiction sources, claiming this didn’t count (though she did raise the plight of black-footed ferrets in the public’s mind, at least). It could all have been avoided with a list of credits in the back of the books (and putting it in her own words - plagiarised passages are often easy to spot because they’re not in the author’s voice). Plagiarism: know what it is, where it differs from copyright violation, and you know how to avoid doing it.

InsPiring: Caricature map of Europe, circa 1914. It was originally drawn for Leviathan by Scott Westerfield, a steampunk story in which Darwin discovered genetics (hence Clankers - the mechanical nations, and the Darwinists, the countries with genetically engineered bio-weapons). Frankly, I just find the map both awesome and inspiring, and I really want to read the book.

Interest Piquing: An Hour a Day Keeps the Existential Angst Away. A lot of what’s posted on the BBC Writer’s Room blog isn’t relevant to me, as it’s calls for scriptwriters or updates on the screenwriting classes. But everyone now and then it throws out something that’s relevant to every writer.

Procrastination: I can read movies - Classic movies reinterpreted as sixties pulp book covers. There’s more on flickr too.

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Monday Motivation - today’s theme is apparently the press

By Nat | Published: February 22, 2010

Publishing: It’s funny how often my publishing links are actually about Piracy. It says something about where the industry is going (and where my attention is focused, I guess).The Gurdian asks who’s affected by digital book piracy, and how people react to finding they’ve being pirated. Take down notices, or one-upping the pirates by offering a legal version on the same site for only a small fee.

It’s also funny how often I link to the Guardian when I wouldn’t pick up that paper in a newsagent. Nothing against it, but outside the culture section the way it reports the news doesn’t appeal to me. I can see why a lot of the big news moguls are up in arms about this; it’s certainly not a sustainable state of affairs, but as long as someone’s writing news and editorials for free online I don’t think simply charging people for the same is going to work.

Interest Piquing:  The evolution of the love letter, from secret missives to sexting. Caveat scriptor.

From the BBC, which the newspaper moguls hate because they have no intention of ever charging - the website is a kind of extension to the TV broadcasting, for which most people pay their License fees (of course, you don’t have to pay your license fee to access the Beeb online). Something of the ultimate subscription model, I feel.

InsPiration: Sex and the off-label use of our bodies. For people who obsess about non-procreational sex, there are myriad arguments to defeat them. Mouths are made for eating - how dare we use them to sing? Feet are made for walking - by their argument dancing is sinful.

Procrastination: While I’m thinking about newspaper, how about the Daily Mail-o-matic? based on commonly used buzzword in Daily Mail headlines, the widget generates its own. I’ve got the greasmonkey script installed, so every time I visit the Daily Mail website (usually linked by the BBC, since it’s definitely not somewhere I’d browse normally!) the headlines are replaced with generated ones. It can make it a little hard to find whatever article I’m looking for, like the creepy bendy babies one…

(I’m fairly sure I’ve shared the daily-mail-o-matic before, though anything you can repeatedly hit refresh on is a wonderful timesink. But, if you want to be technical, call the bendy babies the procrastination. There’s more here. Some are cute, but, really, some are just plain creepy. Nothing that can count the days of its existance on one tiny, pudgy hand should be made to smile at me like that)

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No One Can Hear You

By Nat | Published: February 22, 2010

No One Can Hear You is up at Three Crow Press. Looks like it was server issues ^_^ I’ve already spotted a mistake (my own - editing error!) which I’ll ask if they can fix once the server’s settled again. In the mean time, see if you can find it!

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How do you wait?

By Nat | Published: February 21, 2010

I’m very good at waiting, until a deadline goes past. Personally, I’m not keen on that whooshing sound (unless it’s a self-set vague deadline…)

Say you’ve submitted something, and they don’t get back in the time suggested? You know it’s probably something perfectly reasonable: the editor is ill, their internet is down, they got considerably more submissions than expected.

For me, the process goes something like this:

1) Have webmail or ThunderBird open constantly. Start this within twelve hours of original date/time stated.

2) Refresh whereever I’m expecting the update to appear obsessively. Preferably several times a day.

2.5) Ctrl+refresh, just in case it’s something to do with my cache. Try on multiple different computers, and clear all temporary internet files.

3) After doing the above for several days, see if editor has a public profile on facebook, or a public blog or journal.

4) Refresh that obsessively for several days.

5) After about a week, consider Friending to see if there are non-public updates.

6) After another week, send email query. (while constantly refreshing both blog and original website)

7) If there’s no response to email, Friend blog. Wait to be Friended back.

8 ) Get distracted by another submission I’ve not heard from, and repeat loop before ever finding out about the original.

Normally I’m quite good. Normally, editors are reasonably prompt about explaining late replies. But everyone now and then I start the loop. Aesthetica, for example. has been inundated both years I’ve entered, and have taken a month longer than originally expected to reply (I’m willing to mention them because I’m probably not going to enter again, unless they send me another half price entry thing…). And it’s perfectly reasonable and I understand completely and I’m more than capable of going away and doing something else, but somehow I’m still at it with ctrl+refresh ctrl+refresh ctrl+refresh…

So, what do you do? How do you cope with late responses?

(and on this note - is Three Crow Press still showing November’s issue for everyone else? :P I’m currently on stage 4!)
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Monday Motivation

By Nat | Published: February 15, 2010

Publishing: The British Library is digitising its catalogue, and is offering 65000 rare first editions to download FREE for Kindle owners (I’m still trying find out if it applies to people who’ve got the Kindle apps for iPhones or desktops). What’s of most interest, to me at least, is that they’ve digitized their Penny Dreadfuls too. You can also order paperpacks of the first editions (I had to read that several times to actually grasp it - paperback books containing text and illustrations, including page formatting, from the first editions) for £15. There’s also 2 million newspaper pages you can search for free, which is very handy for research! Unfortunately, lovely as the British Library website is (and easy as it is to lose yourself learning about the Magna Carta orShakespeare’s Quartos) it’s not actually easy to find its own news on there

Interest-Piquing: Dear Jerry, You Old Bastard. Really interesting article by one of the many people employed over the years to answer J D Salinger’s mail. And she didn’t even care for Catcher in the Rye. (actually, Slate has several articles catching my interest this week, also including Exile from Grrrville about 90s feminism, and Google Buzz’s massive errors in assumptions about privacy)

InsPiring: The Guardian offers up the Nat Tate hoax as “The greatest literary hoax ever“. My personal favourite is Ern Malley. What’s interesting is where people draw the line between hoax and fraud; Ern Malley and Nat Tate are a hoaxes, but William Henry Ireland’s Shakespeare forgeries and Konrad Kujau’s Hitler Diaries are frauds. One suspect financial gain probably makes up the largest part of the judgement…

Procrastination: Etiquette Hell. I’ve lost a lot of time reading the archives, and now it’s moved to a blog format. It shows up the differences in teuqette between countries sometimes - the blog owner deems arranging your own birthday party appallingly bad etiquette, whereas in the UK assuming someone else will do it for you is bad etiquette.

No One Can Hear You should pop up on Three Crow Press soon - no sign of it yet, but that might just be those pesky timezones.

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Valentine’s Day snippet

By Nat | Published: February 14, 2010

Excerpt from the selkie story as a little sticky valentine’s gift for you all! Though perhaps, as H2G2 suggests, it ought to be a St Cyril’s day gift, since he fought against language elitism and only teaching the Bible in Latin - though he probably wouldn’t approve of what follows here. But hey, taking literature out of the hands of the educational elite and using it for purposes they deem beneath them? Romance is relevant.

Warning: Explicit m/m sex. Not suitable for under 18s.

Read More »

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