Category: Plugs

10,001 points

April 25, 2006 /

Saved from the LJ comment feed, here’s William’s follow-up to Winter:

Spring falls hard, sprawls awkwardly on the ground. “Goddamn it,” he mutters. Then louder, to the air in general, “this better not set a theme!”

Caleb helps him up, his face full of apology. Spring swats him away, muttering about ‘respect’ and ‘kids these days’. He brushes the dew from his trousers and winces.

“Are you okay?” asks Chyler.

Spring doesn’t respond: he’s just noticed the stains on his suit. He looks like he’s about to have kittens.

After about a second, they realise he’s forgotten they’re there. They hurry off, feeling slightly uneasy.

“Aw, man,” Spring mourns. “These were new.”

April 19, 2006 /

Right now people searching for breakdancing videos still comprise the vast majority of my bandwidth users. That’s just not right, and we should fix it. But how, you say? By shooting breakdancers. The end!

Oh, and also: Jon’s got a new EP out, and you can download it! It’s called West State Line and it’s amazing to hear his music finally given the pro treatment it deserves. There are snares and backing vocals and even a little bit of string! Let’s listen to it together! I’ll make popcorn! I will also make calf eyes at you.

My favorite parts so far are Ghost Town, especially the bridge, and Meg White, which needs to be an indie anthem.

You can spell cataloging with or without the U

April 14, 2006 /

Hammering on the theme of my inability to escape YA literature, LibraryThing has apparently added a new statistic: the average publication year of your books. I haven’t catalogued everything I own quite yet, but still, did it have to be 1996?

When I get a chance to sit down and do it, cataloging on LibraryThing is one of my favorite, most meditative activities. I compare it to Scrooge McDuck taking a swim in the Money Bin.

March 7, 2006 /

Volscian made picture of Rita! And it’s awesome! So awesome that I blew up!

I really like the idea that Rita has tired eyes and a kind of round face–no Carrie-Anne Moss here. I hesitate to pronounce the picture canon only because I’m pretty careful about when and how I state that any given character is of a particular race; it’s perfectly valid to assume Rita is white, but also valid to assume she isn’t. Still, if I were ever to print out the Rita stories or anything, that would make a pretty great cover.

Yeah, you can tell I’m not famous because I obsess over fanstuff.

March 3, 2006 /

Kelly Link describes her stories as “kitchen-sink magic realism,” which I can understand, because the moment you say “fantasy” people think Robert Jordan and their ears shut down. Conversely, in her own words, “people hear ‘magic realism’ and they think ‘oh, like those Gabriel Garcia Marquez stories where people fly.'” (Everybody read exactly one magic realism story in high school, and that was it.)

Anyway, if I thought I could get away with it, I’d call Anacrusis “Kelly Link magic realism.” Look, it almost rhymes.

Gene Wolfe is a curbstomper

February 23, 2006 /

I got these new dress shoes a while ago, where “dress shoes” is defined as “the shoes that are not my sneakers,” and man, they are some shitkickers. They’re semigloss black leather with rivets around the lace holes. The soles are like an inch thick with a deep tread, and I’m pretty sure they have steel toes. We’re basically talking about a boot with the calf cut off here. I like them a lot, although the laces are fraying really quickly.

The reason I offer this description is so that I can properly explain what Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun is doing to me. Everybody talks about Wolfe, of course, but they talk about him in the same vein as the SFWA Grand Masters, of whom only Le Guin is interesting. I checked out the Book of the New Sun as a kind of homework assignment, but when I opened it, it commenced immediately (and has not ceased) to kick me in the head. With those shoes.

Segue of brutality and being amazed, the current storyline at Achewood is a masterwork in progress. When I start awarding the Grand Masters of Webcomics, I will hold up one long printout of the Great Outdoor Fight and say “this. This is what you must achieve.” For maximum run-up, start with Ana-Tomix and never stop reading, ever. But seriously, don’t click if you’re squeamish. Achewood is often unkind to squeams.

Which that story isn’t but still

February 13, 2006 /

“The Slush God: Are you totally sick of seeing rejected-writer-gets-revenge-on-editors stories in the slush pile? Have you ever read a good one?

Kelly Link: There is a wonderful epistolary story by a Canadian writer, Robert Boycuk, in which an editor is lowering himself into a terrible void, in pursuit of an author’s manuscript. It’s a sort of apology from the editor for how long it’s taken him to get back to the writer.

Otherwise, I can’t think of any off the top of my head. I’m sure there are some good ones out there. I would say that there’s probably a novel waiting to be written about hapless slush readers, but it would have to be very well done.”