Link rot alert, but the LJ-feed comments on my senses post are pretty great.
Category: Writing
It is fun to make pictures
Third monochrome image post in a row! This one actually serves a purpose: it’s a very rough (and lazily photoshopped) mockup of what I have in mind for the cover of the Anacrusis book.
Image credits: the human eye came from a really nice BY-SA macro shot called fóvea, and the bug eye from a BY-ND shot called drosoph. The latter makes me unhappy, because I’m clearly deriving from a NoDerivs work, but I can’t find the photographer’s contact info to ask permission. If you are the photographer, please write me! Oh, and also write if you have a strong opinion about the cover.
10,001 points
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.”
Sometimes, awesome things happen! One such thing is Mr. Andy H.’s timeline of the Holly stories, which is really more complete than it should be. I consider it totally canon (your personal canon may vary), with one minor exception: Holly and Rose aren’t trying on bras, exactly. More the opposite.
Thanks, Andy!
Reluctant openness
I don’t like talking about money, but here goes!
I am considering self-publishing an Anacrusis book: 101 of the best standalone stories from the last two and a half years, plus one (completed!) bad penny story arc. I would purchase one copy for myself, one for Maria, one for my grandmother and one for my mom. That’s all the demand I anticipate, which is why I’d be going with a print-on-demand company (likely Lulu) rather than an offset press with some kind of hideous minimum print run. I am not going to sell a thousand copies.
It would come in two versions: a fancy dust-jacketed hardcover, which I’d limit to 101 copies at $24.95, and a “viral edition” cheap paperback at $9.95. That doesn’t include shipping cost. I’d make a couple bucks off either, which I would put back into web ads, review copies, etc. I probably would not break even in the end, but it would be a relatively cheap way to raise my profile as a writer. Anybody who took the trouble to ship me his or her copy would get it signed and shipped back for free.
The chief goal of this project, though, would be to give people who like reading Anacrusis something tangible to show their friends. You might be one of those people. Do you want something tangible? Which edition would you prefer? Would it interest you more if the book came with exclusive content (eg ten new stories) or would it make you feel jerked around? (Everything would be released under BY-SA, as usual, so anybody who wanted could just repost them somewhere.)
I’ll be reading the LJ comment feed on this entry, of course, or you can spam me any time.
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.
California game update
My uncle John offers a rhyming take on Atlantis, and my mom gently reminds me that of course I didn’t invent the form: both “California” and the game were inspired by a picture book she read us when we were young, called Whose Mouse Are You, by Robert Kraus.
Also, saved from the LJ comment thread:
Will:Where is Atlantis? Under the sea.
What’s under the sea? Not you, and not me.
Well then, where are we? The internet.
How’d we get there? Zeroes and ones.
What do those stand for? Video fun.
What is flypaper?
Me: Sweetness that kills.
David: What can’t be killed?
Scott: Everything dies.
Josh: Why do they die?
William: They run out of time.
Beth: What is time?
Kevan: Memory. [Then, because of a crosspost:] Curse you, time!
Ken: What time is it?
Stephen: It’s hamburger time.
David: Do hamburgers rhyme?
Scott: Not on my dime.
Me: OKAY NEW ONE. What is a curse?
Scott: Bad karma, realized.
William: How is it realised?
Ken: Through the teachings of the Maharishi.
Beth: What is the Maharishi?
Me: A teacher of hunger.
Scott: Where is the hunger?
David: In the bowels of the cursed…
Which seems like a neat place for a cutoff.
How many is seven?
A game to play while walking
I call this the California game, but it doesn’t actually have to rhyme.
What is noir? A story about losers.
Who are the losers? They didn’t win.
Who are the winners? The writers of history.
What is a history? Lies that come true.
What kind of words come true? Magic ones.
So for a noir story you make up people who know magic, then write about the ones who don’t.
Your turn. Where is Atlantis?
Which that story isn’t but still
“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.”
So apparently my “include virtual” server-side commands (which make all the content appear at xorph.com/creator) have stopped working, and are now rendering as plaintext. Awesome! Luckily, I appear to have exactly two readers who actually go to that page instead of reading via RSS or LJ, so the tide of complaint and bewilderment has been, well, minor.
Of course, if you do read NFD via the front page, you won’t be able to see this, and if you don’t, you probably haven’t noticed the problem. So this is pretty much a reminder to myself to change the damn Advent webcam already.