Can you believe that J.K. Rowling is suing a small publisher because she claims their 10,000-copy edition of The Harry Potter Lexicon, a book about Rowling’s hugely successful novel series, is just a “rearrangement” of her own material. Rowling “feels like her words were stolen,” said lawyer Dan Shallman. Well, heck, I feel like the plot of my novel Ender’s Game was stolen by J.K. Rowling.
Good stuff, article is here. “Borrowing” ideas and turns of phrase are one thing - but the obvious parallels between Card’s Ender’s Game and Harry Potter (and Star Wars and approximately 1,000,000 other unlikely hero versus the world stories) just go to show that there are countless ways to tell the same basic plot. The devil’s in the details.
Poem: “You made crusty bread rolls… ” by Gary Johnson.
You made crusty bread rolls… You made crusty bread rolls filled with chunks of brie And minced garlic and drizzled with olive oil And baked them until the brie was bubbly And we ate them thoughtfully, our legs coiled Together under the table And then salmon with dill And lemon and whole-wheat cous cous Baked with garlic and fresh ginger, and a hill Of green beans and carrots roasted with honey and tofu. it was beautiful, the candles and linens and silver, The winter sun setting on our snowy street, Me with my hand on your leg, you, my lover, In your jeans and green T-shirt and beautiful feet. How simple life is. We buy a fish. We are fed. We sit close to each other, we talk and then we go to bed.
Have you seen Questionaut yet? Very well done flash game, and answering the questions will make you feel smart.
I loathe time travel as a plot line. Freakin’ loathe it. But I found this Wikihistory short short very entertaining.
I have some long train rides coming up, assuming I get my work done (no last minute working on the train!) I hope to be able to knock out some writing. Here’s a good post on writing conversationally.
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — Arthur C. Clarke, a visionary science fiction writer who won worldwide acclaim with more than 100 books on space, science and the future, died Wednesday in his adopted home of Sri Lanka, an aide said. He was 90.
Goodbye, sir. Know that your works live on. AP press release is here.
Life is just one big banana. Science fiction allows us all to peel open the reality and discover the yellow truth inside.
A post from here which I’m including in its entirety so I can think about doing it myself.
The first issue of Colored Chalk’s zine is nearly complete (edited by Caleb “thirstygerbil” Ross), in its final edits now and looking pretty damn sweet.
As luck would have it, the theme chosen for issue 2 was mine, so I get to play editor this time around. In the interest of getting this zine on a regular bi-monthly schedule, we’re getting a head start on calling for submissions for this issue. The window is open from now until the end of April. The zine will be published the last day of May.
Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
This theme is all about momentum. From its first sentence, your story should be moving and nothing should stop it from reaching its conclusion — not even the truncation of its last few paragraphs.
If you have to explain how your story ends, you’re using too many words. Focus on building the tension, not on how you want to release it. You should engage the audience in ways that they are cautiously certain of what will happen next, and then stop. Let that inertia carry them the rest of the way.
For an example of how one might interpret this theme, enjoy this classic video by RadioHead:
Email your submissions to jase@bucketweb.com. Stories may be in any style or genre, up to 1500 words. Acceptable formats are TXT, RTF, Microsoft Word DOC, PDF, and Open Office ODT.
Please put “Cockroaches Ate the Ending” somewhere in the subject line of your email so that I can spot it amidst the spam messages I get.
Thank you in advance for your submissions!
__________________________
“All the matter in the universe acts like a magnet. You aren’t just drawn to the Earth, the Earth is drawn to you. The effect is proportional to your mass, so it seems like only the planets and stars have gravity, but every animal and vegetable and mineral has this effect.
Link from kottke: The Virginia Quarterly Review did some simple math on the poems that get accepted in their journal, and they came up with interesting results. I never thought of doing text mining on prose, that’s an interesting idea, but I think this comment, lifted from the VQR blog post, says it all:
The only difference
between poetry
and that which is not
poetry
is how you use
the return key.
Which may explain why it is a
dead
art form,
Practiced by many
but read by none.
I do read poetry, but at times I do agree with the poster.
I was listening to the news on NPR the other day and two things occurred to me. First, only assholes feel the constant need to tell you they listen to NPR (does anyone ever say, “So I was watching the CW last night…”?) and I guess that makes me an asshole. The second was that in the midst of listening to the story in question, I had finally figured out how to succinctly sum up why I write. It goes a little something like this –
WD: You’re terribly prolific, but a lot of writers produce one book in a lifetime. Would you advise young writers to spend all their time polishing one piece or to go for quantity?
BRADBURY: It simply follows that quantity produces quality. Only if you do a lot will you ever be any good. If you do very little, you’ll never have quality of idea or quality of output. The excitement and creativity comes from a whole lot of doing; hoping you’ll suddenly be struck by lightning. If you only write a few things, you’re doomed. The history of literature is the history of prolific people. I always say to students, give me four pages a day, every day. That’s three or four hundred thousand words a year. Most of that will be bilge, but the rest … It will save your life!
Ray-Anne Carr has starting blogging about writing a thriller. Not normally the kind of thing I write but the lessons learned for that kind of fiction must apply to others, right? I’ve subscribed to her RSS feed. I found the link from Becoming A Writer Seriously.
It is such a miserable day today in Boston, I’d like nothing more than to curl up with a book and do nothing. But, we do have some fun plans - we’re off to downtown for an 80s themed birthday party. What to wear, what to wear?
