Personal Quests

We need goals in life, things that we strive for even if they're silly. Sometimes especially if they're silly. Lawrence Edmonds is a man with a goal. 

Walking in a Photo Wonderland

Kirsty Mitchell's lovely fantasy photo series is dedicated to her deceased mother. 

Brobdignagian Backlist of Badassery

You know, I don't think I've actually linked Badass of the Week here before, which is a shame, because it's an awesome site. As indicated above, it's got a lot of content built up. 

The Economics of Anarchy

Well, not really, but it's some thoughts about economics from a different perspective.

LitReactor

I try to be on the lookout for sites that run writing advice- especially useful writing advice (you know, not just "have a blog", "build your brand", and "feel the fiction"). I've been poking around LitReactor and it seems to be pretty handy (my favorite so far is the article on visceral horror by Jack Frickin' Ketchum). There's a pay-only section of the site that includes more articles and a workshop forum, but I haven't paid, so I can't tell you anything about those (though there are lots of free services for critiquing).

Anyway, go have a read, it's nice. 

Unspeak

A dear friend of mine pointed me at the Unspeak blog, which is all about language, and particularly the ways it is used by politicians and the media. Check it out and enjoy yourselves!

Men's Fiction

Esquire announced its intent to publish straight to e-book anthologies of "Men's Fiction", and I am cautiously optimistic.

I'm actually really for publishing "Men's Fiction" and labeling it as such. The editor hopes for stories "dealing with passages in a man’s life that seem common," which I think is a fantastic thing to do. Let's talk about boys being expected to fight. Let's talk about the draft. Let's talk about fatherhood. Let's talk about not knowing for sure if a sexual partner's offspring is also yours. Let's talk about the expectation of being the breadwinner, or the directionless feeling when that's no longer expected and one doesn't know exactly what is. Let's talk about being expected to be physically strong in the way women are expected to be physically beautiful. Let's talk about the intersections of masculinity and race in our society. All of these are valuable and important and potentially great stories that are generally pretty specific to men.

I think one fantastic thing about directing attention to the idea that there is specifically masculine fiction is that it helps put wedge between masculine fiction and general fiction being masculine by default. I like the idea of there being a gender continuum with delineated poles and a broad neutral ground in the middle where the subject isn't anything gender-particular, but rather the human condition. Not "women's fiction and general fiction", but "women's fiction, general fiction, and men's fiction".

I am, of course, also leery, because often when people say "men's (anything)" they mean either straight up pornography, or a sort of he-man woman hater's club business that tends to be pretty distasteful. But I'm optimistic that's not where this is going.

EDIT: Aaaand it's been pointed out to me Esquire has a long history of excellent fiction. Here's the highlights of the Esquire collected anthology 1993:

"The Snows of Kilimanjaro" by Ernest Hemingway; "The Death of Justina" by John Cheever; "Towel Season" by Ron Carlson; "Parker's Back" by Flannery O'Connor; "Adult World I" and "Adult World II" by David Foster Wallace; "Neighbors" by Raymond Carver; "Fleur" by Louise Erdrich; "A Man in the Way" by F. Scott Fitzgerald; "In the Men's Room of the Sixteenth Century" by Don DeLillo; "Rock Springs" by Richard Ford; "The Remobilization of Jacob Horner" by John Barth; and "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien.

That's a really boss line up and I'd love to see them carry on in that tradition.

Nick Mamatas on Laurel K. Hamilton (which, in retrospect, sounds kind of dirty)

Just an article on why Laurel K. Hamilton commands as much market share as she does, and why she deserves to. 

Non-Western Science Fiction Roundtable, Again

A separate take on the question, this time by non-westerners. 

Bad Romance

Bizarro Authrix Spike Marlowe runs an advice column called "How to Have a Paranormal Romance". Go. Amuse yourselves. Learn about face eating. 

Piracy on the High CDs.

DVDs, actually, but I love puns. Examination of the altruistic criminal work of Mr. Hyman Strachman.

David Brin at io9

The writer behind the Uplift series talks about science fiction, the singularity, and the outlook of humanity over at io9.

Writing vs. Therapy

An article. Make of it what you will. 

You Go, Mr. Gowers!

Alright, so I've griped before about the limiting of access to the wealth of human knowledge by charging crazy amounts for academic journals and the like. Well, apparently, I'm not alone, and some people are actually doing something about it.

Thanks to Cambridge mathematician Tim Gowers, who started a boycott that now includes over 9000 signatories.

Seriously, this is super cool. 

Broken Arrow, Faded Giant

It's weird to me, given how much we thought about nuclear annihilation when I was growing up, that we really don't hear about it much anymore. Or at least nuclear meltdown, given that it's barely a year since Fukushima Daiichi.

Anyway, here's IO9's article on five times we nearly blew ourselves up. 

Books For Kids, But Probably Not In the Way You Think

As it says above.

Advice On Loving Things You're Embarrassed By

I actually started and then abandoned a post similar to this article, talking about how much I really enjoy the Conan mythos, but completely understand and respect how a great many other people would not. You know, what with all the racism. 

Putting a Man on the Crescent Moon

Islamscifi.com is your stop for Islam and Islam related discussions in science fiction!

Hulk Vs. The Monomyth

The Hulk Film Critic takes on shallow formulaic interpretations of Joseph Campbell's Hero With A Thousand Faces. 

.....Just Wow

So... apparently there is a contingent of Hunger Games fans who are upset that black actors were cast for the roles of.... black characters.

I know I've mentioned whitewashed cover art around here, and I probably said something about how annoyed I was with the casting on The Last Airbender (the Avatar series was one of my favorites, specifically because they did such fabulous Asian culture based stuff... so it was very weird when the only named characters who were any type of Asian (and then clearly not the type of Asian they'd been in the series) were the villains, and then only because the white Disney pop star boy backed out. I actually really got into it with a friend of mine over this, which was terribly weird to me, because I really just assumed they would also assume a character named Toph Bei Fong was, you know, from some sort of Chinese or Korean extraction. Not quite so, apparently.)

Aaaaanyway. Here is a bunch of angry tweets from people very upset to see that characters they apparently thought were just tanned white folk portrayed by black actors. 

In the words of one superfan: "when I found out Rue was black, her death wasn't as sad".