Category: GENERAL
If it offends thee, tear it out!
There have been more reports of subscribers, who, upset with the magazine’s content, are actually tearing out the offending pages and mailing them back to us along with a subscription cancellation.
The latest example of this involved David Gerrold’s “thirteen o’clock” in the Feb. 2006 issue. It’s not clear if the subscriber was offended by the story’s content, or by the lack of punctuation. It’s a toss up. (There were also Puritanical complaints about the Gary Shockley story, though no pages were torn out in outrage, as far as I know).
In order to placate these subscribers, F&SF‘s pages will henceforth be perforated to facilitate the removal of offensive material. We’re definitely still going to keep publishing offensive material though.
Writing the Other
I received a press release the other day about a new writing book that I thought sounded interesting:
Writing the Other: A Practical Approach by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward is now available from Aqueduct Press for $9 a copy. Based on the acclaimed “Writing the Other” workshop, this important book includes essays and exercises that help authors create believable characters with diverse backgrounds. Race, religion, and age are among the differences covered in the book’s hands-on approach.
Both established professional writers and talented beginners have benefited from attending “Writing the Other” workshops. Now these valuable techniques and concepts are accessible to the public in a concise and highly readable, step-by-step guide.
Writing the Other: A Practical Approach (ISBN 1-933500-00-X) can be ordered via your local bookstore, or online. Details about the book can be found here. You can find out more about the “Writing the Other” workshop, and read student testimonials, at www.writingtheother.com.
KGB: 1/18/06
Just got back from the monthly KGB Fantastic Fiction reading. As usual, I hung with my peeps–Andrea Kail, Doug Cohen, Chris Cevasco, the one we call E., and Amy Goldschlager. New to the crew this month was a paralegal named Evan, who, though not a writer or editor could totally hold his own talking about SF; and Jenny Rae Rappaport (an agent-in-training–so start sucking up now) and her boyfriend Chris. Also present was Tempest, who, while not a part of the regular crew, is always welcome. Nick Mamatas also loitered in our area (there were no chairs to be had). Also met Mary Robinette Kowal, which was cool, since we’d exchanged numerous emails but hadn’t actually met until tonight.
It was a really good event tonight. Marly Youmans and Jeff VanderMeer read. Marly started the night off with a fun story, and then VanderMeer rocked the house with some seriously funny stuff–an excerpt from his forthcoming novel, Shriek: an Afterword, and selections from a new book which was spun off from his collection, Secret Lives. The excerpt from Shriek was great, especially for us writerly types–it was about a guy going to visit his editor only to have the publisher tell him how truly terrible and loathesome his latest book is. Although VanderMeer says that that excerpt is not emblematic of the novel–the novel isn’t a comedy throughout–it was a great excerpt to read, and I think it probably sold a few pre-orders.
The Ultimate Genre Crossover Challenge
In response to an amusing comment in the talkback of the Ain’t It Cool News review of her book, His Majesty’s Dragon, Naomi Novik announced the * The Ultimate Genre Crossover Challenge! *
To play, you must write a story containing: vampires, dragons, AND spaceships. The winner will get a signed copy of the UK hardcover of Temeraire (a/k/a His Majesty’s Dragon in the US).
There are other rules too. Read more here. Just don’t send them all to me after you’re done with them.
Preserving Websites
Check out this cool post on MetaxuCafe. It explains how you can capture the entirety of a website and save it to your hard drive easily by downloading a small program. This could be very useful, say, if one of your favorite webzines suddenly had the plug pulled and you’re worried that you won’t be able to read it anymore after the corporate parent decides to delete it from their server. I just tried using it, and the damn thing works like a charm.
Identity Theft
Reading/Brain Exercises
Since most of you probably like to read and/or care about the state of your brain as a thinking mechanism, I thought I’d share some reading/brain exercises I read about in Making a Good Brain Great.
LAZY-8S
How to do it: Extend one arm in front of your face. With your thumb pointing upward, slowly and smoothly trace a large figure 8 on its side in the air. Keep your neck relaxed and your head upright, moving only slightly as you focus on the thumb and follow it around. This reportedly helps with reading, speed reading, writing, and hand-eye coordination.CROSS CRAWL
How to do it: While standing, alternately touch your left knee with your right hand, then your right knee with your left hand. Continue for 10 to 15 repetitions. This reportedly helps with reading, writing, listening, memory, and coordination. It activates both sides of the brain simultaneously.
The first one makes more sense to me as a reading aid, because it’s giving your eyes a workout. I also read about a similar exercise to the Lazy-8s in Men’s Health. In this one, you hold your hand out at arm’s length and point your index finger up, while keeping the tip of your finger at eye level. Focus on the tip of your index finger, then shift focus to something behind your finger without moving your head. For instance, you could stand in one room and shift your focus to a lamp that’s in an adjacent room (that’s what I do). Do the exercise ten times.
On another note, I was reading something about speed reading, and it said that one reason people sometimes read slowly is because they subvocalize everything they read. (And by subvocalize, I mean silently, in their head; not with the moving lips.)
When I read that, it was like a light went off. That’s exactly what I do, and that’s probably why I can’t seem to read any faster than I do. In order to break yourself of this habit, the text said to count to ten in increments of two (2, 4, 6, 8, 10), and do that over and over as you’re reading. While you’re doing this, you’re supposed to read extra slowly as you’re training your brain to process the words differently.
I don’t think I’m ever going to break myself of the habit (and I probably won’t really try as it seems impossible), but it does explain to me why some people can read a whole book in a 2-3 hours, while it takes me much longer. But I also read that people who subvocalize often require a quiet and distraction-free zone to read in, and that’s definitely true of me. So that also explains why some people can sit and read in a noisy restaurant (or while listening to the radio, as Gordon does), while I find any kind of noise or talking very distracting. Of course, reading the way I do means I’m a more careful reader than some others, and so that’s good for editing, at least.
Comics Publicity
Does anyone know how to contact the publicity department of Marvel, DC, and/or Dark Horse Comics? I’ve been able to get graphic novel review copies from Image Comics, but I can’t seem to find contact information for the right people at the other comics companies. I’d like to be able to consider a variety of graphic novels for review in my column, but right now my selection is extremely limited. I could easily include a review of one each month, if I could get my hands on them.
Of course, maybe I’ll find all the contacts I need when I go to the NY Comic-Con next month.
UPDATE:
Dark Horse contact acquired!
DC contact acquired!
Unleashing the Writer Within Redux
Thanks to everyone who provided suggestions in response to my Unleashing the Writer Within post. I just wanted to post a note to say that I’ve found my quotee–it’s David Marusek, who appears to be a poster child for Clarion, or in this case, Clarion West.