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The Literature of Change
New Scientist writers pick their favourite science fiction books of all time - some classics, some obvious modern picks, and some genuine surprises.
The RPG Campaign That Became A Novel
Many authors have written stories or novels inspired by RPG campaigns. There is debate about whether or not tabletop RPGs should be used as writing tools. Plenty of folks give the idea a thumbs-down, but save some room in your heart for the LitRPG. B&N has you covered with, of course, a list of novels that started life as RPGs. [more inside]
It Is Known
What Game of Thrones means to today’s television-makers, 5 years after the finale - includes writers from Shogun, Wheel of Time, BSG (and DS9) and more.
“It’s really a strange town.”
There was allure beyond negation. Branson’s geo-cultural attributes—not quite the Midwest or the South or Appalachia yet also all three; a region of old European settlement but also westward expansion; perched above whatever modest altitude turned the soil to junk and predestined the land for poor Scots-Irish pastoralists; in a slave state with the largest anti-Union guerrilla campaign of the Civil War but little practical use for slavery—invite an unmistakable imaginative allegiance. This is the aspiration and the apparition that the novelist Joseph O’Neill has termed Primordial America, the “buried, residual homeland—the patria that would be exposed if the USA were to dissolve.” “Wherever they hail from,” 60 Minutes’ Morley Safer went on, “they feel they are the Heartland.” No matter the innate fuzziness, Real America in this formula is white, Christian, and prizes independence from the state. It is atavistic, not reactionary. from The Branson Pilgrim by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi [Harper's; ungated]
Say there is a young writer
In the dreamworld of the arts, every inanimate thing is animate, every object contains the entire world, millions of years of history and future and feeling. As she writes her story, which is ultimately her life, it can look like anything she wants. The more she thinks about it, the greater the possibilities. The more she’s cast out, the more she must innovate. The more she will be unique, the more her voice will be untamed. Whatever she is, whoever. She has lived for literature from the beginning and so literature will be her; her indomitable will shall make it so. Our young writer, still unpublished, is the essence of the word itself. Any of her books that may, that will come, be published, read—a footnote. from Every Ship Is a Passenger Too: On Publishing Today by Chris Molnar [LARB]
UK Bookshop opens at 5am for local writers
A bookshop in East Sussex has launched an early morning initiative to help writers.
Kemptown Bookshop, in St George's Rd, Brighton, opens its doors at 05:00 BST on the first Wednesday of every month for a silent writing session.[more inside]
Reality TV for Writers
Readers are needy creatures, Morrison’s letters suggest
Dear {Person's name}
The USPS declared April to be National Card and Letter Writing Month… 23 years ago. American Library Association has some ideas on epistolary fun within games. The Chicago Public Library has suggestions for epistolary novels. The Universal Postal Union has a letter writing competition for writers aged 9 to 15 on the theme: "Write a letter to future generations about the world you hope they inherit." The Smithsonian National Postal Museum has an epistolary fiction project which includes an extensive if not exhaustive list of novels, starting with Xenophon of Ephesus. [more inside]
Lyn Hejinian, 1941-2024
Excerpts from Lyn Hejinian's My Life: "A name trimmed with colored ribbons"; "Reason looks for two, then arranges it from there"; "As for we who 'love to be astonished'"; "Yet we insist that life is full of happy chance"; "One begins as a student but becomes a friend of clouds." Lisa Samuels, "Eight justifications for canonizing Lyn Hejinian's My Life." "The Rejection of Closure," "Continuing Against Closure," and other work online. Obits: NYT (ungated / archived), Jacket2, and The Nation. Remembrances: Berkeley English, LARB, and The Paris Review. Colin Vanderburg (n+1, Apr. 5), "Tree, Chair, Cone, Dog, Bishop, Piano, Vineyard, Door, or Penny: On Lyn Hejinian": "There is no better way to end, or to begin, or to continue. The facts are finished, but the life is still open."
Hierarchies of Fountain Pen Friendly Paper
“So as a baseline, what needs to happen before I will publicly recommend something as “fountain pen friendly paper”? My standard is fairly simple: No bleed-through or feathering with any fountain pen nib that can be reasonably used for everyday writing. (Because I mainly use my paper for drafting and notetaking, as opposed to drawing, wet ink samples, or flex-nib calligraphy, my standards may be more lenient than some.)” [more inside]
Folks from round ere ain’t from round ere
"A strange Thing written upon a Glass Window in Queen Elizabeth's Time"
Madeleine Pelling (The Telegraph, 3/17/2024), "Seriously scandalous and surprisingly sexy: how the Georgians redefined graffiti" -- archived: "In October 1731, ... 'Hurlothrumbo' set out into the freezing streets of London. Armed only with a pencil and paper, he was on a most peculiar hunt. His quarry? The graffiti that lined the city's many surfaces, left behind by its inhabitants." The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany, part 1 and 2, 3, & 4. The play Hurlothrumbo. Pelling on women archaeologists in the 1780s via the Open Digital Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies. Pelling's Writing on the Wall, reviewed (archived) and at Goodreads / StoryGraph. Pelling's podcast, most recently discussing St Patrick.
Finalists for the 59th Nebula Awards
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association has announced the finalists for the Nebula Awards. [more inside]
"new perspective on things by looking at your fundamental assumptions"
Continuing my series curating work by finance expert Daniel Davies, some of his commentary on travel, Ezra Pound, coffee, and the culture of the Internet and how to manage one's equanimity while writing for strangers. [more inside]
Ten there were, dusty chronicles of forgotten lore…
What if we made no money?
This was a way to experiment, free of the pressures of a formal publication TinyLetter shut down on February 29th. [more inside]
Those seams we are seduced into not seeing
Let me offer a couple examples of how the arts challenge AI. First, many have pointed out that storytelling is always needed to make meaning out of data, and that is why humanistic inquiry and AI are necessarily wed. Yet, as N. Katherine Hayles (2021: 1605) writes, interdependent though they may be, database and narrative are “different species, like bird and water buffalo.” One of the reasons, she notes, is the distinguishing example of indeterminacy. Narratives “gesture toward the inexplicable, the unspeakable, the ineffable” and embrace the ambiguity, while “databases find it difficult to tolerate”. from Poetry Will Not Optimize; or, What Is Literature to AI?
opressive blanket of normality
Good writers are perverts. (desktop only)
The Solo RPG-er &/as Creative Writer
Many games and tools exist in the mysterious valley that lies between tabletop roleplaying in groups and writing fiction. Solo RPGs can be considered a creative writing practice or a generator for creative writing. Solo gaming surged during the pandemic, along with a surge in the creation of solo RPGs. (What do you know? Solo boardgaming surged, too.) There are whole kit-n-kaboodle games, as one might find on MeFi Projects and elsewhere, and then there are tools that serve as emulators for the GM/DM/referee. In the depths of the valley, or at the height of the mountain range, between boardgames and solo RPGs are to be found tabletop RPG boardgames.
So you want to be an artist. Do you have to start a TikTok?
Everyone’s a sellout now Vox article describing the challenge for artists, writers, musicians who just want to practice their craft: Sorry, you need to be a highly-promoted brand first.
Tone!!!
When we talk about exclamation points, people often think we’re talking about tone. But what goes unsaid is that tone is the performance of niceness or seriousness. It is the work of matching sentence structure to gender norms, industry norms, workplace norms, and generational norms. It is switching norms dozens if not hundreds of times a day, as you shift from text to email, from group chat to professional Teams Message. And we are doing this Tone Work exponentially more than at any point in history. from A Theory of the Modern Exclamation Point! [more inside]
Pounded in the butt by the Texas Library Association
THE TEXAS LIBRARY ASSOCIATION TELLS CHUCK TINGLE TO STAY HOME BUT WE PROVE LOVE ANYWAY “just when you buckaroos thought 2024 would be a break from book drama, here comes chuck tingle in the mix. recently i was asked to be a featured speaker at the TEXAS LIBRARY ASSOCIATION annual conference. a few days ago they rescinded my invitation. here is what happened….” [more inside]
Organization for the Electronic Production of Homogenized Literary Works
Novelists and poets Bernardine Evaristo, Jeanette Winterson, Adam Roberts, YZ Chin, Harry Josephine Giles, Louisa Hall, Stephen Marche, Will Eaves, Nick Harkaway, Jo Callaghan, Philip Terry and Nathan Filer on how AI could rewrite the future (Guardian)
Everyday Stories from the Ancient Past
Love in an Orchard, as Written by the Trees. Donating Kittens to the Goddess Bastet. Parental Grief. Same-Sex Love Spells. A Runaway Child Bride. A Bachelor Wishes to Marry. A Spell to Attract Women. His Mind is Shrouded in Darkness. I am Dying of a Broken Heart.These and more vignettes of ancient Middle Eastern life at the Papyrus Stories Group Blog (click on language tab or hover on topic tab for best navigation).
Seek out what magnifies your spirit.
On each anniversay of the Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings), Maria Popova writes about the most important lesson she's learned that year. Today, on the 17th anniversary, we have one new lesson and the sixteen previous lessons. Learn how to question your universe from a poem about pi. Learn how to outgrow yourself. And don't forget to embrace joy.
Meaning It
Duong Van Ngo started working for the postal service at the age of 16
.
The last public writer for the Vietnamese postal service passes away at the age of 94. In 1990, he retired but was given special permission to continue to work in the Saigon central post office as a "public writer," a position he retired from in 2020. From 2019: Every morning, he tapes a piece of paper with the words “Public Writer” in French, Vietnamese and English near his table at the Saigon Central Post Office. Ngo has written letters for hundreds of people in Vietnamese, English and French in the past 28 years. From 2007: A Day with Saigon's Last Public Letter Writer.
The last public writer for the Vietnamese postal service passes away at the age of 94. In 1990, he retired but was given special permission to continue to work in the Saigon central post office as a "public writer," a position he retired from in 2020. From 2019: Every morning, he tapes a piece of paper with the words “Public Writer” in French, Vietnamese and English near his table at the Saigon Central Post Office. Ngo has written letters for hundreds of people in Vietnamese, English and French in the past 28 years. From 2007: A Day with Saigon's Last Public Letter Writer.
“Truthfully, I try not to analyse my own intentions”
AMPTP's endgame for writers: They should all be homeless
“The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” - California is notoriously expensive to live in and rife with homlessness, writers are notoriously poorly paid and living precariously (and likely to become more soif the WGA's concerns are not addressed), and thus the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) has decided its tactic to settle the current writers strike and finally break the WGA: Wait for the writers to be broke and homeless.
Women Who Write While Lying on their Stomachs
BREAKING NEWS: I'm a writer and I'm pretty sure this is not actually possible.
I am speaking as someone who writes pretty much every day and changes positions often when I write. I carry my lap top with me from room to room where I sometimes can be found at desks and at tables. Other times I sit on sofas, in comfortable chairs and on beds. And yet I have never written a single word while lying face down on my stomach.
Writing to possible or impossible audiences
"Writing for the Bad Faith Reader" by Susie Dumond (Mar 30, 2023) discusses how easy is is for writers today to get discouraged or preoccupied by the potential reactions of "the person who is looking to invalidate the art that you’re making" (quoting Melissa Febos). Dumond shares "some of the ways I avoid writing for the bad faith reader these days." Her advice to write the first draft for yourself as a way to channel the "best faith" reader, and to accept that your work is not for every reader, reminds me of two of the five laws of library science: "to every book their reader" and "to every reader their book".
A Thoroughly Modern Form
But very short fictions need not be concessions to workshop practicalities, the Internet, or shallow attention spans. They can also be—as my extracts show us—serious explorations of the formal possibilities of extreme compression. from The Art of Compression by Richard Hughes Gibson
Bad Waitress
“Who Jackie?”
Unraveling the Greatest Writers’ Room Story Ever [Vulture]
Zuker had started a new job as a writer-producer on Grace Under Fire by this time, but that show’s offices were also on the Radford lot, directly above the common area at Roseanne. He remembers hearing explosive laughter from below on the day some former co-workers came running upstairs at lunch to tell him the “Who Jackie” story. “What made this a legend for me,” he says, “is that within 24 hours, you’d be walking around the Radford lot and hearing people say, ‘Who Jackie?’ I was leaving the next night, and I heard two security guards saying, ‘Who Jackie?’ and laughing their asses off.”
Zuker had started a new job as a writer-producer on Grace Under Fire by this time, but that show’s offices were also on the Radford lot, directly above the common area at Roseanne. He remembers hearing explosive laughter from below on the day some former co-workers came running upstairs at lunch to tell him the “Who Jackie” story. “What made this a legend for me,” he says, “is that within 24 hours, you’d be walking around the Radford lot and hearing people say, ‘Who Jackie?’ I was leaving the next night, and I heard two security guards saying, ‘Who Jackie?’ and laughing their asses off.”
A Satirist in the Abbasid Era
Satire is among the most powerful tools for bringing the powerful back down to earth, and al-Jahiz from ninth-century Iraq was a master of the craft. Beyond his powerful connections, his financial independence may also have helped make him one of the few writers who could speak freely, not only about the maladies of their age but also its various classes and subclasses.
members have gone on strike six times: in 1960, 1973, 1981, 1985, 1988
What you need to know about the looming WGA strike. [Polygon] “The WGA’s membership consists of writers spanning across the TV and movie industry. [...] The Writers Guild represents a ton of movie, television, and documentary writers. Most of your favorite shows and movies are written by union writers: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Star Trek: Picard, The Walking Dead, Detective Pikachu, Abbott Elementary, Better Call Saul, and plenty, plenty more — too many to name, really. [...] On April 3, WGA leadership asked its members to take a strike authorization vote. Basically, the union wants to know if its writers are willing to strike if a contract isn’t negotiated by the time the old one lapses. Voting on the authorization will start on April 11 and continue until April 17. Should the writers vote in favor, they’ll go on strike on May 1 if a new agreement isn’t reached. Negotiations have been ongoing with the AMPTP since March 20, and WGA representatives told the Los Angeles Times that the AMPTP hasn’t brought good enough offers to the table just yet.” [WGA 2023 list of broad demands] [Contract bulletins]
"I would be dead, but it would make me happy."
Daniel Wallace writes movingly about posthumously collecting the writing of his friend Randall Kenan (A Visitation of Spirits, Let The Dead Bury Their Dead, The Fire This Time). [more inside]
The Novelist Whose Inventions Went Too Far
"You, my friends, are not boring or lame."
Brandon Sanderson (Reddit, 03/23/2023), "On the Wired Article": "Honestly, I'm a guy who enjoys his job, loves his family, and is a little obsessive about his stories ... I can see how it is difficult to write an article about me." Additional context by Janet Manley (LitHub, 03/24/2023), "Read the meanest literary profile of the year (so far) ... and the subject's response": "Does Kehe insult Sanderson’s writing, or Sanderson, or Sanderson's Mormonism? Yes. All of those things." The Wired article by Jason Kehe (03/23/2023), "Brandon Sanderson Is Your God": "I realize, in a panic, that I now have a problem. Sanderson is excited to talk about his reputation. He's excited, really, to talk about anything. But none of his self-analysis is, for my purposes, exciting" (Wayback Machine).
“Should Christian Women Be Allowed to Have Butts?”
...writes Matthew Pierce of Evangelical Think Pieces. "Probably the most dangerous thing for Christian men is to see things, because this makes us sin. My youth pastor says men are visual. This means that whenever a man sees a woman, he thinks “that lady has bosoms, I wish I could do a sex right now.” Also, when a man sees something that is not a woman, like a toaster or a blade of grass, he thinks “hey, remember when I saw that lady with bosoms? I wish I could do a sex right now.”" [more inside]
Write on a piece of paper where something is already printed
Bernadette Mayer's Writing Prompts. Hat tip: Bernadette Mayer will give you ideas. Recommended not just for writers. [more inside]
Vitriol is a precious resource
Ask A Music Critic: Why Aren’t There More Negative Album Reviews? A viral takedown of the Italian band Måneskin prompted a reader to ask music critic Steven Hyden why there aren’t more negative album reviews. "What’s going on here? ...Don’t tell me that music is better than ever!" Hyden responds with his own theory: no, it’s not really all about access, or fanbases, or poptimism, but rather about "the decline of the general-interest music critic".
The Little Nicholson Baker In My Mind
"I wouldn’t write a book like this today."
When you live alone with characters you’re making up, you are more alone with yourself than you realize. Re-reading this book after twelve years, I see more clearly than I did then that it’s a hall of mirrors. Not everyone in it is me, but I distributed my own insecurities and madness quite liberally among the figures I modeled after people I knew. And the book I thought I was writing from such a dissembling distance from real life situations turns out to be transparently about people whom a great many other people reading it could readily identify. That doesn’t matter. I wasn’t indicting anybody in front of a grand jury. It isn’t a cruel book, or a score-settling one. from A Hall of Mirrors by Gary Indiana
Her career was being monitored, prodded and shaped by a group of spies
The worst literary agent? Bryan Denson begins the story by describing how journalist/literary agent Robert Eringer helped Earth Liberation Front spokesperson Craig Rosebraugh develop a book. Then things take a turn. (SLNYT) [more inside]
The Lathe of Heaven
Kelly Link in Praise of Ursula K. Le Guin's Genuine Magic - "It is also, notably, Le Guin's deliberate foray into Philip K. Dick's territory, with its hallucinatory beginning, its drug-using protagonist, and its surreal, literally world-melting alternate realities. Dick and Le Guin were admirers of each other's work and occasional correspondents." [more inside]
I loved John, which remains true
Last year, Australian novelist John Hughes was found to have plagiarised several writers, including Leo Tolstoy and F Scott Fitzgerald. He also plagiarised his former student Joseph Earp, whose reaction was complicated: "It hurt, and I was angry for what had happened to me and other writers – the way our labour had been co-opted, and not appropriately cited. Lots of people can imagine that hurt, I assume. But I can’t imagine that many other people understand the way it felt good, too."
postcards from an unfolding crisis
A Writer Collapses. As He Recovers, His Dispatches Captivate Readers (NYT -- archive link) Hanif Kureishi lost use of his arms and legs. In tweets dictated to family members, he narrates the drama, and muses about writing and art, love and patience. He’s also quite funny.
Imaginary feasts
Elegant and Imaginative Photographs of Meals from Famous Literature versus The Top Ten Most Disappointing Edibles and Potables of Children’s Literature. On the one hand, the roasted eggs and potatoes from The Secret Garden. On the other hand, egg creams. A meal from Heidi appears on both lists. Controversy!