That’s interesting

My daily hits stay about the same whether I post new content or not.

Anyway, a couple of links: Nathan Bransford wisely warns about impatience in submitting your work and signing up with an agent. I think I’ve been very good about this so far but I do worry that I might jump the gun a few months down the road.

Also, I just found out about Flogging the Quill, which offers critiques on first pages (and polls as to whether you’ve effectively gripped the reader). Do check out Open your novel with kitty-cats in action (even if you don’t like cats).

Have some more links

Sorry, it’s still a bit content-free around here, what with the travel and the trying to get things done while I have some spare time. Have a few interesting links:

Jennifer Jackson of the Donald Maass Literary Agency asks whether authors and agents can prevent mismatches before they ever join forces. Note that this is more sophisticated than announcing ‘I want an agent who will sell my book for squillions, also the movie rights.’

Should politics have a place at the bookstore? Some say yes, some say no. But I really hope that during my time working in bookstores – which probably totals nearly half of my adult life, and all of that at independent bookshops – I avoided insulting any of the customers. I don’t have to agree with their political leanings, their choice of reading material, or their hairstyles, but it isn’t my place to critique them. That’s what blogs personal diaries are for. In any case, I did a political window one year and had a nice little three-party window display.

And finally, wow, if you want to know what the heck libraries do when they get archives handed over to them, you can read about how the British Library is dealing with Harold Pinter’s archive. My archive will probably end up in a recycling site, but it’s nice to know about people whose scribblings are deemed useful for literary scholarship.

Link soup for writers

Too much work – both the writing kind and, alas, the ‘keeping-body-and-soul-together’ 9-to-5 slog – to think of anything interesting, so have some links.

Celebs who write children’s books. No analysis here, just a list. Are any of these books any good? Any readers who have children who wish to be guinea pigs? Let me know in a comment.

Alanis Morissette’s writing is apparently an outlet for her anger. Um, and ‘You Oughta Know’ was a tender reminiscence?

One of those stories about a writer who didn’t have to query 1000000 agents before getting signed. But Stephanie Kuehnert only had to give pages to one, so that frees up the other 999999 for the rest of us. (Why the story’s lead talks about publishers, I don’t know.) Why isn’t the agent named, I wonder? The Caren Johnson Literary Agency sounds perfectly respectable.

And, finally, lots of expensive computer programs that claim to help you write your novel more easily. Look, I’m just happy that I don’t have to squint at the mistyped ‘teh’ while dabbing at it with a Liquid Paper brush. I think the brand name ‘StoryMill’ says it all.

Holmes is where the heart is

From the enchanting website Strange Maps (warning: will take away hours of your life, albeit in a thoroughly entertaining way) comes a detailed floorplan of 221B Baker Street.

The Brenda Novak auction is finished (except for the raffle and a couple of stray items), but I am very pleased – I won three items, all of which I very much wanted, and none of which ended up in last-minute bidding wars. Surprisingly so, in one case, given that a nearly-identical item by the same donor ended up costing more than mine (even though it offered less). Well, when my invoice comes I shall cheerfully make my donation.

No fooling

Thought about writing an April Fool post, but I tend to get taken in by them and it didn’t seem nice to do that to other people. So no announcements about six-figure, three-book contracts – hang on, let me check my e-mail – nope, none of those.

But here’s a round-up of some of the better hoaxes of the last few decades.

I can’t think of a clever title that will connect these two things

All of you who were reading this journal back in the heady days of January may remember that I listed Jo Walton’s Farthing as one of my top books of 2007. Well, if you register for the Tor website – which promises to be nifty and interactive and generous with the free e-books – you get to download a copy of Farthing for your very own (assuming that the week isn’t up and they haven’t moved on to another book). Which I will do as soon as they send me the link. *click* *click*

The sequel, Ha’penny, isn’t out in paperback until July. *whine* I swear, when the final volume is due, I’m going to beg a Tor intern to send me an ARC in exchange for a review.

Meanwhile, at some point I ought to personalize this blog in terms of how it looks, because it is really disconcerting to click on a random link and find that an identical blog is all about dental implants. I have nothing whatever against implants, dental or otherwise. Well, except the ones where you get high levels of lead inside your own head. But it feels rather like walking into a room and finding a completely different person wearing the same dress.

How well do you know “etiquette”?

K over at Square One sent me a link to a grammar blog: The “blog” of “unnecessary” quotation marks. It is very “amusing” though also “kind of” sad.

Think you know your historical etiquette? The McCord Museum invites you to prove it, with their fantastic interactive quiz about proper behavior in the nineteenth-century. You can play either a man or a woman – or, heck, try them both! They certainly aren’t parallel, as the man has a far more interesting time at his club than the woman does in the park. (Didn’t Lord Peter Wimsey say something about chivalry being the desire to have nine-tenths of the fun?)

When you’re bored of being proper, you can then move on to see if you’d survive the Roaring Twenties. That Edna Ferber autobiography I’m reading (published in 1938) will hopefully come in handy!

If nothing else, play these games for the Gilliam-esque animations. 

Grammar Across America

Every so often, I yearn to start a blog about bad grammar.  I would call it Grammar Shame (unless someone else got to the name first) and post all sorts of photos about the bad grammar and spelling I see in my daily life. But I never start it, for three important reasons:

a) It would depress me a lot.

b) Probably someone else already does it and has a snazzy web design.

c) I would have to figure out how to get all these photos off my phone.

But NPR has a story about Jeff Deck, a guy who started the Typo Eradication Advancement League, and who is my new hero.

Jeff is keeping a blog of his travels around the country.

I wonder how he will feel at the end of four months of correcting typos.

I wonder whether his tireless work will make any difference.

But mostly, I wonder how he gets his photos off his phone.

This is not a bookshelf

Via Sally, the blog of bookshelves that make you say ‘oooh’ quickly followed by ‘if I ever make way more money, this is where I will invest it’:

http://theblogonthebookshelf.blogspot.com/

My favorite today: this, from the aptly-named iwantoneofthose.com. Actually, I would like three of those, please.

Staircase of books

I think I speak for many of us when I say that I would like to have a staircase of books.

Though if I did, what would I do with the shelves already put up around the walls?

Oh, duh. Put the OTHER books there.