Lakeshore

Up, and out to the office today. Limited supplies of wit and erudition between now and Friday. Meanwhile, check out today's Dilbert. I've been in that conversation.

Today's APOD features a stunning photo of Saturn's south pole.

Chris Roberson and Allison Baker of Monkeybrain Books announce (more or less) my Death of a Starship for their 2008 line-up, along with a novella by matociquala.

tbclone47 has the awful truth about how the bed was broke in the Presidential Suite.

Oops. Big Bang at the atomic lab after scientists get their maths wrong.

CERN broke recently, but I wasn't paying enough attention.

A bit of intensely cool materials science, with thanks to chriswjohnson. (He's also real good on "lost aviation.")

Guardian Unlimited Books section with a fascinating (and somewhat lengthy) critical and historical article on copyright, written from a non-American point of view.

In response to a rather generous comment by echelonpress, and indirectly to shsilver, over at the recent post on presses I said in part:

I wasn't aiming for a Grand Unified Theory of Genre Presses, but more like a New Writer's Rough Guide to Genre Publishing. I left off some categories such as specialty presses, for example, which I might have sought to identify in a more comprehensive survey. This was necessarily incomplete...

Essentially, the question being answered was, what does a new writer need to know about small presses? I expanded that, but only to a point from the writer's perspective.

I may take the time to enlarge that post to a real article if demand seems to warrant, but that would involved, you know, research and stuff. Also, I'd have to correct some loose statements comparing magazines to book lines.

I've been asked several times recently what writers should write. In context, the intent was new writers, but it's a general question. For example, should a writer focus on one subgenre to build an audience?

Hell if I know. Look at my stuff. I'm all over the map. Even the 'typical Jay Lake story', whatever that means, accounts for a minority of my published work.

My personal answer? Write what you want to write. The passion will serve you far better than any amount of market calculation.

One of the undercurrents of the US Attorney firing scandal is a Republican (and specifically Roveian) obsession with Democratic voter fraud. Which is strange on the surface given that most of the indicted/indictable election irregularities which have held any water over the past few years have been Republican operations around misleading signage (Maryland), phone jamming (New Hampshire), ballot handling (Florida) and other voter intimidation tactics.

It has occured to me just now, six years into this wretched administration, that maybe one reasons the Bush-GOP leadership is obsessed with voter fraud is because they're so convinced of their own rectitude that they can't conceive of being legitimately opposed, let alone defeated, in an election. It would certainly explain a lot about their attitude last fall.

How very Soviet of the White House.

(See, you thought I'd abandoned politics for a new career as a writing guru. Hah! My name is legume, for we are meanies.)

How NOT to write a science book. A few lessons for us fictioneers there, too.

:: giggles ::

frankwu has an update on Visual Journeys, ed. Eric Reynolds, in which he, I and a number of other LJers appear.

ETA: mckitterick has the ToC with LJ handles.

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