Ummm, yeah, I’m awesome. I broke the recent stories feed somehow, and just noticed it now. I’m in a meeting at the moment, but I’ll get it fixed sometime in the next couple hours.
Update: This is fixed. Sorry about that!
News, updates and other tidbits from the Ficlets Folks
Ummm, yeah, I’m awesome. I broke the recent stories feed somehow, and just noticed it now. I’m in a meeting at the moment, but I’ll get it fixed sometime in the next couple hours.
Update: This is fixed. Sorry about that!
Galleycat, one of my favorite lit-oriented blogs, has an interesting entry today about how some authors who are big hits here in the US are curiously under-selling in the United Kingdom – and vice-versa – and why that might be. The examples hauled up are Diane Setterfield, whose The Thirteenth Tale is a big seller here in the US but has sold only modestly in Britain, and Martina Cole, who is huge in the UK but unknown here. Clearly there are folks who are successful on both sides of the Atlantic – a certain JK Rowling comes to mind – but I can certainly think of a number of authors whose fame and fortune is not evenly distributed on both sides of the drink.
This topic is of slightly more than passing interest for me because my novel Old Man’s War is going to have its official UK release this June; it was available as an import before then, but this will be the first time the book is widely distributed in Great Britain and Ireland. It will be interesting to see if it does as well there as it’s been doing here. Naturally, I hope so; my daughter needs a college education. And shoes. And a pony! All right, maybe not so much with the pony.
Here you see my beauteous wife Kristine, modeling my office (which she has just cleaned; previously it looked like a bookstore had exploded inside of it). This is where nearly all of my writing gets done, because, for a start, this is where my computers are. But how does it match up with the work spaces of other writers? Are their writing spaces more exotic, or more practical, or just plain more interesting? The Guardian newspaper in the UK invites itself into the writing spaces of notable authors, including JG Ballard, AS Byatt and David Hare, to give you a glimpse at where all those words are coming from (in a physical, if not metaphysical, sense).
What does your writing space look like?
Spare a moment in your day, readers and Ficleteers, to reflect on the passing of Kurt Vonnegut, who died yesterday at 84 years of age, which is far too young as these things go.
I started reading Vonnegut in high school, as I think a lot of geeks and would-be science fiction writers do; I read Slaughterhouse Five, and remember noting how it was not like a lot of other science fiction I was reading at the time; namely, that it had a sense of humor that was not based on bad puns. Further reflection on the work revealed it had other qualities as well, of course, but that wasn’t a bad place to start.
Others will better note his contributions to literature, which are pretty damn significant; I just want to tell him thanks for the good reads, which were inspiring for a young not-quite writer.
It’s not about writing really short fiction, but it is an interesting experience in writing short bits: It’s Twitter, a Web 2.0 sort of site that asks “What Are You Doing?” and then you respond, as briefly as possible. And then the Twitter site posts your answer. It doesn’t get much more simple than that, and yet it’s oddly fascinating nonetheless. Some of the current responses:
“It’s a miracle! I have found my pants!”
“Sitting here wishing I could just leave.”
“Going home to baby-proof the house….for someone else’s baby…”
Any one of those would be a good ficlet inspiration, I’d say. I personally want to know more about where the pants were hiding. And why.