Elle Jean-Charles

Owen King

Yeah, what he said. 

(via robinwasserman)

penamerican:

Slideshow: Chinua Achebe reads at PEN’s 2008 Tribute to Achebe.

Click here to listen to Achebe read from his 1958 novel Things Fall Apart.

All photos © Beowulf Sheehan / PEN American Center

I just found this, and everyone else might already know about it, but! It’s essentially a collections of descriptions (in the form of quotes, lists of words and ‘thematic micro-stories’) that each center around a given theme.

So if you search for “crying” you’ll see user descriptions from literature and often their own writing as well. 

Of course there is an abundance of purple and poorly constructed prose. But there are also little gems like this, from Atwood’s Lady Oracle:

I never learned to cry with style, silently, the pearl-shaped tears rolling down my cheeks from wide luminous eyes, as on the covers of True Love comics, leaving no smears or streaks. I wished I had; then I could have done it in front of people, instead of in bathrooms, in darkened movie theatres, shrubberies and empty bedrooms, among the party coats on the bed.

And you can also contribute your own stuff if you’re so inclined.

Anyway, add it to your bookmarks right next to the Dictionary of Similes and before you know it, you’ll have 3467346 ways to describe a ‘dark and stormy night.’

achickwithacrossbow:

I’m all for trade publishing. I’m all for self-publishing. I’m also happy to e-publish shorter works through smaller e-publishers. All are good options and there are good reasons to go with any of the three. A lot of it depends on a thousand different factors unique to each writer and even to each project.

However, it’s disheartening to see one of the Big Publishers create these e-imprints that basically act like vanity presses. As Scalzi points out in his original piece about their SF/F e-imprint Hydra (yes, like the villains in Captain America), Random House is not wholly evil, and in fact they have been a great publisher for countless authors, including Scalzi himself. 

But these four imprints they’ve created are certainly really bad choices designed to attract desperate writers who want Big 6 Publishing validation without any of the actual benefits of being trade published, let alone by the Big 6 (never mind what many legitimate small presses may offer) So really, if it’s this or  self-publishing, you’re a million times better off doing it yourself. Financially and otherwise.

I recommend writers read both pieces, and even if you’re not a writer, it’s always fun read John Scalzi taking down stupidity.

visual-poetry:

punctuation,is?fun!

from the book “flowers for algernon”

NEW YORK—Law enforcement officials confirmed Friday that four more copy editors were killed this week amid ongoing violence between two rival gangs divided by their loyalties to the The Associated Press Stylebook and The Chicago Manual Of Style. “At this time we have reason to believe the killings were gang-related and carried out by adherents of both the AP and Chicago styles, part of a vicious, bloody feud to establish control over the grammar and usage guidelines governing American English,” said FBI spokesman Paul Holstein, showing reporters graffiti tags in which the word “anti-social” had been corrected to read “antisocial.” 

Go here to see it bigger. It’s hilarious.

In this interview on The Great Discontent, the inimitable Debbie Millman (who is newly on SoundCloud!) offers five pieces of advice for young people starting out in any creative field – a fine addition to our running record of sage advice.

Complement with Neil Gaiman’s advice on the creative life and treat yourself to Millman’s sublime Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Design.

Gaunt as a wolf. —Austin Dobson

Gaunt as a gibbet. —Lord De Tabley

Gaunt as bitterns in the pools. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Gaunt, Like the drear soul of poverty. —T. Gordon Hake

Gaunt as a greyhound. —John Ray

Gaunt as a grave. —William Shakespeare

Gaunt as it were the skeleton of himself. —Alfred Tennyson

sleepysleepypretty:

Auditory Hallucination: An Audio Representation

Writing psychosis from a first person POV and have been listening to “audio representations” of auditory hallucinations. Thought I’d share.

nevver:

“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch a little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.” — David Lynch

I have a Dictionary of Similes and every so often I type up a list of my favorites for a given word. They’re all tagged on my other blog. Thought I’d share them here. Lots of pretty wordage.

Hey! Hi, hello :)

I’m so, I guess the word is ‘immersed’ in YA, that I sometimes forget that most of the well known books have white protagonists. I also read a lot of YA novels that haven’t been published yet and may never be published. So  I know that there are plenty of non-white protagonists and that authors are writing POC stories and across genres.

But then I’ll look at what’s actually selling and what people are talking about, and yeah, it’s definitely not as diverse as it could be. I write a variety of ethnicities and I think early on I felt a lot of pressure to only write POC protagonists, but I’ve gotten over that and the manuscript I’m writing right now is full of very white Irish Catholics. My two others are both POC and most of the ones I have planned are a variety of brown.

That said, I’d love to see more white writers tackle POC characters, but I totally understand why there is a lot of hang wringing. There are a lot of people who don’t consider a POC character genuine unless written by a POC. But I’d compare them to people who won’t read male characters by female writers. Not that it’s impossible to “get wrong” but it’s a lot harder to “get wrong” than people seem to think. The key to writing any character from a marginalized demographic is to write them, first and foremost, as human (or cyborg, or werespider, or whatever they happen to be). I also think that any white writer (or film maker, or illustrator) tackling POC can’t be afraid of being called racist—because it’s going to happen. It may or may not be valid, but it’ll be said. And dealing with that means both being sensitive to those concerns/complaints but not letting them dictate your work. And that is difficult. Creating art and giving it up for public consumption is scary enough, but when it gets political, I think it can be terrifying. It can take the joy out of it for a lot of people.

So it’s tricky, I think. There is the idea that white people won’t read on-white characters, but that’s been proven false so many times, it’s hardly relevant anymore. It’s an antiquated idea, a excuse people hold on to so they can continue being lazy and non-inclusive. But I don’t think it’s really about selling. I think there are just 25 white YA writers to every non-white YA writer and I think the white writers are often staying in their comfort zones (which is pretty morally neutral for me) and writing white as their default. Notice the writers are also largely female and the books tend to have female protagonists. So I don’t think many people are refusing to write non-white and buy non-white and sell non-white as much as they are totally ignoring the fact that non-white (and queer and trans and non-neurotypical etc) is an equally valid option. 

yahighway:

Click through to take a scroll down memory lane and check out some of publishing’s biggest stories of the year!

YA!flash: Rants About Rants About YA 

You should already be following Steph’s blog. Click through to read the rest because it is hilarious and true and hilarious.