Japanese scientists have captured footage of a live giant squid, by sinking a camera with a bag of bait and a depth-activated switch to 900 metres. They were rewarded with four hours of pictures of the giant squid, and a severed tentacle. (ouch.) National Geographic also has a giant squid photo gallery up online, which features photos of the live squid.
Nothing, not love, not greed, not passion or hatred, is stronger than a writer's need to change another writer's copy.
— Arthur Evans
There was a post on the OWW mailing list yesterday, about writing in omniscient point of view, and the tendency of a writing group to "over-crit". I could respond to the POV part, but Bear has that covered. What caught my attention more was this concept of over-critting: that writers focus too much on the technical aspects of a story, and point out things they may not notice if they came across the work in, say, a bookstore. Continue reading »
New Scientist reports on the possibility of ants terraforming their environment. Too cool.
There's been a few synchronous mutterings on the blogosphere lately about beginnings: Jonathan Strahan posted some opening lines (I recognised only the first two, bad me), and Jodi examined a few of the books on her shelves.
Strangely enough, I'm not particularly into beginnings. As such. They're important, yes, but it's the ending (or the climax) that sticks with me after the book has finished. And the voice of the book. Beginnings have one job, as far as I'm concerned: to give me the voice, straight up. Continue reading »
I'm going to be moving the blog around on the site. This will definitely effect links and feeds and page locations, but hopefully it will be a minimum of pain for all involved.
This may take a little while (a period of time which I'm defining as anywhere from five minutes to five hours). Because all endeavours with webpages take a little while.
So if you find pages are missing or links go screwy, please check back soon.
I'm going in.
ETA: Done! Let me know if you find anything particularly wrong.
Sarah Monette gets all philosophical about Mary Sues, and what you can do about it.
This morning, I received an email which started Dear Cheng Soon…. Naturally enough, my first thought was spam. But the email is from a legitimate engineering job agency who have had my details for quite some time. Methinks their database has become the slightest bit corrupted.
Found a new blog today, QwertyRash, thanks to its owner leaving a comment on one of my entries. In browsing through the archives I found an entry on bloggers/writers block. Chris talks of two kinds of block: being bereft of ideas, and experiencing "writer's glug":
where you have the ideas but writing feels like walking through deep mud – quite laborious.
Perfect description.
New Scientist reports on a new browser:
Flock – after the buzz it hopes to create – adds features specifically designed to make writing, editing, sharing and displaying web content faster and easier.
Created by Bart Decrem (previously of the Mozilla Foundation), the browser is built on the Firefox code. It will integrate tools for blogging, photo blogging and shared bookmarks into the browser itself. Users will be able to drag and drop photos from Flickr into their blog; the browser will provide WYSIWYG editing of blogs; and will include a social bookmarking feature like the service provided by http://del.icio.us.
Flock is currently still in testing, but is slated for general release in October. It will be interesting to see what they've come up with.