Recent YA High Fantasy by Female Authors

Stacy Whitman has posted a link to a list of Recent YA High Fantasy Books over on pinterest.

Okay, I got chills because I have been excruciatingly busy for the last couple of years, and Tamora Pierce's third Beka Cooper novel, Mastiff, has made the list. Fantasy magic police procedurals. Yum.

So why did I get chills? Because I hadn't known the second Beka Cooper novel was out yet. So I have two to catch up on! (grin)

Of course, it wasn't until I got to the bottom of Stacy's list that I realized the list only includes female authors. I wonder if anyone else out there on the Internet has written the other half - or more likely third - of the list? Any takers?

Human Strangeness, Antwerp Style

I meant to write this up a couple years back. Like, the first draft was written in late 2009. No telling what the date on the post will be.

From Tara Maya's Tales, comes this moment of Perfect Human Strangeness.

I'd really like to see one of these things live, although I'd probably end up joining them and tripping up the whole choreography...

On the other hand, I'd love to have an interview with the planners and find out how many people had been at the practice (if any), compared with how many participated in the live event. It sure seemed like several of the people out there were just following along as best they could.

Twenty Words to Soup Up Your Writing

Over on Smuggler's Rendezvous, Author John Blackport, AKA siebendach, has a list of twenty words that can use to speed up your writing.

By searching for them and killing them where needed.

Heres a few:

Just

Look

Could

Go read the rest.

SuperComputer on the Moon - Yeah

Okay, so a second post in one day!

Wired has two articles on Ouliang Chang's proposal to put a supercomputer on the moon in order to cut down on the NASA Deep Space Network's data bandwidth problems.

The two articles are Robert McMillan's Why We Need It and Mike Barton's Will It Happen?

See, also, Hal Hodson's writeup of the idea at New Scientist.

World Building Notes by Hope Collier and others

There's an interesting article by YA author Hope Collier on her blog A Lilliputian's Journey to Publication.

Also worth looking at is J.M. Staff's reply.

I was going to give you a link to Holly Lisle's site as well, which has massive amounts of good stuff on it, but the minute I tried to open a tab onto it, IE started freezing up on me. Don't know what that's about. Here's one about Worldbuilding for Magic Systems. check the list to the right of that page to see other articles on world building.

And, if you want the granddaddy of all hypertext worldbuilding links, go over to Patricia Wrede's list of worldbuilding questions on SFWA.

And then, just for fun, over on io9 there's a list of sci-fi authors' favorite bits of worldbuilding. Except that's just where I found a bit of it - it's really over at SFSIGNAL.