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.

Why Every Beginning Writer Should Study Horror

Lately I've been listening to podcasts. I listen to all three sister podcasts in the Escape Artists family: Podcastle for Fantasy, Escape Pod for Science Fiction, and PseudoPod for Horror.

Now, I don't particularly like Horror as a genre. I don't watch Horror movies, I don't read Stephen King or any of the horror greats much, and honestly, there are over 30 stories from Pseudopod on my iphone at the time of this writing that I haven't gotten around to listening to yet.

So, why am I telling you, a beginning writer, to study Horror?

Fiction is about having an effect on the reader. The effect is different for each genre and subgenre, and even varies by scene in longer works, but there's always an effect that the writer is trying to achieve.

When you are studying painting, you look at both the overall balance of the composition and the effects of the individual brushstrokes. You can do the same thing with writing. In Horror, the brushstrokes are very clear. Thus, a beginning writer can learn a lot from studying them.

Take, for example, Pseudopod 165: The Copse, by Robert Mammone, read by Ian Stuart. It's a relatively simple story about a family going to dinner someplace -- well, someplace bad.

To a writer's ear, this is no subtle piece. To use a musical metaphor, this is more akin to Wagner's great brass fanfares than Mozart's clever interplay of cascading notes. But "The Copse" works, and that's the point.

Pay close attention to the use of descriptive details, the symbols repeated, the visceral responses of the characters. This is Horror.

The meaning of "AND"

One pet peeve I have in writing is when people try to impose rules on the language that are not actually in the language, and (d1) pretend that they are.
Take, for instance, the meaning of "and".

Sometimes "AND" does mean simultaneity; sometimes it doesn't. And (d1) sometimes an editor or writer's group will hallucinate a pseudo-linguistic rule that has no basis in the language. Please note that those three cases do NOT necessarily happen at the same time. In this case they aren't related by anything but the point I'm trying to make.

Try and (d5) understand the point. (definition 5 means "in order to").

Neither Webster's nor the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) indicate that the word "AND" *always* means simultaneity. The primary meaning (d1) in Webster's Unabridged (1977 Encyclopedic version) is "also". The derivation in Webster's indicates that the original meaning was "thereupon, then, next". And (d1) there are several column inches of different definitions in the OED.

So I'm going to post this post and (d3) get to printing today's stories. That's two things I'm going to do, listed together, and you might think by definition 1 the word "and" indicates that they are linked or grouped in some way. Not necessarily by happening at the same time. Perhaps they are happening in a short sequence. Or perhaps they are related in theme. Or perhaps, as in this case, one is causing the other or enabling the other, which is definition 3. In which case, they could not possibly be simultaneous.

It's as easy as adding two and (d2) two.

Spider Man Swing

Okay, had to post this as soon as I saw it linked from the Tor Website. Sheer fun, to offset the sad news of legendary artist Frank Frazetta's passing. The barbarian has left the gates.

But, take a look overhead... or, underhead... or something...