Showing posts with label book learnin'. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book learnin'. Show all posts
Neato
Google opens their ebook store. There's Amazon's Kindle store and B&N's Nook store already, but there's one thing that makes Google's store different, and radder.
Openness of platform. Google doesn't have a real interest in where you read your book. PC, Mac, Android, iPhone/iPad, on a Nook, on a bunch of Sony Readers, and dundundun... a website based reader for when you aren't at one of your devices/computers with an app installed. This is the coolest feature in my book.
Openness of platform. Google doesn't have a real interest in where you read your book. PC, Mac, Android, iPhone/iPad, on a Nook, on a bunch of Sony Readers, and dundundun... a website based reader for when you aren't at one of your devices/computers with an app installed. This is the coolest feature in my book.
Fer'iner Shows Americans How to Design Book Covers
Awesomely mind-bending covers for Philip K. Dick books, courtesy Italian artist Antonello Silverini:
More at the artist's blog.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Martian Time-Slip
A Maze of Death
More at the artist's blog.
Dante's Inferno: The Video Game
Has anyone played the demo for this yet? It's in the style of God of War and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, where you fight off hordes of enemies, earn lots of combos, weaken big bosses with normal attacks, and eventually take them out in cinematic sequences by pressing certain buttons when prompted.
Lame, right? Naw, man.
I just played the demo, and for all that it's derivative in gameplay, it was WILDLY ENTERTAINING. It's metal beyond all games ever. It's got gore, nudity, and Heavy Metal-style animated sequences. It's unbelievably crass in how it weds the epic poem with brutally awesome combat, but wed them it does...right down to the inclusion of lurid scenes of a nude Beatrice and a cooly creepy visualization of Dante's guide, Virgil.
The demo starts out pedestrian but by the end I wanted to buy the game. And I don't even usually like these kinds of games! Increasingly stunning visuals, too. Genuinely disturbing.
Settle in...
It's over 130 pages, but it's worth a look for anyone who loved Batman: The Animated Series. (Which should be everyone here, if you didn't love it, I'm not sure we can be friends anymore. ;)
This is a PDF of the original writer's bible for Batman: The Animated Series, with illustrations and character concepts. Some interesting stuff here, including a younger-looking Robin and pudgier Alfred, and interesting revelations about Montoya's backstory that never made it into the show and are now non-canon, given the role she has in the DCU.
This is a PDF of the original writer's bible for Batman: The Animated Series, with illustrations and character concepts. Some interesting stuff here, including a younger-looking Robin and pudgier Alfred, and interesting revelations about Montoya's backstory that never made it into the show and are now non-canon, given the role she has in the DCU.
Important Sex Tips
From the guys at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. The setup is funny, but the punchline, I thought, was killer.
Elmore Leonard's Rules for Writing
This isn't new, but Bendis linked to it and damned if it ain't good. Interesting points whether you've taken a stab at writing or not.
These are rules I've picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I'm writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what's taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.
1. Never open a book with weather.
If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.
2. Avoid prologues.
They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.
There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's "Sweet Thursday," but it's O.K. because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. . . . figure out what the guy's thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That's nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don't have to read it. I don't want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story."
3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.
The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated," and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said"...
...he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs."
5. Keep your exclamation points under control.
You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.
6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."
This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use "suddenly" tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories "Close Range."
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" what do the "American and the girl with him" look like? "She had taken off her hat and put it on the table." That's the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
Unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you're good at it, you don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.
And finally:
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he's writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character's head, and the reader either knows what the guy's thinking or doesn't care. I'll bet you don't skip dialogue.
My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.
If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It's my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say.)
If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character -- the one whose view best brings the scene to life -- I'm able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what's going on, and I'm nowhere in sight.
What Steinbeck did in "Sweet Thursday" was title his chapters as an indication, though obscure, of what they cover. "Whom the Gods Love They Drive Nuts" is one, "Lousy Wednesday" another. The third chapter is titled "Hooptedoodle 1" and the 38th chapter "Hooptedoodle 2" as warnings to the reader, as if Steinbeck is saying: "Here's where you'll see me taking flights of fancy with my writing, and it won't get in the way of the story. Skip them if you want."
"Sweet Thursday" came out in 1954, when I was just beginning to be published, and I've never forgotten that prologue.
Did I read the hooptedoodle chapters? Every word.
A practical question...
Anyone know where I can find inexpensive (but not crappy) bookends in and around Round Rock and Austin?
The face of Shakespeare?
Quite possibly. Read on!
ScienceDaily (Mar. 10, 2009) — Professor Stanley Wells, Chairman of The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and one of the world’s leading experts on Shakespearian studies, has announced the discovery of a portrait of William Shakespeare, which he believes is almost certainly the only authentic image of Shakespeare made from life.
The newly discovered picture has descended for centuries in the same family, the Cobbes. It hung in their Irish home, under another identification, until the 1980s, when it was inherited by Alec Cobbe who was a co-heir of the Cobbe estate and whose heirlooms were transferred into a trust. In 2006 Alec Cobbe visited the National Portrait Gallery exhibition ‘Searching for Shakespeare’ where he saw a painting that now hangs in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington. It had been accepted as a life portrait of Shakespeare until some 70 years ago, but fell from grace when it was found to have been altered. Mr Cobbe immediately realised that this was a copy of the painting in his family collection.
The painstaking work of researching the picture has been carried out over the last three years by Mark Broch, curator of the Cobbe Collection. The research conclusively demonstrates that the Cobbe picture is the prime version of the portrait and establishes beyond reasonable doubt its descent to the Cobbes through their cousin’s marriage to the great granddaughter of Shakespeare’s only literary patron, Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton.
In addition to the Folger copy, several other early copies of the Cobbe portrait have been located and no less than three of them have independent traditions as portraits of Shakespeare. In two cases the traditions date back to within living memory of the poet—providing compelling evidence that the identification of the sitter as Shakespeare was correct all along.
The conclusion that the sitter is Shakespeare is strengthened by the fact that the original picture, the Cobbe portrait, was inscribed with a quotation from the Classical writer, Horace, taken from an ode addressed to a playwright. The original and its copies are being considered together as a group for the very first time. Additional scientific investigation has been carried out to support the research including examination by x-ray at the Hamilton Kerr Institute, Cambridge, treering dating by Professor Peter Klein, Department of Wood Science, Hamburg University and infra-red reflectography by Tager Stonor Richardson.
Up to now only two images have been accepted as authentic representations of what Shakespeare may have looked like. One is the engraving by Martin Droeshout published in the First Folio of 1623. The other is the portrait bust in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon; the monument is mentioned in the Folio and therefore must have been in place by 1623. Both are posthumous – Shakespeare died in 1616. The engraver, who was only in his teens when Shakespeare died, must have had a picture, until now unidentified, to work from. Professor Wells believes it to be the one he has revealed today and that it was done from life, in about 1610, when he was 46 years old.
A third picture, the oil painting known as the Chandos Portrait which is in the National Portrait Gallery, has some supporters as an authentic image but, to quote Shakespeare’s most authoritative biographer, Park Honan, it "may date from the Jacobean era but its authenticity has been debated."
The Cobbe portrait, along with other relevant material, will go on show to the public at The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon from 23 April, Shakespeare’s birthday, in an exhibition curated jointly by Mark Broch and Dr Paul Edmondson, Curator of The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
Professor Wells said: "The identification of this portrait marks a major development in the history of Shakespearian portraiture. Up to now, only two images have been widely accepted as genuine likenesses of Shakespeare. Both are dull. This new portrait is a very fine painting. The evidence that it represents Shakespeare and that is was done from life, though it is circumstantial, is in my view overwhelming, I feel in little doubt that this is a portrait of Shakespeare, done from life and commissioned by the Earl of Southampton and believe it could certainly be the basis for the engraving seen in the First Folio."
ScienceDaily (Mar. 10, 2009) — Professor Stanley Wells, Chairman of The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and one of the world’s leading experts on Shakespearian studies, has announced the discovery of a portrait of William Shakespeare, which he believes is almost certainly the only authentic image of Shakespeare made from life.
The newly discovered picture has descended for centuries in the same family, the Cobbes. It hung in their Irish home, under another identification, until the 1980s, when it was inherited by Alec Cobbe who was a co-heir of the Cobbe estate and whose heirlooms were transferred into a trust. In 2006 Alec Cobbe visited the National Portrait Gallery exhibition ‘Searching for Shakespeare’ where he saw a painting that now hangs in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington. It had been accepted as a life portrait of Shakespeare until some 70 years ago, but fell from grace when it was found to have been altered. Mr Cobbe immediately realised that this was a copy of the painting in his family collection.
The painstaking work of researching the picture has been carried out over the last three years by Mark Broch, curator of the Cobbe Collection. The research conclusively demonstrates that the Cobbe picture is the prime version of the portrait and establishes beyond reasonable doubt its descent to the Cobbes through their cousin’s marriage to the great granddaughter of Shakespeare’s only literary patron, Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton.
In addition to the Folger copy, several other early copies of the Cobbe portrait have been located and no less than three of them have independent traditions as portraits of Shakespeare. In two cases the traditions date back to within living memory of the poet—providing compelling evidence that the identification of the sitter as Shakespeare was correct all along.
The conclusion that the sitter is Shakespeare is strengthened by the fact that the original picture, the Cobbe portrait, was inscribed with a quotation from the Classical writer, Horace, taken from an ode addressed to a playwright. The original and its copies are being considered together as a group for the very first time. Additional scientific investigation has been carried out to support the research including examination by x-ray at the Hamilton Kerr Institute, Cambridge, treering dating by Professor Peter Klein, Department of Wood Science, Hamburg University and infra-red reflectography by Tager Stonor Richardson.
Up to now only two images have been accepted as authentic representations of what Shakespeare may have looked like. One is the engraving by Martin Droeshout published in the First Folio of 1623. The other is the portrait bust in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon; the monument is mentioned in the Folio and therefore must have been in place by 1623. Both are posthumous – Shakespeare died in 1616. The engraver, who was only in his teens when Shakespeare died, must have had a picture, until now unidentified, to work from. Professor Wells believes it to be the one he has revealed today and that it was done from life, in about 1610, when he was 46 years old.
A third picture, the oil painting known as the Chandos Portrait which is in the National Portrait Gallery, has some supporters as an authentic image but, to quote Shakespeare’s most authoritative biographer, Park Honan, it "may date from the Jacobean era but its authenticity has been debated."
The Cobbe portrait, along with other relevant material, will go on show to the public at The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon from 23 April, Shakespeare’s birthday, in an exhibition curated jointly by Mark Broch and Dr Paul Edmondson, Curator of The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
Professor Wells said: "The identification of this portrait marks a major development in the history of Shakespearian portraiture. Up to now, only two images have been widely accepted as genuine likenesses of Shakespeare. Both are dull. This new portrait is a very fine painting. The evidence that it represents Shakespeare and that is was done from life, though it is circumstantial, is in my view overwhelming, I feel in little doubt that this is a portrait of Shakespeare, done from life and commissioned by the Earl of Southampton and believe it could certainly be the basis for the engraving seen in the First Folio."
I Wish This Were True
The Onion: Obama Disappointed Cabinet Failed To Understand His Reference To 'Savage Sword Of Conan' #24
"Obama, whose upcoming challenges include organizing a massive effort to rebuild the nation's infrastructure, was reportedly unprepared for the confused silence he received upon suggesting that his cabinet "team up with Taurus of Nemedia" to secure the necessary funding from Congress.
"If my inner circle of advisers can't even communicate about the most basic issues, how are we going to tackle the massive problems our nation faces?" Obama said during a press conference. "When I tell my cabinet that getting bipartisan support is exactly like the time Conan got Taurus to help him steal Yara's jewel, they need to understand what I mean.""
"Obama, whose upcoming challenges include organizing a massive effort to rebuild the nation's infrastructure, was reportedly unprepared for the confused silence he received upon suggesting that his cabinet "team up with Taurus of Nemedia" to secure the necessary funding from Congress.
"If my inner circle of advisers can't even communicate about the most basic issues, how are we going to tackle the massive problems our nation faces?" Obama said during a press conference. "When I tell my cabinet that getting bipartisan support is exactly like the time Conan got Taurus to help him steal Yara's jewel, they need to understand what I mean.""
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