Everywhere Else & Whatnot
Sunday, March 29, 2015
Jim Henson teaching how to make your own Muppet, from 1969.
Go make your thing, even if you have no idea how to get started, even if you have no idea where it will take you. My bet is it’ll be somewhere pretty great. That’s true even if this particular thing doesn’t quite work out. At the very, very least, it’ll teach you something that will help you make the next thing, and the thing after that, and so on and so on, until you’re standing atop a giant glorious pile of things the world has never seen before — some broke and busted, others pure gold, all wholly yours. - Becky Chambers
Buzzfeed's Hayley Campbell shares what she learned from her years working in a comic book shop.
10,000 works of street art, online with Google. The navigation is a little odd (maybe not Maps for everything, perhaps?) but worth exploring.
Nielsen says that online book shopping overtook in-store book shopping for the first time ever. The opening lines - that book sales are up 4% are actually hiding more disturbing news, buried later in the article: "Despite the rise in overall book spending, volume sales were down compared to previous years." Bookstores themselves seem propped up by "children's books, impulse buys and the gift market." Is that the future of bookselling? (Or, actually, the present?!)
As if in response to the above, the RSA has been discussing the role of heritage in 'place-shaping' strategies - noting that "heritage and memory is a principal advantage that high streets have over online retailers".
And it goes beyond bookshops -
An Independent Library Report for England published in December 2014 recommended to the UK Government that libraries “can only be saved if they become more like coffee shops with wi-fi, sofas and hot drinks”....
Radical librarianship is an alternative position. It acknowledges that libraries are and always have been inherently political rather than – as has been the accepted view – politically and ideologically neutral. It argues that the ethical roots of librarianship are openness, free access to information, and a strong community spirit – principles we apply differently to the neoliberal appropriations of those terms – and that practice in librarianship should be true to these roots - strong statement of intent from the new Journal of Radical Librarianship
Meanwhile, if you're not following Muddy Colors - the group blog of fantasy artists - they've been on fire recently. Lauren Panepinto on her philosophy for female characters (especially interesting when she discusses the oft-criticised urban fantasy sector) and Arnie Fenner on 'Do Awards Matter?'.
And, finally, a few inspirational words from John D. MacDonald:
I had four months of terminal leave pay at lieutenant colonel rates starting in September of 1945, ending in January 1946. I wrote eight hundred thousand words of short stories in those four months, tried to keep thirty of them in the mail at all times, slept about six hours a night and lost twenty pounds. I finally had to break down and take a job, but then the stories began to sell. I was sustained by a kind of stubborn arrogance. Those bastards out there had bought one story “Interlude in India,” and I was going to force them to buy more by making every one of them better than the previous one. I had the nerves of a gambler and an understanding wife.
Pornokitsch people elsewhere
The One Comic Podcast discussed The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #1 and then, in a blast from the past, 2000AD, Prog 376 (featuring some nostalgia (Brits), some utter incomprehension (the American) and the first appearance of Halo Jones).
Molly's Vermilion undergoes the 'Page 69 Test'. Also of note, Publisher's Weekly gave it a (glowing) starred review. Buy it here.
Molly and Jesse Bullington have a chat with the Lovecraft eZine using the dark magic of video.
Rebecca Levene's The Hunter's Kind has a cover! Tim McDonagh continues his amazing work for the series. Also: wolf!
Mahvesh interviews Bex (and Lavie Tidhar) (and Saad Hossein) for Midnight in Karachi.
In case you missed it, Anne's (routinely) over on Hodderscape talking about pretty much anything that catches her fancy. Recently this included Irish fantasy, Bloodline, and psst - open submissions.
Mahvesh and Jared are still traipsing through the Dragonlance Chronicles over at Tor.com - join in on the re-reading fun.