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St. John’s College is very small - my graduating class was at the time is largest ever, at around 120.  That was the Annapolis, MD campus - the Santa Fe NM campus is smaller, still.  And yet I still run into fellow grads all the time - once, while waiting in line to see Don Giovanni at the Vienna State Opera House, in, like, Austria, you know.  Latest example - of the twelve participants in Craig Shaw Gardner and Jeffrey Carver’s writing workshop at Pandemonium in Cambridge, MA, two were SJC grads.  The other one was bearing the internationally-recognizable badge of the SJC grad, which is of course a copy of Plato’s Symposium.  Something to read while you’re waiting for the class to start, because, you know, you don’t want to risk not having anything to read while you’re sitting in the basement of Pandemonium Books!

That’s not just bringing coal to Newcastle - it’s more like bringing it to a Precambrian rain forest. 

St. John’s in a nutshell. 

I’d brought three books in my briefcase, to Pandemonium, for much the same reason. 

I just received my first purchase from CD Baby.  Now that I’ve got the disc, I just have to share the good parts of their shipping notice:

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with
sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.
A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure
it was in the best possible condition before mailing.
Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over
the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money
can buy.
We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party
marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of
Portland waved ‘Bon Voyage!’ to your package, on its way to you, in
our private CD Baby jet on this day, Monday, September 18th.
I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby.  We sure did.
Your picture is on our wall as ‘Customer of the Year’.  We’re all
exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

That sounds like a tough business model to keep up, considering that I only paid $16.25.

Wherein lies a tale in itself.  If you’re an iTunes person like me, you may not be aware of Regina Spektor’s first album, Songs.  For that matter, if you buy your music from Amazon, as I used to, you may not be aware of Songs.  You can only get Songs from CD Baby! 

So how is Songs?  It features Samson, which I think is the best song on her newest album, Begin to Hope, albeit in a less-assured production.  Consequence of Sounds, which is also available on RS’s import compilation Mary Ann Meets the Gravediggers and other Short Stories ( what is it with UK compilation titles? Elvis Costello’s Ten Bloody Mary’s and Ten How’s Your Fathers was released in the US as Taking Liberties) may be my favorite of all of her songs.  If you haven’t heard anything but Begin to Hope, you’re missing Regina’s best stuff.

Elaine of OnSpec is announcing a workshop (in Edmonton, alas) on how to avoid writing bad speculative fiction.  I love the abecedarius:

A- Anachronisms
B - Believability
C - Characters (cardboard/place-holders/unsympathetic)
- Clichés, large and small
D - Dialect (does it detract from flow?)
E - Expository Lumps and Plot Dumps
F - Formatting (how not to look like an amateur)

and so on…

There’s always someone who is just unexpectedly, shockingly, good.  The world is so full of talent, it never ceases to amaze me.

I just finished reading the first week’s homework from Craig Shaw Gardner and Jeffrey Carver’s writing workshop at Pandemonium Books, and darn it all if there isn’t someone in there who, if memory serves correctly, said she yet to finish or submit anything anywhere and nonetheless writes one flawless sentence after the next.  Amazing.

We have a long-standing tradition of apple-picking for my birthday.  This year, for the first time since we started doing this, it rained.  We got a little wet, a little muddy, and a lot of incredible apples.

The Science Fiction Book Club tells us that the R. L. Fanthorpe Write-Alike Contest is now open.  I had never heard of Fanthorpe, or even any of his many pseudonyms; apparently he wrote at least 180 novels, including 89 in a three-year period. 

Given the fame of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, the existence of a Write-Alike contest might give one the impression that Fanthorpe might be a memorably poor writer, but to draw such an impression on such scant evidence would be unjust; after all, there are or were, apparently, a Faux Faulkner Contest and a Bad Hemingway Contest, at the very least.  Wait, instead, to make your determination until sampling some of his thesaurian prose - to think, he wrote these without any revision whatsoever!

Peltorro.com is the repository of all that is Fanthorpian.

“Everywhere was dark, dark darkness. Blackness. Black. Black blackness.”

A 1,000 Years On
Writing as John E. Muller

“He stood trembling like a bladder of lard…”

The Thing From Sheol
Writing as Bron Fane

“Chuck Mahoney was running, running wildly and blindly around the ancient Temple, tripping, stumbling, falling, scrambling to his feet again and falling once more. He was bruised, battered, breathless and bloodstained.”

The Last Valkyrie
Writing as Lionel Roberts

Apex Digest is an excellent sf/horror magazine, and it needs some help.  You can buy raffle tickets here, or just subscribe.  I subscribed, and I may buy some raffle tickets, too.

Ruby on Rails folks may notice that the Apex store site is running on Shopify, Tobias Luettke’s Rails-based e-commerce host.  How cool is that?

http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1064#comments

But then you have to pay TEN FRICKIN’ DOLLARS for every vote you change.  I mean, it’s outrageous!

I think it’s been ten years since the last time I said that.

The more I’m loving revision. 

This too shall pass, my son.

I switched one chapter from Ven’s point of view to Tita’s, and I love the way it works now.  A bunch of stuff is better-explained than before.  The only downside is that I had to give up on the closing image of the chapter, but, on balance, that may be good as well; the new chapter close seems to have a lot more movement in it, despite conveying the same events in the same order.  The magic of POV..