mrissa posts the flyer with the data, but what I really want you do to is read Pamela Dean's description. One track panels? So much discussion that moderators have to limit to questions? Non-fantasy readers who come away with recommended books . . . that hook them? It is painful to miss Mythcon and Wiscon, and very painful to miss Worldcon and Readercon, but of all of them, I think it's worst to have to miss this one.

So here's my selfish request: if you have the money and the ability to travel, please attend, and write a con report! Reading con reports is a lightning bug to the lightning of solid days of reading and book talk, but con reports engender discussion, which makes being stuck at home a lot easier.

msagara on why being a mother is like being a writer. Oh, I had to laugh and wince, wince and laugh because there are just too many days when I come to the end of a long day of labor feeling profoundly incompetent at both.

The concept of Mother's Day used to bother me not just because of the cynical and deliberate manipulation behind Hallmark's various "days" but because it seemed to imply saluting only those who'd given body birth to offspring. Great idea to salute them, but what about mothers who adopted? "Sure," everyone said. "They are mothers, too." What about women who took in kids who didn't seem to be wanted at home? Sure, they're mothers too. But what if they are men? Well . . . What about the unmarried old lady who goes out to the edge of town every single day, even in horrible weather, to lay out food for the animals people have thoughtlessly abandoned to live or die? What about the woman, or the man, who faithfully takes care of his mother who is helpless after a stroke?

I wish we could call it 'unconditional love' day, because I know that's what we value most in the concept of motherhood--the love that does not demand, just appreciates and gives. Like our animals give to us, if we earn and keep their trust.

So this is my salute to unconditional love, and whoever out there gives it to other beings, without expectation or demand, whatever your age or gender or position in life. Heaven knows, this world could use a whole lot more of it.

A personal anecdote, so feel free to slide right on by...
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Everyone wants to know why they've been turned down, but reading meaning into the short lines of a rejection letter is a bad idea. That goes for agentes, as explains so clearly here.

Via bookaddict88 this webcomic cracked me up.

Went last night with the German student and the daughter, as the son has no interest (sigh), and we all enjoyed it, and so did the audience, which was made up of people of all ages and ethnicities.

Here's my theory on these comic books to movies: the ones that work have at least one really great actor in the central role as well as zippy, often funny writing. The comic book heroes that I remember before Christopher Reeve's Superman were pretty hammy, and so the whole thing was kind of Saturday morning. But Christopher Reeve was so good that you could believe in the comic book world and map it and the beautiful scenery over ours. It was real for the duration of the film: it made sense to become Clark Kent, and to run off and jump through windows for individual rescues.

In Iron Man, Downey was so good that it made sense to give up weapons making and do what with your fortune? Not build hospitals or fight global warming, but build a fabulous suit and go mano a mano against bad guys....and for the big baddie to build an even bigger suit. The emotional logic was so strong that it dragged everything else into focus. What a fun movie! Excellent performances. Excellent everything.

rolanni has what I thought a thought-provoking riff here about writer and reader contract.

I would define it differently--for example, the note about killing off characters wouldn't be in it. But exactly how to define it? Well, that's tougher, partly because not only does every writer come to each project with different ideas, expectations, wants, intentions, and motivations, but readers come to books with their own experience, expectations, etc.

Yet my instinct is that contemplating that contract is a good thing, thinking about it seems to stretch muscles that too often get ignored. Yet how to define it, except to observe that my instinctive contract with Jane Austen (books read many times, well loved, always providing new insights) is very different from the contract I have with this biography of Proust here: never read, approached with caution, I need to be convinced of points, and I need to be ready to fly to texts to double check.

Maybe it's easier to talk about what breaks the contract for me. Again, everyone's boundary is going to be different. But the first rule for me is, if I can't "believe in the lie", as rolanni says, then the contract is broken. If that world--whether a constructed one or a representative of ours here--is not convincing, I'm out of there. It's why I frequently can't read historical novels set in the early 1800s, for example. I've read so much from the period that contemporary depictions seldom are able to evoke the vivid paradigm that all that reading has built up.

If characters break the contract. If they seem to be finger puppets, mouthing out some lesson, tract, rant, or other type of agenda--if they behave and speak as I've seen in far too many examples--if I am not convinced by actions and motivations--if sentiment is sprayed everywhere as the universal solvent for problem knots--the contract is broken.

Finally, if what the book has to say is unconvincing within what I perceive as its own boundaries or parameters. The truth it is trying to tell me doesn't convince me even for the duration of the book, I'm out. This is not to say that the book has to fit my own view of the world. No, I can be intensely interested in another paradigm, but I have to be convinced of its structure.

Via desperance take this survey about your experiences with reading Tolkien, and what you think is the key to his popularity. I really enjoyed filling it out. If you are fond of Tolkien's work, you might, too.

tcastleb is proposing a book on Dare to Speak its Name: queer science fiction and fantasy, the writers who write it
and the readers who read it. If you are interested and would like to help out with the survey, click on over. Her focus is on SF and F in general, but if you've got some contributions re young reading and YA material, don't feel closed out.

zornhau has the coolest idea that he nipped from a friend.

In universe R, what's on your bookshelf? Here are a few of mine:
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If you have ten or fifteen minutes and you read fantasy or have thought about the question of magic, do check out superversive's post on the question of magic.

matociquala has a typically thoughtful and thought-provoking post about writing, learning, feeling incompetent, and hope. Every time I see a writer posting a long self-admiring post I get a hot rush of envy. What would competence feel like? At my age, I have had to face the fact that I may never reach what I think of as competence. There's no more "when I grow up I'll be good at it at last" when you're past 55.

Learning to write is an emotional whiplash. High: making learning breakthroughs--I feel like I've done that this past year, for example. Snap! the embarrassment of having not made them twenty or thirty years ago. High: so long as I am blessed with reasonable health, I can learn until I die. Low: what I think is good everyone might be utterly indifferent to. Boing-g-g-g kathud.

I've heard it said that the sense of 'competence' recedes like a mirage. That is a comforting thought, but I have misgivings about its truth. I made a decision when I was nineteen, and it was deadly serious, after several years of sending things out (and amazingly enough a couple of near misses...I shudder now) that I would consider myself a good writer when I could reread a favorite then something of mine and not feel the urge to regurge. Since then, the barf image has been replaced with a wince of regret, but it still happens.

There are so many things to learn, from the most superficial--grammar, mechanics from plot to pagination--to more deceptively complex ideas--sentence scaffolding and POV and transitions--that can elude visual writers in particular. It's ironic that the very same creative mode that has always made writing so intense a pleasure (being highly visual) has been my worst enemy, because words function as more than semiotics for brains like mine, almost like code*. It's exceedingly difficult to fight the image-signals and just see the words I wrote down. I really don't think some visual writers process words the same way the audial writers--the ones who don't get images, but build story through words--do. We think we 'hear' the prose, but we end up with five repetitions of the same word in four sentences, or cloddish phrasing, or cliches sneaking in to lard up what we had thought so tight, and we don't see those, we only see the dramatic images that these fumbling words really don't carry very well. I cherish the writers who write beautiful prose and images, like John Crowley and Greer Gilman. The sound of their prose is a different pleasure than the images they evoke. Some write great sounding prose, but the images I get jumble and flicker.

Sometimes I think it would be fun to have a workshop for visual writers only, where we work on retraining our brains: we have a head full of cinematic lightning, but we don't want to be channeling it through lightning-bug wordage.
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*It was astounding and not happy-making to reread one of my teen-age novels, whose images are still extremely vivid, and discover that there was almost no description, and what little there was had been cast in the most banal and egregious cliche.

For months I have patiently waited for Hilary McKay's latest, Forever Rose to come out in this country. American readers unfamiliar with McKay's work, the
basic premise is the story of a family of creative types, centering around Rose, the youngest. The parents are painters, and they don't live together through most of the books. Their children are named after colors--Cadmium, Indigo, Rose, with Saffy, who may or may not be a half sister, but certainly is adopted.

The family is unusual in many of the ways creative families are, their interactions with others are
as orthogonal as such can frequently be, and their relations with one another are also often orthogonal to what they mean, what they understand, and what they intend. McKay is writing for a young audience, so she doesn't delve deeply into alternative thinking, but certain passages made me wonder if at least some of the Cassons are synesthetes; whether they are or are not really doesn't matter. What does is that the stories are what I think of as "feel good" books.
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Shakespeare took popular plots and forms and made them new. Here we are, centuries later, still reading him, and using his work in all kinds of ways.

What better way to celebrate his achievements than to use the net to link to projects that aren't easily defined? I also added a component--projects not boosted by the big guns in publishing. Word of mouth is powerful; the links below begin with things I like, or things offered by friends. Some of the other links I am not familiar with, some are not my type of thing, but they might be yours. This is about spreading the word so that projects can find their audience.
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negothick has an interesting take on McCarthy's The Road, which I found unreadable, but eighty bazillion people didn't. Wow, it's just amazing, how wide a spectrum there is among readers for one work--but ask that same spectrum about another work, and they fractalize, if that's a verb. Probably not.

I don't know about you, but when something is bothering me, I see connections to it everywhere. Suddenly the universe seems to want to fence with me on some wideflung floor, no rules, Get the point, Smith? while jabbing me repeatedly in the keister. Well, one of the latest "thing"s is that news item of a month or two back, when a writer was a day away from departing on a massive book tour before her equally massive launch of a memoir about growing up poor in Southcentral LA and her gangsta life. Only her sister blew the whistle, and she proved to be an upscale Valley girl after all.

Here's the part that got to me. She claimed (and from what I could tell, this was corroborated) that she'd been rejected everywhere with a similar sort of observation: her writing was dynamic, the story riveting, but no one could sell it as fiction. Okay, fine. She reinvented herself, rewrote the story as a memoir. Sale! Except, ooops, she apparently didn't clue her own family in on the deceit, though she brought in a bunch of ringers as gangsta witnesses in order to charm her editorial house with their lack of couth.
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If you've got two minutes and as silly a sense of humor as I have, check out this dog and his idea of fun. (It takes him a while to get hold of the rope, just stick with him.)

beth_bernobich has an excellent idea today--posting paragraphs from favorite works. It's a pleasure to read her choices, as well as the ones posted by others. If you have a few moments to spare, go read--post yours.

I posted mine there, but I will here, too. It's the very last paragraph of Middlemarch:

"The effect of her being on those around her was incalculably
diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent
on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and
me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived
faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

I have many favorites, but I always come back to that one.

I love contemplating the evolution of terms, and what's implied behind. (If I can.)

anyway, here at least in L.A. cell phones are "phone" or "cell" but I seldom hear them together.

In England (UK?) the word is "mobile"

German it's "Handy" (nouns are always capped)

Handy is not a German word--you scarcely ever see 'y' in German words, and always in foreign words. Yet there it is, an English term adopted for German use to mean cell phone. I love that.

What's the French word?

What other languages does anyone know the word in--and what does the word mean? Like, let's say we had a language Klaatu, and the word used is "splatnik" which means "pocket". But everyone knows "pocket" to stand for "pocket phone."