1. Last Friday was the best Fall-of-Sauron Day ever. No, I can’t talk about it. But someday the world will know, and then it will say, “What is he talking about again?”
2. You know how it is when somebody writes some incredibly dumb thing about your profession and you grit your teeth and say to yourself, “I’ll have to write something in response to that. But first I’ll lie down for a bit,” and then three days pass and then when you get up, someone else has written something about the piece, saving you the trouble, you see, like a good old-fashioned Fall-of-Sauron-Day miracle? That sort of thing? Never happens to me.
3. The Blog Gate has been even more than usually sparky lately, with great pieces on the-book-vs-the-movie (using I Am Number 4 as a test case) by Andrew Zimmerman Jones, Matthew Surridge’s “attempt at an appreciation” of the underappreciated and utterly unhinged R.A. Lafferty. But the most interesting post recently might be the one by web-editrix and verbal wonderworker C.S.E. Cooney on writers’ nights. It’s fascinating to me because it’s so far removed from my writing life, which is solitary as a hermit’s, or was, until people found out I was a hermit. I don’t even have beta readers, really–which puts me in the sub-Dante scale for writer’s sociability. All this is due to accident rather than design, though. (And it wasn’t even my blowtorch, which makes the whole thing–no, maybe that’s too much detail.) Claire’s post is a fascinating map on how to do it different, and better.
4. This is the first year when I was a nominator for both the Hugos and the Nebulas. I don’t know why, but this fills me with avuncular pride for the nominees. The Hugo nods haven’t been announced yet, but I snuck in with a ballot right before the deadline last week. And the avuncular pride is already there, waiting only for the announcement to burst forth like a dead walrus from a luggage compartment.
