Sarah Monette's Blog, page 74

Happy birthday, coffeeandink!

Happy birthday, coffeeandink !

Remember what I was saying about being lucky?

Here's the deal.

asatomuraki explains:

hominysnark needs a hysterectomy to keep an unpleasant medical condition from becoming a life-threatening one (it's already most of the way there) and she can't, because she doesn't have health insurance.

Why doesn't she have health insurance? Because she's self-employed, and as many self-employed creative people (she's an artist and writer - full disclosure, she writes for GC) know all too well, when you have to choose between eating and having a place...

Help the Project

" helptheproject is a fandom auction to benefit the Virginia Avenue Project, a free afterschool arts and academics program. 100% of participating children graduate from high school. 95% go on to college. 98% are the first person in their family to go.

"Due to budget cuts, unless we can raise $15,000 by mid-March, we will lose our centerpiece program, the One-on-Ones. In this program, professional actor/writers write a short play to act in with the kid they're paired with, rehearse it with them ...

Don't talk back, just drive the car

It feels weird to be saying this about the CEO of a corporation, but John Sargent is proving himself this week to be a class act. Here's his update on the Amazon fiasco.

Notice that Sargent is talking to authors and illustrators and about authors and illustrators, as well as about consumers. Compare Amazon's (thus-far) only public statement here, wherein the ONLY AUTHORS MENTIONED are self-published authors (who, not coincidentally, can self-publish through Amazon). Otherwise, from Amazon's le...

State of the Mole

So.

The Goblin Emperor is safely Someone Else's Problem for a while, and I have no idea of what novel I'm going to write next (except, of course, for A Reckoning of Men with matociquala , but we're not doing that until she's cleared at least some of the carnage off her decks*). Partly this is because The Goblin Emperor is a standalone. Partly this is because Cormorant Child, the novel which would be next up if writing was a purely rational, efficiency-oriented profession, has a lot of the same ...

found via several people

Blue whales are singing in a lower key. This is somehow deeply sfnal to me, and I love the idea that they're singing lower because their population is larger--although that may or may not be true.

It's really hard to write fiction as purely full-of-wonder as the truth.

Things! To! Read!

"White Charles" and "Mongoose" made Locus's 2009 Recommended Reading List.

So did two Shadow Unit stories, "Sugar" by Leah Bobet ( cristalia ) and "Cuckoo" by the Three Bs: Bear, Bull, & Bobet--and, yes, that would be E. Bear, not G. Bear. Which makes this a good time to point you to Bear's post about the start of Shadow Unit Season 3 and the plans for the rest of the SU arc, with its pointer to the Reading Order put together by the fans on the Shadow Unit wiki.

The rest of Locus's 2009 Recommend...

As the Amazon fracas continues...

jaylake has an open letter to Kindle readers.

John Scalzi has a suggestion about a response. Don't boycott Amazon: buy books from other retailers.

And I want to talk about something that makes me uncomfortable: how EXTRAORDINARILY LUCKY I am.

Let's take my luck piece by piece.

1. I'm married to someone I love. That's not a given or an inalienable right. I got lucky.

2. Because I am straight, I can get married and have my marriage legally recognized in every state in the Union. Again. I got lucky. ...

Random cool thing. Because I can.

This is the coolest fence EVER. More pictures here.

It's at the Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga, which I visited once when I was in high school, and I remember the fence vividly (not so much the rest of the museum, which I think is more a statement about how bowled over I was by the fence than about anything else). And hey! The artist, Albert Paley, is still alive and working. Check out the Memphis Portal Gate (2008) and then, well, I just started going through the Gates subsectio...

multivalenced grumble

John Scalzi has a very cogent analysis of Amazon's mistakes over the weekend; if you've been following, or are even interested in, the current contretemps, you've probably already read him--but he says basically everything I would say, if I were going to say anything more than "Go read John," which I'm not.

Me? I didn't get to sleep until after 4 this morning. I got nothin'. Back on your heads, people. Nothing to see here.