Katharine Beutner's Blog, page 10

Crazy and unlikely and unusual

This week, my students are workshopping their first pieces of fiction (and doing an excellent job of it). After a week and a half of class every day, I think we're all starting to realize that an intensive summer fiction workshop will, in fact, be intensive. For all of us. But with judicious applications of cookies and porcupines that think they're dogs, I think we'll manage just fine.

Anyway, I'm afraid it's links all the way down today:

Via Gwynne Garfinkle, this recap of a Readercon panel

Whew.

My first week of teaching is over! Or sort of over — my students just turned in their first assignments, so I'll be reading those this weekend. We spent most of this week reading and discussing published short fiction and we begin workshopping their own work on Monday.

I am very sleepy this morning, not least because T. talked me into attending the midnight showing of Inception with him on Thursday night. Vaguely spoilery reaction below — skip if you're not into that kind of thing...

Things that make your (my) week

A really amazing, thoughtful, detailed, super-complimentary reader review. The kind that inspires dolphin-sonar noises and flappy hands. (If you've never been inspired to make dolphin-sonar noises and flappy hands, I feel bad for you.)

And now, I'm about to go talk  about Katherine Mansfield's "Bliss" with my fiction students. Heh.

Interview and reading clips on Youtube

In March, I filmed an interview with "Open Books, Open Minds," a local TV book program based in Ashland, Oregon, and sponsored by the Jackson County library system. Clips from that interview are now up on Youtube — the first features a bit of the interview and me reading the prologue; the second shows me reading a selection from chapter 1 that I haven't read publicly before. (The bit about the seawater ritual, for those of you who've read the book.)

Many thanks to Maureen Battistella of the a

Another great thing

Back in May — long enough ago that I'd totally forgotten about it — Lambda Literary asked for interview questions for the fabulous Sarah Waters. This was just after I'd read The Little Stranger, so I was bubbling over with them, and I left a few at the Lambda Literary blog. Yesterday I was surprised and delighted to see that Lambda Literary had actually asked Sarah Waters those questions, along with great questions by Shelley Ettinger and Jeri Estes. Here's a snip from her answer to my...

Things that are great

Watching a room full of students busily writing fiction, in response to a writing exercise given on the first day of class.

Not a post about 'Twilight'

I've been trying all week to write a post about why the film versions of Twilight and Eclipse are kind of avant garde — notice I claim nothing of the sort for New Moon — but I just can't seem to finish it up and post it. Can it be that I've hit my limit for dissecting the cultural phenomenon that is Twilight? Does Edward Cullen like to eat bears? (This is still the funniest thing about the Twilight universe, by FAR.) Actually, I'm almost tempted to read the remaining Twilight books — I've...

If you've ever wondered why libraries are necessary

… first of all, you're silly. But second: read this wonderful letter by Mary A. Dempsey, the Chicago Public Library Commissioner, calling out the many stupidities of a FOX News story asking why we still need those tax-greedy libraries now that we have this handy series of tubes called the internet.

The post also has one of the most heartening and non-keyboard-mash-y comment threads I've read in a while. The best one is by a Patrick F.:

Does anyone else find the [sic:] after 'Wifi' to be as...

Rhythm as alarm system

The first thing I read this morning, while eating my quinoa flakes, was Kate Elliott's excellent post about how she knows a scene needs to be rewritten:

The medium answer is:

I feel uncomfortable with it (see: "I just know" above) because:

the rhythm feels wrong when I re-read it. The rhythm of a scene should flow smoothly and inevitably for however you are defining inevitability — you should never catch or stumble over the flow of action and conversation.

Or: the characters aren't doing...

This week's capers

I'm bogged down in dissertation-land this month, trying to finish a chapter before I start teaching in mid-July.

Things I have been doing lately, in addition to writing my dissertation:

Pondering the confluence of events that leads pets to get sick immediately before one's partner leaves on a scheduled trip.Washing a lot of bedding. See previous point.Watching season 1 of Leverage and pondering the caper plot. It's a silly, fun show with a ridiculously sentimental frame story, but it's also...