Harry Connolly's Blog, page 186

Today is my wife's birthday

I won't be online very much, I expect. Have a great day.

A quick favor.

Today (I'm actually writing this in March, during a quiet moment) is June 1st, three months before the publication date of this:

If your library is like mine, today is the day you can log onto the library website and request that they purchase Game of Cages. Would you do that please? Libraries bring in new readers, and me, I love them.

Thanks.

Randomness for 5/31

1) Never plan a crime through unsolicited queries.

2) The next step in the development of our robotic overlords is complete.

3) How many companies think to put ASCII art in their html codes? Warning: using View Source on that site is probably NSFW.

4) This one is for Hannah Wolf Bowen (and everyone else, too): A Batman costume… for your horse.

5) Forced perspective, using Legos. Really amazing.

6) The scale of celestial bodies.

7) A unique promotional idea. I don't think it's such a...

The Scalzi/Wheaton Benefit Anthology

Check this out. John Scalzi and Wil Wheaton are putting on a benefit anthology for the Lupus Foundation of America. The stories have to be between 400-2,000 words, will earn 10c a word if accepted and have to be based on the crazy illustration posted at the link above.

Me, I'm working on a little story to submit (in my Copious Free Time) but my son (who's 8 years old) was inspired to write a little something himself. It's not long enough to meet even half the minimum word count...

"Because all you of Earth are idiots!"

My son and I are watching PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE.

OMG.

Discolored skin

On Thursday, my color inkjet printer finally gave up the ghost. It had been iffy for a long while–the paper feed hasn't worked correctly for years–but if finally started chewing on the paper, and when I reached in to clear it, it sprayed multi-colored ink all over my hand.

I didn't wash it off quickly enough, either, and I still have weird colors on half my left hand, 36 hours later.

Worse, I no longer have a color printer. The truth is that I don't use it much; my black Samsung laser...

As an addendum to yesterday's post about The Terminator

Writer Livia Blackburne writes about the way to grab a reader's interest. The concept of a "knowledge gap" is interesting but not useful for my process. She does a good job covering the importance of context, though. Check it out.

Let us consider THE TERMINATOR as an role model for expository technique

I am annoyed. And bored. What, you wonder, is annoying and boring me beyond all the things that bug me every day, like the day job or whatever? Books that are supposedly thriller with action and violent clashes, where the author decides it's vitally, vitally important to explain shit to me.

What about THE TERMINATOR? Let's see what explanations we get in this movie:

Arnold appears in a blast of unnatural energy, butt naked. He demands random strangers give up their clothes. Stranger...

Randomness for 5/28

1) Cut paper art.

2) Dawn's Wedding Chapel.

3) Subtitles for the Asian DVD release of THE TWO TOWERS

4) Everyone loves looking at creepy dolls, right?

5) Seasonal Cake Wrecks.

6) Why the bad guys in River City Ransom say "BARF!"

7) All of today's links came from Sherwood Smith's Birthday thread. There are many, many more wonderful things there, including a bunch of videos that I can't check out and can't link to. Wish Sherwood a happy birthday (and treat yourself to one of her books, if you...

Randomness for 5/27

1) Five reasons it's still not cool to admit you're a gamer.

2) Mr. Know-It-All, I just found out that one of my favorite sci-fi writers is a raging homophobe. Should I prevent my son from reading the jerk's books? Huh. I wonder who they're talking about?

3) Weeks ago, we borrowed Cosmos from the library to share it with our son, but he refused to even be in the same room when we started it. I'm pretty sure he thought it was high-fiber. This auto-tuned video made him change his mind.

4)