Mur Lafferty's Blog, page 89
September 14, 2009
ISBW #131- Worldcon Interviews – Lake, Gilman, and Kelly, Kessel, and Cadigan
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I'm too beat for detailed show notes. I finish up my WorldCon interview series with Jay Lake, Felix Gilman, and a round table-like chat with Jim Kelly, John Kessel, and Pat Cadigan. So much awesome in one episode!
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News From Poughkeepsie, Sunday Edition #2
Yeah, I know it's Monday. Been a busy weekend. We'll get to Monday's regularly scheduled NFP later this afternoon.
Our theme over the past week was the question "Who Are The Regulators," and we had some really good ideas along those lines. My personal favorite came from Jason (Anthraxus):
Mark and his gang of friends spent most of the summer doing what kids do: exploring, roughhousing, and generally hanging around. While fun, the summer had been pretty boring. That was until the moon turned...
September 13, 2009
More tough love – get a workshop
Because this is a blog all about support, I will spin this positively.
You need a writer's group. You need a workshop.
Just that word, "workshop," has the feeling of transition to it. You don't take a piece of wood and smile and say it's a chair. No, you take it to a workshop and work on it. When you enter a workshop, you're saying, "My story needs work." You've already accepted that.
Within this group, you will meet with peers and have them look at your manuscript. They will point out the...
September 12, 2009
September 11, 2009
ISBW #129 LITE- Content rating system for children's books?
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I talk in this podcast about whether we should give children's books content ratings like video games and movies.
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News From Poughkeepsie – Day 105
Who are the Regulators?
The citizens of New Albuquerque knew an angel when they saw one.
They knew her by her white coat bearing the cross, her severe hair, her heavy glasses and her slight smirk. She wandered in from the East, her steps leaden with the weight of her pack, but her head high. She went to the sick, the injured, removing her sacrament from their translucent bottles and doling them out one at a time to the loved ones.
"Make sure he takes this regularly," she would say, and they...
September 10, 2009
News From Poughkeepsie – Day 104
Who are the Regulators?
Bobby prided himself on his daring. Most time travelers just observed, but Bobby fixed things. Gave himself a pep talk when he was 16, which created the the prom night he always wanted. Made sure that mortgage payment didn't fall through. Little things, sure. But it made his life better. And isn't that what technology is for?
But Bobby decided to break out, and make things better. Go back to the mid-twentith century and kill Hitler. An obvious choice? Perhaps. But no...
Media Report and Future Plans
We cut off cable a couple of weeks ago for reasons that included both money and the fact that we had a gazillion channels (that's the Latin word for eighty-three) and watched maybe twelve shows regularly. And many of those were on network TV.
I thought I'd miss it. Wil Wheaton was on Leverage the DAY after we turned off cable, but I shrugged; I'll catch it on DVD. People gush about the gleeful horridness that is the Saturday movie on SyFy, but I never watched it anyway (although I did rent...
September 9, 2009
A really really weird cake
When I had the honor of interviewing Neil Gaiman at WorldCon, one thing he said struck me hard – it was when he was talking about how he doesn't want to write the same thing every year: he wants to write different things and used the metaphor of food to explain. Instead of steak every year, one year he could write sushi, or a sandwich, "or a really really weird cake."
I loved that. I wanted to write a really really weird cake.
I just got back from DragonCon, and I saw some old friends and made ...
September 3, 2009
The News From Poughkeepsie – Day 99
A woman gets on a bus…
…of the dead.
Charon smiled and tipped his hat at Yuri as she got on. She paid her fare—two copper coins—and sat down next to the kindly old woman with snakes for hair and gleaming brass hands. A fresh scar that wound around her neck like choker.
The old woman was an easy talker, going on about her sisters, how she couldn't do a damn thing with her hair and how much polish she went through on any given week to keep her hands shiny. Yuri started to space out, and it wasn't unt
