I’ve made a page describing my current fiction projects. The piece I’ll probably read tonight is “Daphne” — I did rewrite the ending of “The Former Hero” last night, and I like it much better, but now it’s too long to read tonight, as we were told to aim for ten minutes, with a maximum of fifteen. If I read “The Former Hero” quickly, it takes seventeen minutes — so I’ll only read that one if everyone else’s times are running extremely short. And if I feel like the mood is right for a weird Shakespearean ghost story. But really, when isn’t the mood right for that?

I think the tagline for my blog, if I had one, would have to be something like “Literature for dorks.”

Projects for the rest of the day: working on the final novel edits; baking a spinach quiche; finding something to wear to the reading; not being nervous. I haven’t read my writing in public since my first year of college, and that was in my poetry days, unfortunately for the audience. My mother said, “Remember, you read at the Library of Congress!” I did, it’s true; and it sounds impressive until you discover that I was in seventh grade at the time. (Much love to the Scholastic Writing Awards.)

Before I go, a few links:

Sherwood Smith shares excerpts from the diary and letters of Agnes Porter, a governess in the late eighteenth century.

A transcript of Stephen Colbert’s remarks at the press corps dinner (via BoingBoing).

More clarification about how book packaging works in the world of teen fiction, by the Harvard Independent here and Lizzie Skurnick here.

In other news, I have a reading to prepare for — the graduating students in my writing program are doing a practice reading tomorrow night (at Club DeVille on Red River, 7:30 p.m., if any Austinites are reading this). I’ve been waffling about what to read all week: the novel prologue, which I’ll read at the official graduation reading next weekend? The four-page piece I wrote last spring? The Much Ado story, with its not-quite-right ending? But T. read the Much Ado story this morning and helped me figure out how to write the ending I wanted, and now I’m tempted to rewrite that last page this afternoon and inflict the story upon my captive audience tomorrow. More on this as it develops.

Kaavya Viswanathan’s book is being withdrawn.

I wonder what her first attempt at a novel was like — the Lovely Bones-style manuscript that was judged too dark to be saleable. I keep thinking about that, especially as I read about Alloy Entertainment and the process of “packaging” that Opal Mehta went through. Now Viswanathan’s been packaged herself: she’s an accused plagiarist. I think she probably did type those plagiarised bits herself, though I’m so sketched out by the concept of “book packaging” that I’d far rather blame Alloy. But I still feel sorry for her, and for the novel she wanted to write.

More on this later, maybe. For now, have some more cheerful writing-related links:

Jennifer Jackson and Nephele Tempest discuss their reading processes for submissions.

Sarah Monette on the implications of “the moss troll problem,” or world-building and comparisons, especially in second-world fiction.

Drive slow
Originally uploaded by Katharine B.

This morning I slept in a little and then went to Café Mundi, our favorite eastside coffeeshop, only a short bike ride away. I ate a Belgian waffle with fruit and whipped cream and scuffled with the Much Ado About Nothing story, which has been extremely recalcitrant. I have to whip it into shape by Wednesday for workshop — I’ll probably spend most of the day working on it.

The coffeeshop got progressively noisier as lunchtime approached, so I left a little after noon and biked home, stopping to take several pictures. Only a few people out in their yards today; most were either inside, avoiding the humidity, or in church. I had to bike around fleets of Cadillacs parked along the curbs.

I put a few other photos on flickr, but here’s the House of Elegance, a local beauty parlor, which I’ve been meaning to take a photo of since I moved in last spring:

Yesterday I attended an interdisciplinary symposium on the topic of “animal humanities.” A friend helped to organize the symposium, and had invited me to the lunch with the presenters and other graduate students. There had been some difficulty organizing a vegetarian lunch, apparently; the catering services in the student union building tend more toward barbecue. But that had been straightened out, and the morning panels and speakers were fine. The first plenary speaker talked about the uses of animals in modern art — especially the kind of art that looks more like taxidermy — and warned his audience before showing some slides that their content was disturbing. I’m extremely soft-hearted about animals, but I didn’t find the images terribly bothersome; some people in the room clearly did, though, and appreciated the warning.

At noon we graduate students walked into the dining room where the lunch had been laid out and saw, with a kind of giggling horror, that the chandeliers were all constructed of huge antlers. “Oh, no,” said one of our professors. T. squinted up at the antlers and said quickly, “No, they’re fake. They’re all exactly the same, they’re not real.” And he was right — they were cast ceramic, carved and painted. But they hung there over our heads while we ate our salads and our vegetable-stuffed pastries, and I still sort of wanted to giggle.

Tor editor Anna Genoese explains how profit and liability analyses work, using the example of a mass market paperback original that fails to earn out the author’s advance. (This post might equally well be titled “Why accepting a massive advance for a first novel is not such a great idea.”) Ms. Genoese’s continuing series of posts aimed at demystifying publishing is collected here — she’s been producing great lucid descriptions of the business of editing commercial fiction which are extremely edifying to a sheltered writing-program pup like me. I highly recommend checking them out.

Hi, everyone. I’ll be back soon with actual content and a fancier-looking style.