I’m just back from a conference and still stuck in the post-travel blahs — I was in Richmond at the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies and managed to get my flights screwed up by thunderstorms in both directions, sigh — but I wanted to share a few things:
Via my friend Elizabeth Scott (whose lovely Something, Maybe is now in bookstores!), a fascinating link about the cover design process for a new book about Columbine.
A New York Times article about a 40-foot clonal amoeba colony in a cow pasture near Houston.
In other news, I’ve started doing more in-depth research for my new novel idea. There’s nothing quite so giddiness-inspiring as walking around the library collecting an armful of books for a new research topic.
Via Justine Larbalestier, Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk on genius, inspiration, and “mulish” work. It’s a beautifully presented talk, though I’m not sure that I agree with her final premise of talent as a kind of transitory gift. I do agree, and I’m pretty sure I’ve gone on about this before, that the post-Romantic (Gilbert says post-Renaissance) conception of the artist has led to an absurd cultural insistence that all writers be damaged in order to create. (See this great New Yorker article on writer’s block and the invention thereof.) But I also think that placing “genius” or “inspiration” entirely outside oneself is a little sad. We are human, and we do create beautiful things. Inspiration is the work of our brains, and that’s worth celebrating, even if we don’t understand how it functions.
But I do agree with both Justine and Elizabeth Gilbert that the most important thing you can do as a writer is keep doing your work, or, as Justine says, make it the best book you can.
Now I’m off to make the best dissertation chapter outline I can. I hope.
RaceFail 09 — a summary of which is available here and a timeline here, and which Rydra Wong has exhaustively archived — led to some incredibly rude and defensive behavior on the part of published authors and SF editors. It has also inspired some amazing posts about writing the other and some new communities dedicated to reading and publishing works by people of color. I cannot recommend highly enough:
