Another semester, another long stretch of blog silence. I haven’t got much to say or much time to say it in; this year is one of those strange larval periods, I guess, for my academic work and my writing and my family life. Editors are reading a novel I wrote, I’m starting to write a dissertation prospectus — and all the while we’re keeping an eye on my father’s health, as we have been since I graduated from college in May of 2003. It’s my five-year college reunion this May, and that means it’ll also have been five years since my father’s cancer was diagnosed.

By the end of the summer or beginning of the fall I should be beginning to write my dissertation. I’m hoping it’ll give me a new clarity of purpose.

This will probably be a recurring feature, because… yes.

• The scuzzy salmon-pink Chucks Robert De Niro wore in Great Expectations.
• Knopf rejection sheets for works by Joyce Carol Oates, V.S. Naipaul, Italo Calvino, Salman Rushdie.
• David Mamet’s (extremely detailed) baby book, complete with report cards from pre-school–apparently he handled scissors very safely.
• Houdini’s collection of magic-related manuscript materials.
• Ms. for a minor Beckett work, which I needed to measure in order to answer a patron’s query.
• A rather accomplished landscape sketch by Charlotte Brontë, with a title written in by her mother.
• Publicity photographs of a famous blackface performer, in and out of costume and paint.
• Ink on paper self-portrait by Henry Miller. T. was disappointed to learn that the self-portrait was not at all pornographic.
• A small model concept car designed by Norman Bel Geddes that looks far more like a spaceship than like an automobile.

Not much to report otherwise; I’m studying French like a fiend, doing dissertation-related reading, and working up grant proposals for an exciting new digital humanities project in our department. More on that once we have a good demo up, I hope.

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, the delightful magazine that published my short-short “Things That Make One’s Heart Beat Faster,” was just nominated for a Hugo in the semiprozine category. Congratulations to editors and all-around fabulous people Gavin Grant and Kelly Link!

I’m in the middle of prepping for class at the moment, but I direct your attention to Justine Larbalestier’s satisfying rant about Maureen Dowd’s latest column, on chick lit.

I haven’t read Dowd’s column myself; it’s behind the pay wall, and, frankly, her obsession with referring to politicians by faux-cutesy pet names annoys me so much that I’ve stopped reading her, period. But Justine does an excellent job of highlighting the key elements familiar from many Times pieces on genre fiction: inadequate sample size; blithe generalization; treating all genre works as “interchangeable.” Maybe there should be some kind of drinking game for this sort of thing?

My short-short entitled “Things That Make One’s Heart Beat Faster” — a riff on Sei Shonagon’s style — was just published in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet 19, the tenth anniversary issue of Small Beer’s beautiful zine. I’m listed in the poetry section of the masthead, which startled me, then made me laugh at myself for being startled. The piece is a prose poem, it’s true, but somehow I’d never thought of it as anything but a short piece of fiction. I spent most of my adolescence writing poetry — and now I think of myself only as a fiction writer. Brains are odd!

The contributor’s copies are in the mail, so I’ll report on the contents of the issue in more detail when they arrive, but it looks lovely and I’m proud to be in such company.

The order page for the issue is here.

To the lovely Elizabeth Scott, whose latest story, Stairs, is now up at Mytholog — and whose wonderful first novel, Bloom, now has a release date and a shiny official Amazon page. Go forth and pre-order!

I’ve seen this all over the internets since yesterday, but it can’t hurt to pass it on once more. Barbara Bauer, one of the agents named on Writer Beware’s list of the twenty worst literary agents, has managed to get Absolute Write temporarily shut down; see Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s explanatory post on Making Light, and Miss Snark’s two most recent posts.

I’m not an Absolute Write regular, but I think it’s idiotic that the ISP pulled the site, and Bauer’s attempt to use the (equally idiotic) DMCA as a weapon is beyond mind-boggling.

Here’s hoping for the quick recovery of Absolute Write and all its messageboards.

Technorati tag: BarbaraBauer

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.

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.