Mockingjay movie poster.
Submitted by thekaycho
SABRIEL Conceptual Art (Part II) Bryce Homick designed these places as a part of his Senior Thesis project, which was about making conceptual art for a video game based around the book Sabriel by Garth Nix. Click on each to see their names.
A tweetathon to save the short story
by Neil Gaiman
I love short stories. I grew up on them, and the stories that had an effect on me are now encoded into my DNA. Shirley Jackson’s ”One Ordinary Day With Peanuts” and “The Lottery”. Saki’s ”Sredni Vashtar”. WW Jacobs’s “The Monkey’s Paw”. Kipling’s ”The Gardener”. There are heaps of them, and it’s love all the way.
For a working writer, this is a silly sort of love. You should write novels. Short stories sell for the price of a good dinner, if you’re lucky (and the magazines and anthologies that used to buy them are themselves fading away or gone completely). When they get reprinted they won’t cover the taxi fare to get to the dinner. I’m lucky, and have collected my short stories into books that sell well for short-story collections, but still only a fraction of the number that my novels sell.
But short stories are the best place for young writers to learn their craft: to try out different voices and techniques, to experiment, to learn. And they’re a wonderful place for old writers, when you have an idea that wouldn’t make it to novel length, one simple, elegant thing that needs to be said. People like reading short stories. And they like listening to short stories.
For years, Radio 4 has supported the short story. Ten-minute stories, professionally read, give writers young and old a chance to make a professional sale. Full disclosure: I wrote a short story, “Jerusalem”, for them a few years ago, and grew up listening to short stories on Radio 4 and dreaming that one day I’d have a story on there.
Now the station’s support for the short story is waning. TheTweetathon we’re doing to bring attention to this (each Wednesday for the next five weeks, in association with the Society of Authors, a writer will tweet the first line of a story and tweeters will add the next four sentences to create a short story in 670 characters) may or may not produce great stories: hive minds are excellent news-gatherers and commentators but tend not to produce great art.
All I’m hoping is that it reminds people how much pleasure readers, and listeners, get from short stories, and how much we learn from writing them. If we produce another “The Monkey’s Paw” that’ll be a bonus
An Imperial Propaganda mentioned in Behemoth by Scott Westerfeld. This, in my opinion, is one of the best illustrations that describe how effective Westerfeld and Keith Thompson (the artist) worked as a team. Here is the description of the poster from the book, in the eyes of one of the characters:
At the bottom was a cartoon city labeled Istanbul, festooned with steampipes and train tracks. The city sat astride The Straits, with the Russian bear looming over the Black Sea and the British navy threatening from the Mediterrenean.
Dominating the poster was a giant chimera striding over the horizon, a Darwinist beast fabricated from half a dozen creatures. It wore a misshapen bowler hat, and carried a dreadnought in one clawed hand and a sack of money in the other. A tiny fat man labeled Winston Churchill rode on its shoulder, watching as the obscene beast menaced the tiny spires and domes below.
Who will protect us from these monsters? read the legend across the top.
You be the judge. :)
It’s an anthology of short stories divided into two teams—well, zombies and unicorns. Each team basically just tells how cooler their side is (and proves which is better in fiction) by their stories, and so far—by that I mean 50 pages in—it’s SUPER awesome! The anthology was born after the banters between Holly Black and Justine Larbalestier on their blogs. :)
IT’S NOT EVEN FAIR HOW MUCH I WANT THIS TO BE MADE. I’m legitamitely sobbing.
totally made my night! *gleeful*
Sabriel fanart by the Picture Book Report. Sabriel comes to the Clovencrest, where she first encounters an undead being and a glimpse of the dangers of the Old Kingdom.
@neilhimself One of these men is a knight of the realm. One is a commoner who badly needs a haircut. You be the judge.
He’s right. Terry Pratchett really needs a trim.
Pictured: the entire basis of one of my fandoms. (arguably two, since seasons 4 & 5 of Supernatural are so heavily laden with references at times)
Definitely THE literary event of the year.
It’s the face-off that everyone’s been waiting for. Writers from the canon of Philippine Literature and contemporary book creators from Visprint (publisher of ZsaZsa Zaturrnah, Bob Ong, Trese, Kiko Machine Komix, among others) are going to have a showdown at the University of Santo Tomas on Aug 17-18.
If there’s one event that can change the face of Philippine writing forever, THIS IS IT. Can the classics hold their ground against today’s challengers? Why do bestseller lists from NBS all crappy US titles? And what the fuck was Stephenie Meyer thinking? More importantly, why are all Twilight fans virgins? (OK, so maybe the talk wouldn’t be answering those last two questions, but what the fuck, right?)
(via siegemalvar)
attended the first day of this seminar, which is made of awesome! :) Learned something about Liwayway magazine history, tips for [erotic] poetry writing, cool discussion of literary theories on why peeps read Bob Ong and whatnot…and yeah, Twilight was mentioned many times throughout the talk, though rather unfavorably (which is kind of expected).
Also, loved that one of the speakers, Sir Jun Cruz Reyes (author of Ilang Taon na ang Problema Mo?), knew a My Chemical Romance song. He did not indicate the title and did not sing; he just recited a few lines from the song Mama (Mama, we’re all gonna die; mama, we’re meant for the flies…stop asking me questions, I hate to see you cry. Mama, we’re all gonna die) as if they were lines from a poem. :) YES, and I thought I’m the only one who thinks that some MCR songs are really poetic. XD
