Tag: writers

Denvention: Day 3

(OK, actually I’m posting this around midnight on Day 4, but pretend, OK?) Friday was a great day at the con, starting with a good panel on Canadian Science Fiction with Barb Galler-Smith (fiction editor of On Spec magazine, who has just sold a book to EDGE), Robert J. Sawyer, Jo Walton and Christian Sauvé. …

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Denvention: Day 2

And so Day 2 has come and gone (at least for those of us for whom 11 p.m. is still a reasonable time to head to one’s hotel room). It was a good one for me. Things started off with a bang with the panel I mentioned a few days ago featuring writers reading their …

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Willett of the Day: Edward Willett, Dime-Novelist

No, I’m not featuring myself. This Edward Willett lived in the 19th century and wrote dime novels for Beadle and Adams, with titles like Alone on the Plains, or The She Eagle’s Vengeance (see the cover at right). I can’t find anything else out about him. He may also have written the rhymes for the …

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Bruce Sterling’s SF workshop lexicon

I don’t know how I’ve missed this all these years. I know a lot of the terms–I’ve used them in workshops and more recently in all the work I’ve done with young writers–but I’ve never seen them all brought together in one place, even though this Workshop Lexicon, compiled by Bruce Sterling, has been around …

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Bruce Sterling’s SF workshop lexicon

I don’t know how I’ve missed this all these years. I know a lot of the terms–I’ve used them in workshops and more recently in all the work I’ve done with young writers–but I’ve never seen them all brought together in one place, even though this Workshop Lexicon, compiled by Bruce Sterling, has been around …

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Never talk about religion or politics

At a dinner party in Litchfield, Conn., Publisher’s Weekly reports: As entrées were being enjoyed, a McCain supporter and an Obama supporter, having exhausted their verbal arguments, lunged at each other with fists flying. Eventually the kitchen staff came to the rescue and separated the two men, but not before some blood was shed and …

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"The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination"

J.K. Rowling speaks at Harvard’s commencement: Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its …

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Announcing the Hayden Trenholm interview

I’m currently interviewing Aurora Award nominee Hayden Trenholm on the discussion board of the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Facebook group, and will be all week. You can follow along over there (if you’re on Facebook), or check back here: I’ll be posting the interview here as it develops.

Happy birthday, Robert Silverberg!

Robert Silverberg is 74 today. His children’s book Revolt on Alpha C is one of the first science fiction books I can remember reading (it was his first novel, published in 1955, four years before I was born). Much, much later, I learned quite a bit about sex I didn’t previously know by reading his …

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Aurora Awards announced

I’m back! I’ll post more about my exploits with the Canadian Chamber Choir (which is what kept me away from the computer and hence from this blog for the last week) soon, but in the meantime, let’s get things rolling forward again with this list of the Aurora Award winners for the best Canadian SF …

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More on Madeleine L’Engle

John Podhoretz posts a lovely personal memory of growing up in the building in New York where she lived. And here’s one of those more complete obituaries I predicted would quickly appear.

Madeleine L’Engle, R.I.P.

Publisher’s Weekly reports that Madeleine L’Engle has died, and posts a short obituary:Author Madeleine L’Engle died last night in Connecticut, at the age of 89. Best known for her 1963 Newbery Award winner A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels, L’Engle was the author of more than 60 books for adults and young readers, most …

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