On words and books and writing.
Steampunk and sci-fi.
Romance and action.
Fantasy and mystery.
Adults, but we promise to keep it SFW.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Holly Black's Tumblr: 21 Reasons You Think You Don't Have Time to Write
1. You are letting people tell you that you should be doing other things with your time.
2. You can’t live with the level of clean that your family accepts as normal.
3. You haven’t decided to treat your writing seriously and so no one around you treats it seriously, either.
4. You haven’t made yourself a writing space.
5. You haven’t realized that you need help.
6. You do what is urgent rather than what is necessary.
7. You don’t let your kids and other people solve their own problems.
8. You think that someday you will have more time for writing.
9. You are spending time doing things you actually don’t care about.
10. You are actually using distractions as an excuse not to write.
11. You are terrified of writing, of actually sitting down and putting yourself on the page.
12. You are too busy criticizing the best selling books that you are reading to write something better.
13. You don’t know what to do with a blank page.
14. You don’t know how to turn off your internal editor.
15. You talk a good game, but you don’t play it.
16. You need to do a little planning and research before you start.
17. You don’t actually like writing. You like having written. (Join the club.)
18. You need to write the first line of the next chapter before leaving for the day.
19. You need to spend time remembering what it is you love about writing.
20. You have convinced yourself that you need 2 hours to write and don’t know how to use the 20 minute chunks you actually have.
21. You don’t have notebooks scattered through the house, including in the bathroom, to jot down inspiration.
Ouch.
The only way this list doesn’t sting a little is if it stings a lot.
Too much truth, Mette!
(Although 21 is kind of funny too.)
Tumblngs of KJ: So about the so-called lack of boy stuff in YA
So I have a lot of feelings every single time I hear that people are “angry” or “annoyed” or whatever that they can’t find ONE SINGLE YA BOOK IN THE ENTIRE YA SECTION FOR BOYS TO READ and YOUNG MEN ARE FAILING BECAUSE GIRLS ARE TAKING OVER LITERATURE and HOW CAN BOYS POSSIBLY BE EXPECTED TO WANT TO TOUCH WHINY GIRLY CRAP WITH A TEN FOOT POLE?????
I have a few thoughts.
1) If you cannot find at least a handful of books in the YA section that might appeal to a teenage boy, you aren’t looking very hard. Maybe peruse this list of 140 titles that would appeal to teenage boys. Also, that list is from last year and similar books are being released every month.
2) LOLOLOLOLOL okay yeah young boys have absolutely nothing to read, you’re right. It’s not like you can walk into any library or bookstore and find that the majority of the books in it are about white men.
3) I resent the implication that a book with a female protagonist OR romantic element, no matter how slight, is a “girl book” unless it’s by some guy who gets really upset when anyone calls him a romance author because HIS BOOKS ARE NOT ROMANCES THEY ARE ~SERIOUS LITERATURE~ because the two are mutually exclusive. I also resent that we continue to encourage our boys to distance themselves vehemently and often violently from anything that could be considered even slightly non-masculine.
There is this thing people say: “My son/brother/I had nothing in the YA section to read! They/I had to go STRAIGHT FROM KID’S BOOKS TO LORD OF THE RINGS/WHEEL OF TIME/ENDER’S GAME/CATCHER IN THE RYE/ETC.!”
Wow. I mean, do you understand what a tragedy it is that these poor boys don’t even get to stop in the YA section and they are forced to go immediately to the thousands and thousands and thousands of fantasy and science fiction and ~real literature~ books that are about young white men coming of age and having adventures? Greatest tragedy of our generation, honestly.
I mean doesn’t anyone find it a little… odd? That the fantasy and sci-fi shelves are bursting with young 16-25 year old men who are doing lots of different things (including kissing/sexing ladies OH MY GOD ROMANCE???!!!!?!?!!?), and then the YA section is hanging out over here with lots of stories with VERY SIMILAR CONTENT (Kristin Cashore! Tamora Pierce! Beth Revis!), but everyone looks at those books and goes “Ugh, girl books, there’s no possible way a young man or even a smart girl could be into those?”
TAMORA PIERCE LITERALLY WRITES ABOUT KNIGHTS AND MAGIC AND FANTASY CREATURES AND WAR AND SASSY ANIMAL SIDEKICKS. She just writes about them from a *girl’s* perspective. Which means boys are physically incapable of reading it, I guess?
I just can’t wrap my brain around the fact that people do not get the irony in what they’re saying. They don’t even realize as the words are rolling off their tongue that YA is so female-centric because coming-of-age stories for young men have already been staples in the “real books” section for decades. Because being a young straight white man is universal, see, while being a girl is something that’s impossible to care about unless you’re both a girl and stupid. (COOL GIRLS read the boy stuff, duh!)
And even then, even then, there’s still plenty of boy-centric YA, too. Because there is no boy-free space, you guys. That’s the thing about privilege — you’re so used to being allowed in every space and have everyone accept you as the default that when you can’t immediately find something that’s obviously “for you,” you claim that it’s excluding you and that you must be included. You don’t even see that you can literally sidestep into another area that is catered exactly to you.
Honestly, to a point, this is not even the fault of young men. It is the fault of a society that continues to tell them that they’re the most important of all. Boys don’t start out believing that they can’t relate to girls, or that romance is sappy and beneath them. They’re not born with the idea that sex is a game or they’re “naturally” better at certain things. We feed them that. And we continue to feed it to them every time we huff about there being no “boy stuff” in YA, which is a flat-out, complete and total lie.
Of course, at a certain point they can reason on their own, and then it’s on them whether they’re willing to learn some empathy, just as it’s on any other privileged class.
There is so much more to this, like the fact that patriarchy often drips from those so-called “girl books,” even though they’re “for girls.” That publishers literally can’t afford to be idealists and they have to take society and money into consideration, and how much that sucks.
I have said this before, and I doubt I’ll stop saying it: if young men aren’t reading, it is not because of women and their stupid girl books. There are other elements at work here, because there has never and will never be a “lack” of books written by dudes for dudes. Please try again.
In the meantime, I might segue into the way we pish-posh “romance” and sex if it’s written by women, but that’s another post.
So much yes.
Life of Scientist Who Changed the World’s View
“I can find in my undergraduate classes, bright students who do not know that the stars rise and set at night, or even that the Sun is a star.”- Carl Sagan
“Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up.” -Stephen Hawking
Like no other science, astrophysics cross-pollinates the expertise of chemists, biologists, geologists and physicists, all to discover the past, present, and future of the cosmos—and our humble place within it.” -Neil deGrasse Tyson
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the the universe.” -Albert Einstein
“Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.” - Niels Bohr
“Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?”- Richard Feynman
“In science, we must be interested in things, not in persons.” -Marie Curie
“You look at science (or at least talk of it) as some sort of demoralising invention of man, something apart from real life, and which must be cautiously guarded and kept separate from everyday existence. But science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated. Science, for me, gives a partial explanation for life. In so far as it goes, it is based on fact, experience and experiment.” -Rosalind Franklin
“I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success… such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.”-Nikola Tesla.
“I never did a day’s work in my life. It was all fun. I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” -Thomas Edison
I never get tired of this photo.
Ella Fitzgerald was not allowed to play at Mocambo because of her race. Then, one of Ella’s biggest fans made a telephone call that quite possibly changed the path of her career for good. Here, Ella tells the story of how Marilyn Monroe changed her life:
“I owe Marilyn Monroe a real debt… she personally called the owner of the Mocambo, and told him she wanted me booked immediately, and if he would do it, she would take a front table every night. She told him – and it was true, due to Marilyn’s superstar status – that the press would go wild. The owner said yes, and Marilyn was there, front table, every night. The press went overboard. After that, I never had to play a small jazz club again. She was an unusual woman – a little ahead of her times. And she didn’t know it.”
Unfortunately, This Piece Is Not for Us: Handling Rejection
Rejection is a thing that happens to writers who seek publication. Getting a story rejected is a sad thing. It hurts. Rejection is universal, but that fact does not make the feeling suck any less. Because you have already been rejected or will be rejected at some point in the future, here are a few things to keep in mind regarding the word “no.”
15 Writers - The Best Writing Advice They Received
- Alice Kahn: The best writing advice I’ve ever heard: Don’t write like you went to college.
- Andrei Codrescu: Best advice I ever got was from the Romanian poet Nichita Stanescu, who told me in Bucharest, before I emigrated: ‘Learn English. French is dead.’
- Christopher Buckley: The best advice on writing I’ve ever received was from William Zinsser: ‘Be grateful for every word you can cut.’
- Cynthia Ozick: The best advice on writing I’ve ever received is: Write with authority.
- David Guterson: The best advice on writing I’ve ever received is to take it seriously, because to do it well is all-consuming.
- George Plimpton: I think the best advice on writing I’ve received was from John Steinbeck, who suggested that one way to get around writer’s block (which I was suffering hideously at the time) was to pretend to be writing to an aunt, or a girlfriend. I did this, writing to an actress friend I knew, Jean Seberg. The editors of Harpers forgot to take off the salutation and that’s how the article begins in the magazine: Dear Jean….
- James Atlas: The best advice on writing I’ve ever received was from Dwight Macdonald: ‘Everything about the same subject in the same place.’
- Margaret Carlson: Best writing advice I’ve ever received: Sell everything three times.
- Nick Tosches: The best advice on writing I’ve ever received was given to me, like so much else, by Hubert Selby, Jr.: to learn and to know that writing is not an act of the self, except perhaps as exorcism; that, in writing what is worth being written, one serves, as vessel and voice, a power greater than vessel and voice.
- Patsy Garlan: The best advice on writing I’ve ever received is: Don’t answer the phone.
- Peter Mayle: Best advice on writing I’ve ever received: Finish.
- Richard Ford: The best advice on writing I’ve ever received: ‘Don’t have children.’ I gave it to myself.
- Robert Lipsyte: The best advice on writing I’ve ever received was, ‘Rewrite it!’ A lot of editors said that. They were all right. Writing is really rewriting—making the story better, clearer, truer.
- Russell Banks: The best advice on writing I’ve ever received was probably something Ted Solotaroff told me years ago when he was my editor. Going over a manuscript line by line again and again he kept reminding me, ‘Remember, this is your book, not my book. You’re the one who’s going to have to live with it the rest of your life. I might publish 30 or 40 books this year, you’re only going to publish one, and probably the only one you’re going to publish in two or three years.’
- Whitney Balliett: The best advice on writing I’ve ever received is, ‘Knock ‘em dead with that lead sentence.’
From Writers Write
Common Descent
There’s a famous old anecdote about Charlemagne that’s been used for ages to explain how interconnected we are among our biological pasts. It has been said that everyone of European ancestry is related to Charlemagne, the great King of the Franks, born in 742 AD. If you’re European, you’re royalty. How is that possible?
I’ll tell you another tidbit first: Not only do all Europeans share Charlemagne as an ancestor, they share everyone alive at the same time as Charlemagne as an ancestor. Everyone who had kids, anyway. Let me explain:
Everyone alive has two biological parents. They each have two parents themselves, for a total of four grandparents. For x number of generations that you travel back in time, you have 2^x direct grandparents of increasing separation. Extrapolate that back to Charlie’s time, and you’d need 1 trillion grandparents to cover all your ancestral bases. Michael from Vsauce did a video about it. Since that’s far more people than have ever been alive, we need to engage some incest to solve the problem. Not banjo-applesauce incest, just a bit of redrawing our family trees into family webs.
Somewhere, far enough back in the web of grandparents, we will find a person whose lines connect to every single person who comes after them. That zig-zagged trail of shared genetic history ends surprisingly recently (for Euros, again): A common European ancestor around 1400 AD. Go a bit farther, and we find a common Earthling ancestor around 3,000 BC. It’s neat stuff. But it’s all based in mathematical models, not real genetic data.
Until now. USC and UC Davis researchers Peter Ralph and Graham Coop have surveyed the genomes of 2,257 Europeans in order to put some real data behind those models. Because of the random shuffling of chromosome fragments that created your father’s sperm and your mother’s egg, you, your siblings and your cousins all share varying chunks of DNA. People who are more closely related share more of these chunks. Depending on how many chunks are shared between two people, we can calculate their approximate relation to each other. Using 2 million shared sequences and a lot of math, they proved the mathematical models correct. Turkish people are more related to other Turks than to someone from Portugal, but they are related enough that, not only do they share one common ancestor a few hundred years ago, but they share every ancestor if you go back a mere thousand years. The models guessed that a long time ago, but now we have the data to prove it.It’s likely that these patterns extend to other regions of Earth, although the numbers might be slightly (but not that) different.
Next time someone in your neck of the ethnic woods points out a famous relative or claims blue-blood descent, remind them that they aren’t so special. All street-sweepers are royalty, all nobles are peasants, and we are all Kings.
Read more at NatGeo. Have more questions? Also check out the great FAQ on the project from the researchers themselves.
Jean Louis Gerome
Jean-Léon (not Louis) Gérôme painted “Pollice Verso” (Thumbs Down), the painting that inspired Ridley Scott to make “Gladiator,” and his Orientalist work is straight from the Thousand Nights and A Night.
When I was a kid, I thought bashi-bazouk was just something Captain Haddock from Tintin shouted as a comics-acceptable swearword. No, it isn’t.
Bashi-bazouks were mercenary soldiers employed by the Ottoman Empire. Here’s Gérôme’s portrait of one, clearly dressed in his finest clothes: the ivory stuff, which I’ve seen described as “musical instruments” (!) are a pistol-butt (the ball) and a yataghan sword (the butterfly.)
