(Have a new–or not so new–ereader? My short story, “Drawing the Moon,” is available free from Smashwords through to the end of the year, in all ereader formats.)
The Five Best Toys of All Time. No, really. They are.
Ravens use gestures to get one anothers’ attention. Much like some other higher life forms we know.
All you ever wanted to know about Meh. Or, there really is a wikipedia page for everything.
lnhammer on Apollo 11 and bunny girls banished to the moon. You know you want to write that fic. Yeah, you.
Speaking of fic, from this year’s Yuletide fanfic exchange, here’s The Tough Guide to Urban Fantasyland: “You will not encounter any rustic taverns, bards, or bowls of stew on these tours! Instead, expect nightclubs, rock singers, and lots of gourmet coffee.” Also, of course, love triangles.
I’m Christian unless you’re gay. Which is really an essay about that mandate to love one another, which has this way of showing up in an awful lot of religious traditions. Also worth reading: some of the more powerful responses to the original post.
Sara Zarr on having creative cajones: “I want to be the kind of creative person who is not scared off by possibly-crazy ideas and doesn’t smother every spark and crackle with a host of “yeahbut”s and “ifonly”s … I’m very glad to be making my living as a writer, and know how fortunate I am to do so, and believe artists should be paid. I just don’t want to cling to my situation so tightly that I forget to make at least some choices based on passion and joy and the desire for adventure, growth, challenge. To take a chance now and then.”
Why do so few blacks study the civil war? “The belief that the Civil War wasn’t for us was the result of the country’s long search for a narrative that could reconcile white people with each other, one that avoided what professional historians now know to be true: that one group of Americans attempted to raise a country wholly premised on property in Negroes, and that another group of Americans, including many Negroes, stopped them. In the popular mind, that demonstrable truth has been evaded in favor of a more comforting story of tragedy, failed compromise, and individual gallantry. For that more ennobling narrative, as for so much of American history, the fact of black people is a problem.”