About Me, Other People's Books, The Internet

A few things make a post

Some good reading on the Intarwebz today! First up, I bring you today’s Big Idea column over at the Whatever, where Mr. Scalzi brings word of Brad Meltzer’s new children’s books about Amelia Earhart and Abraham Lincoln. Parents of small children, especially daughters, go check this out. Especially if you’re fans of Calvin and Hobbes. The art for the Amelia book looks adorable.

***

Meanwhile, Jim Hines has put up a good post today going over a writing advice question I hear time and again: i.e., whether you should try to write to the market. I said over there, and I’ll say here too, that even though “don’t try to write to the market” and “be aware of the market” seem contradictory on the surface, for me they’re actually kind of not. You want to be aware of what people who aren’t you are writing, so you aren’t writing in a complete and utter vacuum, and accidentally writing stuff that people lost interest in reading five or ten or even more years ago. Plus, you never know what awesome ideas you may have spark for your next book.

***

Fellow Carina fantasy author Shawna Thomas is talking up her work over at Eleri Stone’s place, and in particular about coming-of-age fantasy. Go give her a look, ’cause fantasy by Carina is love!

***

I’ve been following the news posts on TheOneRing.net for a while now, because hi, yeah, Tolkien geek, yo. But this post of theirs made me up and join their message forums for the express purpose of voicing my appreciation to their forums member who wrote some nice fanfic about Dís, the mother of the dwarves Kíli and Fíli, the only female dwarf Tolkien ever named. Looks like Cirashala’s getting her epic on with further fanfic about the character, too, based on what she’s saying in the thread that the news post links to. I approve!

***

And last but least, speaking of Tolkien, I’m posting about reading fantasy in other languages over on Here Be Magic today! I talk up the Trilingual Hobbit Reread, but also a couple of the novels I want to read out of Quebec SF/F as well, like the ones by Élodie Tirel I’ve been talking about, as well as Esther Rochon.

C’mon over and tell me about nifty non-Anglophone genre works English speakers should know about, won’t you?

January 14, 2014 by
The Murkworks

Murkworks.net mail and mailing lists still down

FYI to all, our mail server at Murkworks.net remains down. Dara tried to swap out the power supply last night, but that didn’t work, so now she’s working on swapping out the motherboard in the system in question.

Anyone who usually gets mail on our system, please tell folks to contact you via alternate email addresses today if they need to. If you need to ping me by email, my annathepiper address on gmail will work.

Mailing lists that we host remain also out of commission (which is particularly irritating to me, given that we just took over the filk list)!

Web services however are UP, and all web sites that we host should be working correctly, since we keep web sites on one of the other servers.

More bulletins as events warrant.

ETA: The attempt to install the motherboard was UNSUCCESSFUL. It’s apparently dead. So I’ll be going out to get us a fresh one for Dara to install. Watch this post for further updates!

January 12, 2014 by
The Internet

Link salad for Sunday

Here are a few links of interest that’ve come across my radar over the last few days. Posting them here, just to clean out some browser tabs, and to give y’all an idea of what I’ve been reading on the Interwebs!

On the topic of why the notion of “Mary Sue” is oftentimes sexist, a thing which has been bubbling around in my brain for a while now:

Mary Sue, what are you? or why the concept of Sue is sexist, from adventuresofcomicbookgirl on tumblr

An Introduction to Mary Sue and Her Critical Uses and Abuses (text) from author Kate Nepveu on her dreamwidth account

On the entitlement and sexism of one particular asshat’s posting of a picture while attending a school play:

“I’m Not Apologizing for Voicing My Opinion”: Entitlement Goes to a Middle School Play from Bitter Gertrude

And on Disney’s imminent shakeup of the Star Wars Expanded Universe, relevant to my interests as an owner of QUITE a few Star Wars novels, not to mention my stint on Star Wars MUSH:

Op-ed: Disney takes a chainsaw to the Star Wars expanded universe, on arstechnica

January 12, 2014 by
The Murkworks

POWER RESTORED at murkworks.net but mail server still down

We have power back at the Murkworks now but I apparently shut the damn servers down incorrectly. Door and lodestone came back online but newmoon did NOT. So now the server appears to be broken. 🙁 🙁

Dara is home from her concom meeting and diagnosing. This means that while we now have restored main murkworks.net connectivity as well as hosted web pages, mail services are still out of commission, including individual mail accounts as well as hosted mailing lists. Stand by for further updates.

January 11, 2014 by
The Murkworks

POWER OUT at Murkworks.net

All,

The power just died at our house thanks to the exciting weather we’re having today (and MUCH to the vexation of housemate Paul, since the Seahawks game JUST started).

I am about to shut down our servers. Which means that our hosted resources, web pages and mailing lists, are about to become inaccessible for the duration of the outage.

I will post updates to social networks, so if you’re not following me on Twitter (annathepiper), Facebook (annathepiper), or Google+ (Angela Korra’ti), find me in those places. I’ll also post to LJ and Dreamwidth when I know if we have an ETA on the power coming back.

Apologies for the inconvenience all! Stupid weather. 🙁

January 11, 2014 by
About Me

Hi there, visitors from transformativeworks.org

Whoa hey, a sudden flurry of hits from the site transformativeworks.org has alerted me to having gotten linked to right over here! It’s a roundup of reactions to the story I posted about last month, when a Sherlock fanfic writer’s saucy fic got unexpectedly thrust into the faces of Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman when interviewer Caitlin Moran asked them to read it out loud.

So um hi, people coming over from transformativeworks.org! Say hi if you see this post. As I said in the post that got linked to, I’m fanfic-friendly, and have been both a reader and a writer of fanfic in my day!

And to the rest of you, if you’re also fanfic-friendly and don’t already know about transformativeworks.org, you might go check ’em out.

January 10, 2014 by
Music

Current side project

For those of you who haven’t already seen me posting about this on the social networks, Dara and I have taken over management of the Emerald Forest Filk site and associated mailing list. This is the Pacific-Northwest-specific filk community site and mailing list, previously hosted by our friend JT Traub. JT needed to step down from being admin of the site and list, and since we had the resources to handle it, we took it over from him.

So now we own the Emerald Forest Filk site, which we set up as a WordPress blog, and we’ve recruited a few volunteers who will be periodically posting things of interest to the Pacific Northwest Filk community. Since it’s WordPress, you can subscribe to the RSS of the posts there via your RSS reader of choice.

We’ve also set up a Facebook account and a Twitter account, and anything that goes up on the site will echo out to there, too. So you can follow the site via either of those means as well.

So if you’re interested in filk music, whether in the Pacific Northwest specifically or just in general, come check the site out. And if there are particular things you’d be interested in seeing posted about there, talk to me or Dara!

January 9, 2014 by