Category Archives: Links

Double Take

The new covers for the seventh and final Harry Potter book have been released.

Throughout the entire series, I have been glad that my country sells the UK-based designs, because I prefer them.

Until now.

I am stunned to see that I actually prefer the US cover to this book. I may buy the adult cover of the UK edition instead of the junior cover, despite my obsessive need to have matching sets on my shelves. None of the covers, US or UK, really interest me this time around. Not that the series cover art has ever been anything to hang on a wall, but this time it all seems particularly bland.

Eighty Years of Genius

Happy birthday, Rostropovich!

(Irony: I spelled the name this way, then noticed that the CBC headline had a ‘t’ in the last name. I double-checked to make sure, and yes, I’ve spelled it correctly, and they got it wrong. The URL has the correct spelling embedded in it, as does the body of the article. Gah. Does no one proof these things?)

Also: Who is this Slava guy, anyway?

Apropos Of Not Much, AKA Distraction

My most recent wish-I-had thing is a five-string cello. It would be so, so very nice to be able to play low B (and lower!) without going to the trouble of downtuning and changing fingering.

Also, making part of your instrument from 250 year old reclaimed Pennsylvanian barn wood is just awesome. (Most of the instrument, actually, as this is an e-cello and thus consists mainly of fingerboard.)

I need to get some Philip Sheppard CDs, now. The samples on this page are beautiful. You can hear more at BMGZomba, a media-industry library of music clips for trailers and so forth, by searching “Philip Sheppard”. ‘Crystallised Beauty’ is being used for the ITV Jane Austen season, which is what led me to Sheppard’s other music.

Not What You Think It Means

I really want to believe that a journalist was aiming for a punnish-like thing in composing this headline, but it’s more likely that s/he simply didn’t think this through:

Rare gladiator marbles discovered in major Italian art bust

Rare because gladiators weren’t big marble players; they preferred tetherball. And these must be really special marbles, too, because they were discovered during an art bust (“*in* an actual bust, as the headline could also be read, would be stretching my patience just too far), so they’re probably collectibles!

(Yes, I know what marbles are. But I’ll bet that at least eighty percent of people who encountered this headline didn’t until they read the article.)

Die, Angst, Die

Argh! My characters are angsting about the last scene and what happened therein.

So of course I have now combined Radio Sunnydale and BtVS: The Album in a playlist to counter it. (Because there’s nothing angsty about Buffy, oh no.)

No, this music is not conducive to the era or atmosphere I am trying to cultivate for this novel. But it’s sure destroying the angst that’s built up. Move on, people. Advance the plot! Quit moaning about how your lives are changing and how you don’t know where you’re going, and get on with the change.

(See? Right on cue, Joey Ramone’s “Stop Thinking About It” has come up. Obey Joey, characters.)

LATER: Yes, butchering and skinning swans is a much better activity than angsting. Yikes. (Now I theoretically know how to skin a bird. I should go through Fearsclave‘s archives and dig out all the entries that discuss dressing fowl corpses, to pay more attention to detail.)

Writing Truisms

Matociquala reminds everyone about one of the overlooked/unknown truths regarding professional writing:

(this pro writer thing isn’t just writing. There are page proofs, interviews, research, contracts, business nonsense, copy-edits. There is slush to read. There is Stuff. Stuff takes up a couple of hours a day. Every day. Some days it can take ALL DAY.)

and

continued creative output requires continuous creative input.

The Stuff can really mire you down. Particularly if, like me, you forget that it’s part and parcel of the whole career while you’re doing it, and think it doesn’t qualify as Real Work.