Constance Ash January 17th, 2007
HBO has acquired the rights to turn George R.R. Martin’s bestselling fantasy series “A Song of Fire and Ice” into a dramatic series to be written and exec produced by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss.
This could be incredible!
Love, C.
Â
Constance Ash December 21st, 2006
The website also provides a difficult interactive that allows you to learn the name of the forthcoming and final Harry book.It doesn’t access very well, either because there’s something wrong with the links, or because it is heavily used.But here are the instructions for that part of it, courtesy of today’s NY Times. Remember to have your audio enabled. It’s pretty good stuff.
[ "Meanwhile, she set up a test for her Potter fans.
If you go to jkrowling.com, click on the eraser and you will be taken to a room -- you'll see a window, a door and a mirror. (By my own experience this link doesn't work, you have to get there via the one I provided above; nor does the eraser thingie work.)
If you go to , click on the eraser and you will be taken to a room -- you'll see a window, a door and a mirror. In the mirror, you'll see a hallway. Click on the farthest doorknob and look for the Christmas tree. Then click on the center of the door next to the mirror and a wreath appears. Then click on the top of the mirror and you'll see a garland.
Look for a cobweb next to the door. Click on it, and it will disappear. Now, look at the chimes in the window. (All of this works, by my experience, up to here -- then it just quits working; the key doesn't appear. Your cursor on the door knob turns the knob, but nothing else happens.) Click on the second chime to the right, and hold it down. The chime will turn into the key, which opens the door. Click on the wrapped gift behind the door, then click on it again and figure out the title yourself by playing a game of hangman." ]
However, by now you all already know the title of the last book is: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.Â
Love, C.
David Louis Edelman December 8th, 2006
Pippin: “You want a song, Denethor? All right, stand back everybody — here’s a little number from NWA called ‘Fuck Tha Police.’”David Louis Edelman November 27th, 2006
Note: I really do try not to duplicate my posts between this blog and my personal blog, but every once in a while I write something that I think is pertinent to both places. Feel free to comment either here or on my personal blog entry.
It’s now been about five months since Pyr published my first novel Infoquake. It seems as good a time as any to sit back and take stock of my promotional efforts. What worked, what didn’t work, what should I have done more of, what should I have done less of?
When I started to make a list of all the promotional efforts I’ve made in the past year, I started to feel — well, a little embarrassed. To an outsider, it must look like I do nothing all day but come up with ways to move copies of Infoquake. The “Infoquakes Cereal” pic here is meant to be a joke, but honestly, sometimes it feels like I’ve tried everything but a sugary cereal for kids.
(Quick aside: Have you ever noticed that when companies say their cereal is “part of this nutritious breakfast,” the cereal box is always sitting next to… a complete nutritious breakfast?)
Here, then, are the promotional efforts I did that I think were well worth doing:
Katharine Kerr August 31st, 2006
Yet another voice from the grave — someone found the outline and some notes for a novel Heinlein never wrote, and now Spider Robinson has written it.  For all I know, VARIABLE STAR might be a really good book, but I’ll wager that the publisher wasn’t thinking about its quality when they set the project in motion.  Lately there have been a number of these “dead writer speaks” projects, such as the new “Sanditon” and the pseudo-Sayers THRONES, POWERS, AND DOMINATIONS. Â
 To me, these are different from the continuations of classic series, such as Sherwood’s Oz books, which are going to be much much better than the originals, or the “Endless Dune” series, which at least aren’t any worse than the orginal sequels were. When someone creates a world, like Oz or Dune, one can make a case for setting new stories within it, assuming the author agrees — or his/her heirs do.  I have no doubt that Baum would agree, because he was a deeply commercial writer who wrote Oz to entertain others and make himself money.   Herbert — I dunno.
But this “new” Heinlein was meant to be a stand-alone, as was SANDITON. Austen had ambitions for her work well beyond the entertainment level. Sayers’ work deepened with every Peter Wimsey she wrote, but TPD is not a deep book.  I see these as a different kind of publisher-driven projects. I don’t like them, for reasons that might be irrational.  I do know that I’m going to leave instructions to my literary executor to burn all my papers and wipe my hard disk when I die.  (Kevin, take note!)  I don’t want my name on any book that I haven’t had the chance to edit, revise, and polish to my (probably low anyway) standards.
How do others feel about this?
Kevin Andrew Murphy July 27th, 2006
Last year, just in time for Comicon, my sister scheduled her wedding opposite the Masquerade, which I consequently missed. This year? Well, I missed the Masquerade again, but only because of other complications.
Where to start? Where to end? Egads, I’ve been going to this thing for twenty years now, saw it when it was small, saw it when it was dying, then saw it when it moved to the new convention center and doubled in size every year, even as they continued to enlarge the convention center. I remember a couple years ago when I made the mistake of being on the main floor when the crowd capacity overtaxed the air conditioning and I nearly fainted on top of Guillermo Del Toro as he was slipping out the back of the Marvel booth and under my arm as I supported myself on a pillar.
Constance Ash July 16th, 2006
“The days of judging a book by its cover are drawing to a close. Publishers have finally tapped into the MTV generation, and now it is possible to make your literary choices in advance online by watching a sequence of rapid-fire images accompanied by a thumping score, big flashing words and, if you’re lucky, a deep-voiced American talking about ‘one man’ and ‘his quest to find meaning in a world gone mad’. Yes: there are now trailers for books and soon, according to Steve Osgoode, director of online marketing at HarperCollins Canada, they will be everywhere.”
Constance Ash July 13th, 2006
 Deep Genre; Introduction; Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5;
Part 6
“Vampires” is a populous subgenre. Perhaps you would like to create a work featuring a vampire or vampires, but, you wonder, being the professional genre writer that you are, “Will anybody be interested in another novel, another movie, another television program or a non-fiction study dealing with vampires? There have been so many since Stoker’s classic Dracula.“Â
Constance Ash July 8th, 2006
This past Thursday, but you can see what it was about by going to the NPR-ATC site and clicking here. It was part of their ongoing summer series, You Must Read This. Barns chose Mosley’s Intergalactic Coming-of-Age Tale: ‘47′.
I keep waiting to see how he’ll wind up the Zulu series ….
For one thing, he’s one of the very few SF male writers with the ability to write romance-sex scenes without turning ludicrous! Recall how uncomfortable and unbelievable were the clinches of Sheridan and DeLenn on the mostly wonderful Babylon-5?
Love, C.
Constance Ash June 30th, 2006
Deep Genre; Introduction; Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 5; Part 6;
Part 4
In Stoker’s era a woman who had sexually sinned was infectious, a contagious miasma. She who violated the sexual rule that she never submit but to her husband’s sexual appetite needed to be quarantined from all other respectable persons, especially other women, for they too might catch her evil taint. Therefore, as in Stoker’s novel, Mina (danced by CindyMarie Small) is not present during Dracula’s seduction of Lucy. In the film Mina’s at the nebulously located convent where her financé, Jonathan Harker, has taken refuge, ill from the erotic fog Dracula’s vampire harem cast over him.
The ballet enacts this via Mina’s reading of his journal.
In Stoker’s novel Mina’s letters, journals, her cutup of information out of newspapers and other sources (very modern structural technique here, as critics have noticed with joy), her skills with typewriter and stenography and knowledge of train schedules and all the other technical tools of Victorian capital administration are utilized by her. She tries to defeat Dracula by exercising the powers of her formidible mind – the mind that Van Helsing so admires that he elevates it to the status of her soul. Mina is active in her work to save Jonathan and herself, to track the monster, Dracula. Lucy merely submits. Writhing in voluptuous acquiescence, Lucy invites him in.