You may have noticed it has gone a little quiet around here in the last week or two. I’ve been in the States for my day job. That and various writing projects have sapped my attention. Instead of just promising to be better in future, I’ve drafted in another writer to contribute to the site. Welcome to my old friend and editor Steph. Steph, who will be posting links, and probably other stuff in coming weeks, will no-doubt post a mini-bio at the foot of this post.
The economy is falling apart; healthcare reform stopped short of contraception; Mel Gibson has been feeding the bears again; and the oil spill seems to have been finally capped, which has to be good news for all ocean-going creatures. This has been one heck of a week for America. I’ve never been so glad to live in the UK, where all we have to worry about is drunken politicians and third-storey tube stations. Oh, and football, of course. Some of us may have stopped watching long before the final, but Britain’s Poet Laureate still went ahead and wrote a World Cup poem. About defeat. Oh well.
I’m blown away by the sheer quantity of things that I could blather on about in this slot. It took me several hours to get down to a mere hundred or so interesting links, but don’t worry—your eyes are safe. I already know nobody reads long essays any more. I read it in that long essay I just linked.
When Matt first invited me to join him online for the summer, we had a long discussion about the kind of English we should use on his site. British English? US English? Perhaps some homogenised mid-Atlantic mix, invented by us especially for the www? (io9 could have helped us out there.) It seems we scooped The Economist, where almost exactly the same debate was held last week, and we even came to much the same conclusion: if you’re based in the UK, and you’re not aiming exclusively at a US readership, go with British English. In other words, be yourself.
Stacia Kane wrote an interesting blog entry, republished on io9.com, about the distinction between writing as art-with-a-capital-A and writing for a living. Stacia argues that if whatever you’re writing doesn’t fire you up, it can hardly be expected to communicate passion to others. She wonders—among other things—just how far an author should be expected to compromise in order to sell his or her material? The perennial cry of all artists down the ages, but it’s good to see these questions explored here and now, given the current political and economic woes both sides of the pond.
Talk of artistic compromise leads me straight to zombies, naturally enough. Several blogs reported that a car-load of The Undead crashed in Portland, Oregon on their way to a party last week (and yes, please do as I did and blink—just once—at the line about the ones that “fled the scene on foot”). As zombie-free author Janice Hardy could have told them, that’s what you get for jumping on the bandwagon. Meme, shmeme.
Steph is a freelance editor and writer.
