Another week, another round up.
In the Observer Aleks Krotoski interviewed Cory Doctorow, and discussed his practice of publishing under the Creative Commons licence.
Forget their lamentable record on the war, and on human rights, is there anything of literary merit to be found in the remains of the discredited New Labour project? Nope, said Robert McCrum also in the Observer.
Roz Morris at DirtyWhiteCandy discussed writing unremarkable first meetings. How do you get over the fact that your cataclysmically important relationship starts in supermarket check out queue?
At StoryFix Larry Brooks took a look at short story structure. A particularly interesting post for me as I approach the end of a month of short stories.
What if the banners and burners of books are right? In The New Yorker John Lahr reviewed The Metal Children, a play by Adam Rapp. The play explores the limits of acceptability in YA novels. Made all the more interesting by Rapp’s own run in with the family values brigade, his conclusions are far from unambiguous.
Charles Stross is writing a novel set in the near future. The trouble is, the near future just won’t play nice.
Lest we forget, Tuesday was Towel Day. A great way of honouring the memory of a great man: Douglas Adams. If you don’t think so, you might instead take the advice of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation and go stick your head in a pig.
I had to head back to DirtyWhiteCandy again when I picked up Eddie.. you know Eddie.. Eddie’s in the Space/Time Continuum (that’s another Hitchhiker’s Guide, joke. Sorry). Anyway it turned out to be my required Doctor Who link of the week. Roz Morris railed against the show’s lazy story telling. She’s right, of course. This series is a vast improvement on the last, but really most episodes trundle along until it’s time for some running around at the end.
The wonderful AL Kennedy (who addresses her readers as Best Beloveds) wrote about magic, illusion and story in her Guardian column this week.
