Another post from another airport. This time it’s Toulouse. A quick word to the wise. Don’t look for coffee after 9pm in Toulouse Airport once you get through security. If you’re desperate, though, there is a machine which will remind you nostalgically of the Share and Enjoy machines from Hitchhikers Guide. So with a cup of something which is almost but not quite entirely unlike coffee I intend to summarise some tweets.
Parenthetically, I’m not bringing back the weekly roundup, so much as expanding a little on the week’s Inflatable tweets. Call it a tweet-up. Not sure I can live with that, but never mind.
[Edit: Well duh. I learn from How to Leave Twitter by @gracedent that a tweet-up is a twitter related meet up, and so couldn’t possibly be a Twitter round up. Ho hum. Title amended].
I’m not yet sure about the best format for this, either. For now I’m going to leave the tweets themselves more or less alone apart from inlining the links and adding minimal context. After that I’ll riff a little about anything from the list that leaps out at me. First the tweets:
Flying home, I encountered a child with “Little F***er” uncensored on his t-shirt. Turns out the motto was accurate. Did the slogan cause or just reflect this?
Soundtracks for ebooks. Is it just me, or is that a TERRIBLE idea?
Eve of family return from French vacation. Charging 2 iPhones, 1 iPad, a PSP, a camera, an iPod, an iPod touch, 2 laptops, a DSI. Oh my god.
Juliette Wade posted a link to some famale combat attire which was altogether more sensible and less chilly than standard fantasy book cover fighting wear.
An Inflatable link: Flashbacks considered harmful? I’m not so sure.
One step further than editing in passes: writing in layers – The Daring Novelist
Connie Willis wins Hugo Award for Blackout. Really? Where is the retrieval team? Maybe history has gone wonky? Help!
Chuck Wendig of Terribleminds on putting yourself about online: “You are not a logo, a marketing agenda, a mouthpiece…” Damn. There goes my social media strategy.
@eliselbert asked me if I am the author of a book called PHP Objects Patterns and Practice. Turns out, why yes. Yes, I am.
Missed too many of the 10 thingies to make your writing wotsit type posts? Try this list of lists from Write it Sideways
At Writer Unboxed James Scott Bell argued writers should treat dialogue as a weapon – ie every utterance should be yoked to a character’s agenda.
How many pages of inaction should you suffer before you chuck a book? I have a low tolerance for books in which nothing happens. On the other hand I recently read a bad book twice just to work out why it sucked. Guess which book? Hint: it won a major genre award recently.
OK, so I just can’t leave the Hugo win alone. I don’t really follow these things, so I’m unaware of the politics and traditions that surround both the Hugo or Nebula awards. And I’m not so confident in my critical faculties that I’m entirely sure I’m not wrong here. Perhaps there’s a layer of irony in Blackout that I’m just missing. Maybe it’s like the ineffable quality of greatness that completely eludes me but apparently means the output of Mark E Smith is not utter drivel.
In both cases plenty of people I respect seem to get it, while I remain mystified. So, seriously. I may be missing something. Certainly, I understand that Connie Willis is a talented writer, and that some of her previous novels have been very fine indeed.
After reading it closely twice, however, and making copious notes, it seems painfully and abundantly obvious to me that Blackout is just not a very good book. And it seems strange to me that a not very good book should win prestigious awards. In fact it seems to me this is a Bad Thing, because other, good, books won’t get the recognition they deserve, and a genre is then misrepresented to the reading public.
Next week I’ll post some practical thoughts about the book itself. In the meantime.. I’m home now, and the coffee is much better. And better still it’s a Saturday night. Time for a beer.
By the way, you could follow @inflatableink on Twitter. Just saying.
