Getting Out More

...well, at least on the internet. Seriously, I read more than the three blogs I've been running around interlinking with for the last few days. What else have I been reading?

Will Shetterly is also talking, as is most of the country, about race.

In Florida in the early '60s—when I was marching with my family for civil rights, when we got anonymous death threats in the night, when we couldn't get fire insurance because word was out that the Ku Klux Klan would burn us down—the classifications of prejudice were precise:

He's also making pronouncements on the subject of endings.

There are two kinds of endings, abrupt ones and leisurely ones. When they work, they work for the same reason: they imply that characters' lives have been changed by the events of the story. That may be especially true of stories that restore the status quo—in the best of those stories, the world is restored, but the characters and their relationships have changed.

Kelly McCullough is writing about endings too, specifically happy ones.

...one human being’s lie is another’s necessary myth. Sometimes you’re in a place in your life where you need look no further than tomorrow to see how ugly the world can be and then that lie of happily ever after can be the myth that keeps hope alive long enough for freedom or healing or happiness to become truth.

K. Tempest Bradford is, in her inimitable style, offering a different sort of advice for writers.

All you authors out there, we need to have a talk. Sit down.

Tell me, if someone were to Google your name, or the name you write under, right now, would they be able to find you?

Reesa Brown and Kit O’Connell are starting a series on business advice for artists.

Presuming the words “business model” haven’t already scared off our artistic readers, how do you start approaching this topic? Well, the same technology that provides new means of telling stories and sharing art provides new means of deriving income from the stories.

Christopher Waldrop just really wants to know whether zombies are dead.

But there are only so many things you can do with a walking corpse. What made Shaun Of The Dead so damned funny was that the zombies were almost secondary to the drama of a guy reluctantly growing up, but that’s also why, watching it, I felt like it was the apex of the zombie genre.

Jessica Palmer doesn't just want to know things. She wants to know how we know things, and she features a project that can help us figure that out.

One of the hardest tasks I encountered as a professor was getting my students to recognize that all of their convictions - even assumptions as basic as "the world is round" or "the sun will come up tomorrow" - are built on a lifetime of accumulated experience. Sometimes the experience is direct: we've all seen the sun come up. But sometimes it's not.

And almost immediately after posting an apology for her lack of posts (and hours before McCain tried to use it against Obama), Muse in Vivo brings us back to politics by dissecting the idea that spreading the wealth is a bad thing.

Seeing as that ideal - of a full time worker being capable of maintaining a basic quality of life - is not exactly working out on its own, we as a society need to fix something.

Enjoy. I did.