Thanks to eldritchhobbit, seperis, and lemonitsa for the snowflake cookies on my profile! Those are really cute.


art link: Phil McDarby, Digital Artist

I'm hoping today is a better day than yesterday.

Links:

jimhines is doing his yearly book drive for a domestic violence shelter.

Terrible Yellow Eyes a collection of fan art for Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are

Gargoyles, from all over the world.

An article from DearAuthor: New FTC rules for Bloggers: The FTC and the Case of Unreasonable Disclosure. Not sure how this will affect me, as I don't generally get books for free. I either buy them or get them from the library or borrow them from friends.
ETA: FTC Guide re Endorsement Update

book rec: An Old Chaos by Sheila Simonson, author of Bar Sinister, Lady Elizabeth's Comet, the Lark Dodge mysteries. Really enjoyed this, though it's the characters that make this book rather than the mystery. (disclosure: I did not get this book free from the author or the publisher, but from a gift card sent by a friend not associated with author or publisher for my birthday. See, this could get old fast.)

art site: Kris Kuksi the sculpture is incredible.


Some people have probably already heard of this site, but it was recommended on the Black Gate blog: Query Shark -- book queries critiqued.

Agents have been getting huge numbers of online queries this year, to the point where it's overwhelming, and a huge number of those queries do not follow the submission guidelines posted on the agency web sites. They don't send it in the right format, they don't include the right information, they query for genres the agents do not represent. They waste time, the agent's time, the author's time, the intertube's time, everybody's time. Like I told the group in my program at WriterCon, if you just carefully follow the submission guidelines of whatever you are submitting to, this will put you ahead of a surprisingly large percentage of other people. It's sad, but true.

I've also got a small collection of publishing information sites and articles for new writers on my web site.

The pot roast last night turned out very well. There will be sandwiches with gravy for lunch today, oh yes, there will.

I'm getting a fall check for the furnace today, because as cool as the weather has been, we might actually need it soon.

No news on the job front. Troyce has put in a lot of applications, but none of the positions stay posted long, which means there are tons of applicants.


art sites:

Charles Vess

One of my favorites: Thomas Canty here and here.

Another great informational post from tacithydra: Freivald's Flash Fiction Online is a Queer Unfriendly Market. They refused an ad for Crossed Genres Magazine LGBTQ issue.

BTW, the lovely art for the ad is by Paul Davey: Mattahan and he's got some new art up on his deviantart site, including some Dossouye portraits (from Charles Saunders' fantasy novel Dossouye).


On the personal front, things are not good. As far as we know, Troyce is still scheduled to be laid off at the end of this month. He's applied for the few IT jobs that are listed at the university, here in town, and outside of town, but there's been no word back yet. The jobs tend to appear for a short time in the listings, then get pulled, probably because there are so many applicants.

I got a hellaciously painful cramp in my left hand from typing Tuesday, so bad I thought I had actually sprained my hand somehow. It started to feel better fairly soon and was pretty much gone by yesterday afternoon, but damn. I think I have a better idea now of how much I can type in a ten-hour period and how I shouldn't do more than that. stinabat said that calcium can help, and I noticed I had been slacking off on my calcium pills lately. So let that be a lesson to the rest of you.

And the weather has been much better. There was a cold front last week that dropped the temperature to 90, and the past couple of days it's been raining. It's also hurricane season, so I need to remember to start stocking up on canned food, cat supplies, etc.

And here's a link to a list of Hurricane Ike Anniversary Events at Galveston

Here's a more direct link to Stephan Martiniere's City Without Ends.


No real news to report, we're still waiting to hear for certain. We canceled our land line phone service, and the expensive cable package, and we're trying to redo our car insurance in a way that should cut it in half, though we'll have to drop collision insurance on Troyce's truck. And if he is laid off, we won't be able to afford health insurance, but that just puts us in the same boat with a whole lot of other people.

More art-related posts:

Jim Hines: Sexism is Not About Your Ego: There are people, myself included, who have been watching to see how Realms would move forward under new management and whether this trend would change. To see whether Realms would continue the boobs and chainmail cliches. We got one out of two.

In the comments, bearmountain makes a good point about the covers for Black Gate, that they depict intriguing scenes and landscapes (without naked women) that make you want to read the stories. I think that really nails what draws me in about particular covers. I'm not big on character portrait covers (with gigantor boobs or without) because I haven't read the book yet and I have no idea who that is, and also know the chances of the portrait on the cover actually resembling anybody in the book is probably hovering at 05% at best. (I expect the effect is different if it's a character I probably already know, like Elric or Miles Vorkosigan, for instance.) Awesome fantasy landscapes, fascinating cities, an intriguing action scene, are a lot more likely to make me pick up a book.

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and on a different topic, John Picacio's An Open Letter to Adam Roberts.

Here are the gorgeous gallery sites of Donato Giancola, Dan Dos Santos, Bob Eggleton, and John Picacio again.

We had a huge storm yesterday evening, with a couple hours worth of pouring rain and a tornado warning. I think it was about seven miles away to the southeast of our house. It got scary for a while, with the pine trees outside the second floor windows getting all bendy and limbs coming off and slamming into the roof. Apparently the TV station less than a mile away got hit by lightning twice. Yikes.

Hopefully it'll rain again today; we have a lot of drought to make up for.

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Haven't done this for a while, so here's some art links:

Jessie Wilcox Smith 1863-1935 Fairy tale illustrations.

John Picacio from San Antonio, TX.

The Chesley Award Nominees are posted. I especially loved the entries for Unpublished Color and Unpublished Monochrome.

art link: Mattahan This is Paul Davey, the artist who did the gorgeous cover for Cross Genres Magazine.


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supurnuva asked: What are some good online writing resources? Specifically, I think it'd be helpful to do short, daily prompts to get into the writing zone. It helps not to dive into an existing project cold. I guess I'm asking for the writing equivalent of warm up exercises or stretches? But if there are other online resources you like, I'd love to hear about them. Thanks!

I've never used it myself, but this site, WritingFix, does has interactive writing prompts.

There's also Write or Die on Dr. Wicked's Writing Lab. Write or Die is a web application that encourages writing by punishing the tendency to avoid writing. Start typing in the box. As long as you keep typing, you're fine, but once you stop typing, you have a grace period of a certain number of seconds and then there are consequences. I've seen people talk about using this one and having a lot of fun with it.

Does anybody else have any favorite writing exercises, prompt sites, etc, to suggest?


I'm still taking writing questions here.

The Breast Cancer Site Needs Clicks: There's only 15 days left to get enough clicks for a $10,000 donation.

In honor of National Library Week, findingDulcinea spotlights five librarian bloggers who cover a range of important and interesting issues, including children’s media literacy, reviews of e-products for libraries, how librarians can keep their skills up to date and tips for elementary school librarians.

Art link: Raymond Swanland

From eldritchhobbit: artist M.S. Corley redesigned the Harry Potter book covers to look like the old Penguin Books covers.

Neat stuff from WebUrbanist: Seven Urban Wonders of the Modern World

art link: Ciruelo Cabral Hit the "gallery" tab, then the "tour" button toward the bottom right, and you can click through the art.

And if you need to see something cute this morning: Susan Van Camp Kitties, lots and lots of kitties.

More art for Sunday morning or whatever time it is in your part of the world:

Warwick Goble here and here. 1862-1943 Children's book illustrations.

George Grie surrealist fantasy landscapes.

Michael Whelan, my favorite. The new landscapes/dreamscapes he's doing are fabulous.

Art links:


Margaret Brundage She did a lot of covers for Weird Tales from 1933 to 1938: Brundage's art frequently featured damsels in distress in various states of full or partial nudity; her whipping scenes were especially noteworthy and controversial. There's an official site for her but it's still under construction.

And the opposite end of the spectrum: Ida Rentoul Outhwaite Children's fairy tale illustrations. Here's one of her sections at the Children's Book Illustrations Gallery.

The Galveston webcam page has added a Penguin webcam, where you can watch the inside of part of the penguin exhibit at Moody Gardens. Penguins!

Here's another Kay Nielsen gallery, not sure if it's got anything the previous one didn't have.

I went back to aerobics class today after taking last week off, and yes, I could really tell I'd taken a week off. Augh.

Site I just stumbled on: Children's Book Illustrators and Illustrations. Check out the gallery for oodles of gorgeous art. I hadn't seen those Kay Nielsen illustrations for East of the Sun, West of the Moon before.

It's a freezing rain day here, not fun.

art links:

David Cherry official site, another gallery. I couldn't find much of his art on the web, which is too bad. He has some wonderful pieces of fantasy portrait art.

Rodney Matthews official site, another gallery. He has some very cool fantasy landscapes, like this one.

It snowed here last night. That doesn't usually happen. What we normally get is fairly mild weather up until February, where there's usually one vicious ice storm, and that's it for winter. I doubt it'll stay around long, because it just doesn't feel that cold out there. Freaky.

I took pictures, hopefully I'll be able to get them off the camera and post them later.

Kitty is back home and doing fine, which is a relief, though the pain medication is the kitty equivalent of being hopped up on goofballs.

art link: Edmund Dulac Lush fairytale illustrations.

From weburbanist:

The Private Lives of Toys

From darkroastedblend:

Miniature Palaces, including a hobbit dollhouse.

art link:

Alicia Austin

Meant to post this earlier and forgot. art link: Stephanie Pui-Mun Law. Gorgeous fantasy art.