Linked List – Novelr - Making People Read

Quarter stories is a writing project where people are paid 25 cents to write a story about a photograph. Pretty cool stuff. (via) # (1)

The New Real 2 is MCM’s second #3D1D livewriting event. Follow him as he writes a complete novel in 3 days, on The Dispatch. # (0)

James Bridle on Volcano Fiction:
I could, charmlessly and redundantly, expand on that to say: when life surprises us, making the everyday strange and wonderful, our first impulse is to make stories. These are of course personal stories: the volcano itself is too remote, too vast, to fit into our little narratives. Like Vonnegut’s glaciers, they just exist: human lives happen around them.
Also worth a look: Robin Sloan’s Ash Cloud Tales. # (0)

“You will outlive the bastards.” (Alternatively: do not burn yourselves out.) # (0)

99 year old lady becomes an iPad user – and writes poetry.
“Those are free books? Free …? Oh my, that’s just fantastic!”
Wait for her limerick at the end. I loved it. (via) # (0)

A magazine for the stranded.
This is an open call to designers, writers, photographers, illustrators, art directors and anyone else who is stranded by the ash cloud, and would like something to do. If there’s one thing my ol’ ma taught me, it’s that when life gives you volcanoes, make magazines. And so we shall.
They’re publishing via MagCloud and/or the Newspaper Club. (via) # (0)

New York’s public library now sorts books via scanner:
On one side of the machine, which is two-thirds the length of a football field and encircled by a conveyor belt, staff members place each book face-down on a separate panel of the belt. The book passes under a laser scanner, which reads the bar code on the back cover, and the sorter communicates with the library’s central computer system to determine where the book should be headed. Then, as the conveyor belt moves along, it drops the book into one of 132 bins, each associated with a branch library. It’s sort of like a baggage carousel that knows which bag is yours and deposits it at your feet.
My inner geek is giddy with excitement. # (0)

The Jew’s Daughter is non-linear fiction done right. Beautiful, experimental stuff; sadly – requires flash to run. # (0)

The New Yorker on the iPad, the Kindle, and the future of books:
“Amazon has done a great job” with its Kindle. “We’re going to stand on their shoulders and go a little bit farther.” It would probably have been more accurate to say that Jobs planned to stand on Amazon’s neck and press down hard, with publishers applauding.
I don’t believe the decision to enter publishing to be a reversal for Jobs (who had earlier said that ‘people don’t read anymore’) – to put things in context, the iBookstore’s going to be miniscule if compared to the app store. iBooks – while big for publishers – are merely a blip on Apple’s radar. # (0)

Web fiction writer L. Lee Lowe’s got a post on web fiction over at the National Book Critics Circle:
Let’s be blunt: writers who self-publish online are failures, right? I reckon nine out of ten of you—no, 99 out of 100—are thinking, yeah, too right, though a few may be inclined to be magnanimous and a few more may even have a friend or two, at the very minimum a Facebook friend, who has posted a poem at her blog, added a fiction page to his website.
Oh, and it gets better. # (4)

Slate’s got a fascinating piece on Agatha Christie’s notebooks. I particularly enjoyed this paragraph:
Her less-than-refined writerly day began with finding her notebook, which surely she’d left right there. Then, having found a notebook (not the one she’d used yesterday), and staring in stunned amazement at the illegible chicken scratchings therein, she would finally settle down to jab at elusive characters and oil creaky plots. Most astonishing, Curran discovers that for all her assured skewering of human character in a finished novel, sometimes when Christie started her books, even she didn’t know who the murderer was. Ah! It makes sense—a brilliant mystery writer must first experience the mystery! Or does it?
Which goes to show that even the best of us are only human. # (1)

Kottke on the extinction of paper children’s books:
However, I’d like to assure the childless Rose that if paper books ever go extinct (they won’t), paper children’s books will be the last to go, particularly among the pre-K crowd. E-books are “broken” in several ways that are important to kids, not the least of which is that paper books are super useful as floors in really tall block buildings.
Amen to that. # (2)

Markos Moulitsas’s iPad is now his primary mobile writing tool:
For me, all I care is whether a device makes my life easier. I could give a shit about whether the hackers love or hate it, or how much hype something has. The iPad filled my needs seamlessly, with only minor hassles. It was better than a laptop, allowing me to travel more efficiently.
He spends most of his time surfing, writing, and emailing. (via) # (0)