Linked List – Novelr - Making People Read

Isa has written what I’ll call The Best Piece on Web Fiction You’ll Read This Week. It’s the results of a survey she undertook a couple of weeks back, covering the readers and writers of fanfiction, web fiction, webcomics and role plays. # (0)

Japanese Author Skirts Publishers With iPad Novel:
Let the nightmare begin. Novelist Ryu Murakami plans to release his latest novel exclusively for digital bookworms through Apple Inc.’s iPad ahead of the print version.
Appears to be a trend – Stephen King did something similar in April this year. # (0)

Does Language Influence Culture? Lera Boroditsky for the Wall Street Journal:
English speakers tend to say things like “John broke the vase” even for accidents. Speakers of Spanish or Japanese would be more likely to say “the vase broke itself.” Such differences between languages have profound consequences for how their speakers understand events, construct notions of causality and agency, what they remember as eyewitnesses and how much they blame and punish others.
Somewhat related: what language do the deaf think in? (thx, Tanushri) # (0)

Janet Fitch’s 10 writing tips that can help almost anyone:
The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story. Sometimes we try to protect them from getting booboos that are too big. Don’t. This is your protagonist, not your kid.
# (1)

I find your lack of faith disturbing: SLEDGEHAMMER AND WHORE is a screenwriter’s rant at procedural tv shows.
The stories I love often involve world-building. But most people working in the tv business are terrified of building worlds. They want shows that are relatable and recognizable. They want real worlds with real people that will under no condition make viewers uncomfortable or remind them of anything remotely strange and unknown. No Ordinary Family is a perfect example of this: the family is Absolutely Ordinary until they’re NOT. And when they’re NOT, they respond to that very NOT-ness just as any other Ordinary Family would.
Then he finds a whore in his office and decides to write a procedural around that. # (0)

I quite like this: Monique Jone’s Polite Society. Great theme choice, and lovely character drawings. # (4)

Web Series Writing Month is out. 10 days left for registration – go knock yourself out (literally!) for a month of serial writing. # (0)

SlushPile Hell is one literary agent’s attempt to chronicle the worst of writer queries. It is also rather funny. (via) # (3)

A Computer Engineer studies literary deconstruction and comes back with one hell of an essay:
The basic enterprise of contemporary literary criticism is actually quite simple. It is based on the observation that with a sufficient amount of clever handwaving and artful verbiage, you can interpret any piece of writing as a statement about anything at all.
So, so true. # (3)

Kas Thomas: In defense of PDF. There’s an excellent overview of how the format came to be in the beginning of this article, and Thomas’s thesis reads largely correct. I do not, however, think there are many threats to PDF today, so far as print-and-share documents are concerned. # (1)