[Hat tip to the Speak Coffee to Me blog’s consistently brilliant selections in its Ad of the Week series]
“What Time Is It?” “Time to Wish You Were in Prague.”
Per Eileen of Speak Coffee to Me, this awesome* video of a projection on the Prague Orloj, an “astronomical clock tower.” “The 600 Years” refers to the number of years since the clock was first built — years which pass by as you watch the video:
It’s the handiwork of a project known as The Macula, “dealing with the relationship between image, sound and audience.” If you follow that link to their site, be sure to nose around some to view more of their other work… including similar projection-on-buildings pieces.
The logistical problems they had to solve to make this overwhelm my brain. Just getting the perspective right had to be a matter of a lot of experimentation and calculation.
_________________________
* The word is here no cliche.
“Sometimes I Tie a Hair to a Piece of Lint and I Drag It Around”
Some things are just too entertaining and… unclassifiable not to pass around. Hence: “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.”
[Hat tip to Eileen of Speak Coffee to Me, temporarily coming out of… well, you know.]
LitFic: Online Resources
The other day, Moonrat replied to a question about the acceptability of collections of “linked” short stories: stories united by a common theme, cast of characters, whatever. Along the way, she wondered what the state of short fiction in general might be, in these days when writers seem so focused on books.*
(The comments surprised her, and me too, by implying there are a lot of short-story readers out there. On the other hand, the readers tend to be writers of short stories, too — which implies a certain… goal orientation, let’s say.)
One gauge of continued interest in short stories (and poetry, and “creative non-fiction” as they call essays these days) is the health of the literary-fiction markets. Eileen, a/k/a Speak Coffee to Me, points us to a post at the Third Coast** blog — a “linkbucket” of online resources:
There’s much more to revolution and innovation in literature than the Kindle. To find some, all you have to do is open your browser.
I knew of the DuoTrope directory of magazines (both print and online); it’s been linked to for months over at the right, in the the “Writer’s Biz Resources” category. (I didn’t know, though, about its submission-tracking feature.) And including general links to Twitter and Facebook — not to specific resources there, just to the services’ home pages — seems, er, a little… obvious?
But whether you’re a writer or reader of literary fiction, you could build a pretty respectable list of browser bookmarks from nosing around the links the post provides: consider it a “Start Here” post on the subject.
________________
* Hey, you can be a writer of short stories, but we all want to be authors — which means books, right?
** If you’re imagining the “Third Coast” to be along the Gulf of Mexico, er, not. Try the Great Lakes.
Okay, I Still Hate the Name “SyFy”…
…and probably always will. But this is a pretty damned impressive advertisement/trailer:
It sort of compresses all the memes from the SyFy cable network’s distinctive bumper spots into a big ol’ nearly coherent 2:40 whole (and avoids the corny-CGI temptations to which the network’s special-effects guys all too often succumb in the actual programs). Nice.
(Anybody know what song is on the soundtrack? Musically, it reminds me a lot of the song whose adorable video I featured in this post back in June, but the lyrics don’t seem the same.)
(Hat tip: Speak Coffee to Me)
I See
Speak Coffee to Me‘s most recent “ad of the week” is this glittering little diamond, a brief film (directed by Azazel Jacobs) “about looking at art.” A nice little fable for those who just don’t get the point of so-called non-representational art, it’s from the Web site of New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Rejection Sans Scorn
An essential part of the toughening-up process, for anyone who aspires to be published by someone other than himself, is: how to handle the fact that not everyone — perhaps not anyone — but the author may be interested in publishing his work.
(As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a bad manager of my own career in at least one respect. Which is, I just don’t submit it to enough places (or rather, to enough people). So maybe I’m not the right person to offer advice about this. But, well, since when have actual qualifications ever denied a blogger his or her say? Right. Never.)
For one reason or another, as Speak Coffee reminds us, handling rejection letters from editors, magazines, publishers, and agents is suddenly (again) a hot topic. The links she provides in that post are handy, but I especially liked the (now four-plus years old) frank, editor’s-eye view of the rejection letter by Teresa Nielsen Hayden at the Making Light blog.
Nielsen Hayden is an editor with Tor Books, and she took it upon herself to explain, as carefully as possible (but with occasional frustration), what an editor might mean by rejecting a given manuscript:
