Here are some shiny things that caught my eye recently:
♦ “It is a miracle if you can find true friends, and it is a miracle if you have enough food to eat, and it is a miracle if you get to spend your days and evenings doing whatever it is you like to do, and the holiday season–like all the other seasons–is a good time not only to tell stories of miracles, but to think about the miracles in your own life, and to be grateful for them.” ~Lemony Snicket, The Lump of Coal
A couple weeks ago, I saw the below image on Francesca Ramos’s wonderful tumblr and wanted to be sure to share it once December rolled around. I love the sharp contrast between the tree line and the field of snow, and how the people—that pop of red and green, so vivid!—aren’t centered in the photograph so that their position gives them a sense of movement.
♦ She Blinded Me … with Science!
6 pieces of folksy wisdom that are actually true—everything from biology to medicine to zoology.
Anthropology: Bizarre study suggests men care more about their sisters’ children than their own (I don’t think it’s bizarre at all!).
Astronomy: Galaxy NGC 1277 is pretty much all black hole….
Social Science: An interesting take on the educational system…. (via)
♦ Someone’s in the Kitchen with Dinah…
5 moments in sauce history that changed the way we eat. I do love a good sauce….
These baby heads, made of white chocolate and about the size of an actual newborn’s head, are creepy and satisfying at the same time. At least for me. I wonder if they taste good…. Via.
Baby heads by Eat Your Heart Out
Related: how a butcher sees a human body.
Wondermark, how do you know my life so well? I have said these very speech balloons many, many times!
Chew On This: 10 Food Idioms Explained (via).
♦ The Book Nook.
Check out 9 more gorgeous European libraries over at mental floss. Below is my favorite pictures:
Vilnius University Library, Lithuania via Wikimedia Commons
Love this home library from Book Mania!
♦ Viewers’ Paradise.
Apparently, A&E is making Bates Motel, a prequel series to Hitchcock’s Psycho. I don’t know that to think about that, but this teaser appeases me. Via.
Color me pleased as punch: BBC will make a six-part miniseries based on Susanna Clarke’s fantastic historical fantasy novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. I can’t wait!
♦ The Reading Spot.
“Heads Will Roll” illustration by Hannah Christenson
So much wonderful online reading material! Check out these works:
Heads Will Roll by Lish McBride at Tor.com
“You’re Heads,” She Says. “You’re Tails.” by M. Bennardo at Daily Science Fiction
The Key to Everything by Nina Kiriki Hoffman at Daily Science Fiction
The Safe Road by Caroline M. Yoachim at Daily Science Fiction
Seven Smiles and Seven Frowns by Richard Bowes at Lightspeed
Flax-golden tales: A Small But Helpful Stray Panda by Erin Morgenstern
The White by Berit Ellingsen at Weird Fiction Review
City of Dark Magic (excerpt) by Magnus Flyte at Tor.com
Impulse (excerpt) by Steven Gould at Tor.com
The Three Immigrations (a poem) by Rose Lemberg at Strange Horizons
Homo Homarus by Ellen Denham at Daily Science Fiction
A Wizard of the Roads by Therese Arkenberg at Daily Science Fiction
Also, new issues of Electric Velocipede (below, check out the fantastic cover art—Wolf Girl in the Woods by Jeremy Zerfoss) and Jabberwocky are out!
BookRiot posted their Top 10 Novellas of All Time, and the list has a lot of great works, to be sure, but they leave out Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, which is my favorite novella, but, perhaps even more egregiously, they omit James Joyce’s The Dead. What the hey?
♦ The Horns of Elfland.
Sadly, I can’t remember where I ran across the link to this song by Kylie Minogue and Nick Cave to give credit, but I’ve been enjoying “Where the Wild Roses Grow” and its disturbing video:
I didn’t know Andy Stott’s music until I came across this video on Boing Boing, but I’m digging it a lot (I like this video, too, even if it’s not disturbing).
♦ The Ninth Art.
I love John Bishop‘s take on Ego, The Living Planet, over at The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe REDUXE Edition. Something about those teeth just get me!
Ego by John Bishop
Because of the student presentations I watched last week (several of which were about The Grapes of Wrath), I laughed even harder than usual at this installment of Wondermark:
Tim Callahan’s The Great Alan Moore Reread continued last week at Tor.com with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Part One.
Super-Team Family mashing The New Teen Titans against Galactus! I bet a showdown between Trigon and Galactus would be pretty cool….
According to Dr. Neil Cohn, our brains read comics as sentences.
♦ The Writing Desk.
The Encyclopedia of Fantasy is now online!
Theodora Goss on being responsive—again, I could have written this post, so similar is my own experience!
Krissy Brady shared 6 money-saving tips for writers. These tips are quite useful (I’m sold on the first four, for sure).
Terry Ambrose on using book structure to create compelling stories.
Elizabeth Spann Craig on developing conflict and tension.
How Chuck Wendig writes a novel.
LitReactor on the archetype of the Eternal Wanderer.
Also, 10 reasons your screenplay sucks (and how to fix it). The first couple lines grabbed my eye: “Good screenplays are like sonnets. They’re elegant, simple, rhythmic, adhere to a specific structure, and nail a problem/solution within the requisite number of lines. They’re a joy to read.”
Blake Charlton talks about opening sentences.
The many stages of writing a research paper.
Friday, December 7th, is Letter Writing Day!
♦ Two videos: one cool, one wacky.
I really enjoyed this video showing off some extreme card flourishes (via):
Brazilians sure love pranking—this scary ghost elevator trick was fun. I particularly liked trying to figure out at which points the audience would laugh because they like to laugh at places that aren’t funny. Weirdness abounds!
