Red and White and Linked All Over
Originally published at tansyrr.com. You can comment here or there.
I feel ridiculously guilty about missing out on my Friday links post last week thanks to miscalculating how long it would take me to pack and get ready for Genrecon (which was amaaaazing and has turned my brain inside out, more on that later).
I have a ‘to do’ list a mile long from the convention, with publishers I need to query, social media wrongs I have to right (or write), and empires I want to build. Writing, you are a business, let’s get on that! One of the big takeaway messages I had from the con (many of which were a bit depressing and negative I will admit) is that there is totally a built in, fairly mainstreamy audience for my Livia Day books. So while all my illusions about making a living from just writing have been well and truly punctured, I have come away hugely excited about A Trifle Dead and the potential for getting that book into the hands of readers next year.
Livia now has a website! That’s item one of my long and sprawling Genrecon Plots list ticked off. I will be running an occasional post over there and have some subject headings to write about, but I deliberately have made it ‘not a blog’ on the front page so I’m not killing myself trying to keep up anything as actively as I do this one, which is always going to be my Front and Centre web presence. (guiltily sweeps away tumbleweeds) Still, if you want to keep an eye on what my scarlet alter ego is up to, there is a RSS feed.
The nice thing about having a Livia website now of course is that I can stop pretending that my Tumblr is all Livia and go back to mostly posting Doctor Who and Downton Abbey gifs, as is only right and proper.
The Friday Links have been stacking up, as I’m about 700 posts behind my RSS reader. So here are a few to be going on with, before they become completely untopical:
The Penguin and Random House merger, in case anyone missed it - how awesome of a terrifyingly major game changing book industry event to happen immediately before a convention weekend so we all had something to talk about.
Too soon for jokes about Hurricane Sandy? Storm of the X-Men doesn’t think so.
Wendy Harmer talks about the media, politics and Maxine McKew, the latest in a long line of capable and professional women to be completely disillusioned about our political process.
The World Fantasy Award winners, which I read while waiting at Redfern Station for @Capshuns to pick me up to go watch the Downton finale together before I left Sydney.
Angriest provides a measured response to all the Disney-Lucasfilms freakouts (I’m with Warren from Radio Free Skaro on this one, after the Star Wars prequels, what on earth do we all have to be scared of?) by looking at which directors might be in line to direct the new Star Wars movie, and which are most likely to actually get the job.
Briony Kidd of the Women in Horror Film Festival talks about the changing voice in her field, and how women are starting to become noticed as more than just the victim in horror movies. Some of them even hold cameras! I’m excited to see that Little Lamb, one of the scripts from this year’s festival (which I helped to judge), is now being produced as a real short film. I am soooo entering next year.
DC Comics announces two new titles beginning early next year: Katana (awesome!) and, um, Vibe. Cue all the Stephanie Brown and Cass Cain fans going, “No, SERIOUSLY?”
In closing, my favourite revelation of the week was the one about Sir Ian McKellan and Sir Derek Jacobi starring together in a sitcom (I know, right?) playing an elderly gay couple (I KNOW, right?) which is actually called “Vicious Old Queens.” Chalk that up to TV concepts that the 1980′s never saw coming! I hope madly that as many Sirs and Dames as possible are given brief walk on parts so we have the royalty of British theatre & cinema all in the same kitchen. Sadly the updated news suggests that the title has been made a touch more discreet and will now be simply ‘Vicious.’ It’s still pretty damned awesome. The Brits are so good at cranky old person sitcoms…