trash fire in the publishing world
today is my dad's birthday. everyone say happy birthday. :D
a link i forgot to share yesterday: houston reporter saves truck driver stuck in flooded cab. she was reporting from what looks like a highway, saw the guy in the cab of the truck, and managed to flag down a sheriff's truck and boat to get him out. the tv station went off the air (the studio flooded) while the reporter was reporting, but she and her cameraman kept going anyway.
in totally other news, if you need to facepalm, especially if you're a writer, i bring you the story of lani sarem and handbook for mortals, and her attempts to game the system to get it on the new york times bestseller list, so she can get a movie deal for it. a movie she plans to star in. she tries - hilariously - to defend herself to huffpo, by whining that ya is hostile to "fresh voices" and "new stories". lady, your novel is about a conventionally beautiful girl who thinks she's plain, who is also supernaturally talented, and who is also also the pivot in a love triangle in which she's torn between two equally-attractive guys. none of that is "fresh" or "new". and if you, my lovely flist, are feeling kinda masochistic and have some time and brain cells to kill, read the sample chapters on amazon. i feel i should warn you in advance that, cliched story and characters aside, the writing is awful. like, twelve-year-old-just-discovered-writing awful. think about the shit you were writing in middle school, that you would never, ever show anyone now, because you were twelve and didn't know what you were doing. (well, it's possible some of you did. i sure didn't.) it's like that.
and to top it all off, the cover was evidently plagiarized.
(it's apparently totally legal to fake your way to #1 like lani sarem did. she's just profoundly unsubtle about it. and her writing is profoundly bad. the writers among you will feel so much better about your own work.)
speaking of writing! st catherine's monastery, at the foot of mt sinai, has a fabulous library of early manuscripts including 130 palimpsests, or manuscripts where the original text was erased and new text written over it. hey, parchment and vellum were expensive. modern technology means people can now scan the pages and see the original text. this is especially neat when the original text turns out to be a language no one's spoken or written in literally a thousand years.
a link i forgot to share yesterday: houston reporter saves truck driver stuck in flooded cab. she was reporting from what looks like a highway, saw the guy in the cab of the truck, and managed to flag down a sheriff's truck and boat to get him out. the tv station went off the air (the studio flooded) while the reporter was reporting, but she and her cameraman kept going anyway.
in totally other news, if you need to facepalm, especially if you're a writer, i bring you the story of lani sarem and handbook for mortals, and her attempts to game the system to get it on the new york times bestseller list, so she can get a movie deal for it. a movie she plans to star in. she tries - hilariously - to defend herself to huffpo, by whining that ya is hostile to "fresh voices" and "new stories". lady, your novel is about a conventionally beautiful girl who thinks she's plain, who is also supernaturally talented, and who is also also the pivot in a love triangle in which she's torn between two equally-attractive guys. none of that is "fresh" or "new". and if you, my lovely flist, are feeling kinda masochistic and have some time and brain cells to kill, read the sample chapters on amazon. i feel i should warn you in advance that, cliched story and characters aside, the writing is awful. like, twelve-year-old-just-discovered-writing awful. think about the shit you were writing in middle school, that you would never, ever show anyone now, because you were twelve and didn't know what you were doing. (well, it's possible some of you did. i sure didn't.) it's like that.
and to top it all off, the cover was evidently plagiarized.
(it's apparently totally legal to fake your way to #1 like lani sarem did. she's just profoundly unsubtle about it. and her writing is profoundly bad. the writers among you will feel so much better about your own work.)
speaking of writing! st catherine's monastery, at the foot of mt sinai, has a fabulous library of early manuscripts including 130 palimpsests, or manuscripts where the original text was erased and new text written over it. hey, parchment and vellum were expensive. modern technology means people can now scan the pages and see the original text. this is especially neat when the original text turns out to be a language no one's spoken or written in literally a thousand years.