“Stopping was death. Stopping meant you’d given up and turned the keys of the world over to other people. The only option for a creative person was constant motion—a lifetime of busy whirligigging in a generally forward direction, until you couldn’t do it any longer.”
—Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings
In case you’d forgotten that Maris is a completely inspired genius.
FREE e-book short story by Neil Gaiman: “How to Talk to Girls at Parties.”
Available for a limited time…Enjoy!
Calling all Gaiman fans. This is a Good Deal.
Whovians, rejoice! We’re THRILLED to finally share with you the stunning cover for our upcoming book, Doctor Who: The Vault, which goes on sale October 29th! The Vault is the ultimate, official, visual celebration of 50 years of the BBC cult hit Doctor Who filled with unseen and iconic material, photos, artwork, and production papers from the previously untapped BBC archive as well as from private collections.
We at Harper Design are all such huge fans of the show. We’re really excited about this project and can’t wait to share more about it as we get closer to onsale!
Pre-order your copy now: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Books-a-Million
Can I tell you all how excited I am that my company is publishing this beautiful, beautiful book? When fandom and work collide…
(Submission from SpecialEdition87, thanks!)
This is exactly how I felt when I read The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
Okay, here’s the baby and I fighting over the new Rob Sheffield memoir. Did you read “Love Is a Mix Tape”? Terrible title, great book. Well, the new one is “Turn Around, Bright Eyes,” and I’m enjoying it. Not as much as “Love Is a Mix Tape,” because that book is crazy, crazy good, but this one is also great, and he describes the experience of being miserable really well.
Also, seriously, this is a really high-quality baby video.
Best baby video on the internet.
I don’t know what is going to happen to print publishing. People in publishing take publishing very seriously, probably because in order to get their jobs, they had to kill a lot of good, creative people who did not take publishing very seriously.
Miracle, babe, shhhhhh about all the people I killed to get this job!
(But really you should go read the whole thing.)
Look, I promise I’m not gonna turn my blog into a marketing vehicle for my job, but I need to do a public service and tell you to go buy this book. It is creepy and funny and unsettling and just generally a ridiculously polished debut. If you like your fiction with a hefty dose of dark humor, or have an affinity for stories about sailors (past, present, and future), or just happen to like alpacas, don’t miss it. I’m still thinking about it and I read it in January.
Also, I’m making it my personal mission this year to champion short story collections, and if you don’t know where to start, this is the perfect place (and when you’re done, you can come to me for more recommendations!).
Grammar is important. Don’t split your infinitives. [x]
Oh shit, did Benedict Cumberbatch make a super-nerdy Star Trek grammar joke? Did I finally just get why people find him attractive?!
(via propsforbella)
Source: sallydonovan
“Also, I was in possession of a positive outlook, which is just a trick whereby you convince yourself that the desolation of your world is a phase in your personal growth. The weird thing is it works.”
—Sam Lipsyte, The Fun Parts
After learning my flight was detained 4 hours,
I heard the announcement:
If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic,
Please come to the gate immediately.Well—one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there.
An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress,
Just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly.
Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her
Problem? we told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she
Did this.I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly.
Shu dow-a, shu- biduck habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick,
Sho bit se-wee?The minute she heard any words she knew—however poorly used—
She stopped crying.She thought our flight had been canceled entirely.
She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the
Following day. I said no, no, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just late,Who is picking you up? Let’s call him and tell him.
We called her son and I spoke with him in English.
I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and
Would ride next to her—Southwest.She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it.
Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and
Found out of course they had ten shared friends.Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian
Poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours.She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering
Questions.She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies—little powdered
Sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts—out of her bag—
And was offering them to all the women at the gate.To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
Sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California,
The lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same
Powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies.And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers—
Non-alcoholic—and the two little girls for our flight, one African
American, one Mexican American—ran around serving us all apple juice
And lemonade and they were covered with powdered sugar too.And I noticed my new best friend—by now we were holding hands—
Had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing,With green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always
Carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought,
This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.Not a single person in this gate—once the crying of confusion stopped
—has seemed apprehensive about any other person.They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too.
This can still happen anywhere.Not everything is lost.
(via lovefrommolly)
Source: oliviacirce
I’m really liking The Darkest Minds by Alexandra Bracken but…
I’m guessing Ruby and Liam are going to be the romantic couple of the book. And I just wonder why Ruby wasn’t paired up with Chubs? Why does the white girl have to fall for the white boy or vice versa?
Am I just picking up the wrong books? Are there inter-racial romantic relationships in YA books that I’ve missed?
I hope you don’t mind me jumping in here to answer your question and explain a bit about how I make these kinds of narrative decisions. I also want to open this up for others to chime in with reading suggestions. I don’t want you guys to feel like I’m constantly peering over your shoulder, but this is a topic that I’ve been thinking about quite a lot over the past few years, so I hope it’s okay that I’m joining the conversation. I think this is a really valid question and one that needs to be raised over and over again.
The reason Ruby and Chubs aren’t together is because their characterizations just aren’t compatible in that sense. Really, that’s it. One of the reasons why they become such close friends is that they have very similar dispositions and goals. Whereas, what attracts Ruby to Liam is the fact that he has the complete opposite outlook on their future (aka hopeful versus their Team Reality brand of pessimism) and he’s warm and open when she’s been denied that for so long. It’s my feeling that in relationships, partners should complete each other, rather than reflect one another. Chubs is lovely once you get him on your side, but his grouchy, closed-off protectiveness is one of his defining traits (he’s probably the closest I’ll ever get to writing a tsundere character), and I wasn’t willing to sacrifice that aspect of him to make him more romantically compatible with Ruby. These characters are real people to me, with fully fleshed out lives, and it’s very, very, very difficult for me to change their core traits once they’ve popped up in my head and start talking. Ruby and Chubs’ friendship is one of my favorite elements of the whole series, and is just as important as her relationship with Liam. My goal was to portray a true male-female friendship without any sort of romantic entanglements, which I think there’s also a lack of in YA novels.
I try really hard to be sensitive and all-inclusive when it comes to portraying different ethnicities, not to mark them off an imaginary checklist, but because it’s natural and realistic and important to acknowledge that the population of this country is not one enormous blanket of white. There’s no arguing around the fact that Liam could have been another ethnicity, but the decision to make him caucasian came from the fact he was actually born in (spoiler!) West Virginia, which is something insane like 96% white. I couldn’t really change his place of birth, either, because he needed to be from WV to complete what is arguably the most important thematic arc in book 3 that I really can’t get into without S-P-O-I-L-E-R-S. I like to think I’m fully in control of my story development, but some things like this really do shake out through coincidence.It’s actually sort of strange that this popped up on Tumblr when it did, since I’m drafting book 3 and finally delving into Liam’s backstory. You may have noticed he doesn’t like talking about it, largely because of the memories he has of his biological father who really, truly, was an abusive asshole. He never specifies this in TDM (for a number of reasons, mostly because it would have felt incredibly unnatural for him to qualify it), but his much-beloved stepfather/personal hero, Harry, is African American, meaning, yes, his sister was biracial. And actually, the romance between Harry and Liam’s mom is so damn wonderful and swoony I want to tell you every detail about it right this second instead of making you wait until Fall 2014.
More than ever, I think the YA community is recognizing the need for diversity, especially in main characters—it’s something I think about all the time as I work through and identify my privileges and those racial default settings that many people aren’t even aware of when they sit down to write. I wish I could say I was perfect on that front, but I know I’m not and I’m always willing to have it pointed out to me so I can learn from it. I hope you guys are never afraid to engage in dialogue with me or other authors about this. We should all be asking these kinds of questions.I totally agree with you that there’s a shortage of YA novels portraying main interracial couples at the heart of the story. I’m hoping others will chime in with a few more suggestions for you, but here are the big ones I came up with off the top of my head. I know there are more, but it’s super late and I have major conference brain (TLA starts tomorrow—woooo):
ACROSS THE UNIVERSE by Beth Revis
DIVERGENT by Veronica Roth (someone correct me if I’m wrong, but
Simone Elkeles’ books
LEGEND by Marie Lu
NORTH OF BEAUTIFUL by Justina Chen
ELEANOR AND PARK by Rainbow Rowell
Cassandra Clare’s Infernal Devices series
Libba Bray’s Gemma Doyle trilogy
In which Alex is really smart about race in YA.
Source: adventuresonpaper
Michelle Bachmann misquoted Shakespeare today and Emily and I are having too much fun with it.
This is exactly what the internet is for, right?
Beautiful Ruins, Jess Walter.
Crayon of the day = goldenrod.
Look at this beautiful BEAUTIFUL RUINS drawing on the Tumblr radar. So proud!
Herman Melville: Bartleby, the Scrivener
SLOW CLAP.
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![Grammar is important. Don’t split your infinitives. [x]
Oh shit, did Benedict Cumberbatch make a super-nerdy Star Trek grammar joke? Did I finally just get why people find him attractive?!](http://24.media.tumblr.com/e849c4555160dcdafcc4ed578f8d4ff6/tumblr_mlytne2ud41qdrbf4o1_500.gif)
