Saturday, March 26, 2011

Aetheric Ephemera: The Edifice of the Self Edition

No blogging this past week because I have been writing my ass off elsewhere:

1) My new Apex blog post, which did not get much attention, although my editor loved it. I like the idea of the Paradox Continuum as a metaphor for how fantastika is looked at as a genre with both adoration and scorn. I hope to write more about it in the future.

2) I get my lit dork on in my latest SF Signal column. Hal Duncan responded with some good observations and pointed me to his work on the subject, which is intriguing and productive (I also liked this piece by him quite a lot). I'm going to explore the novum idea more in next week's column and see if I can either wring some utility out of it for fantasy or figure out more of its problems.

3) I also posted a long review of Jeff VanderMeer's Monstrous Creatures. I highly recommend the book for its combination of insight and evocative observations.

4) I have a few things in process. I just submitted a guest blog to Bryan Thomas Schmidt which should be up on Monday. I am finishing a review that should be up at Functional Nerds in the next several days, and reading two more books for review. And I added another thousand words to what is becoming a novella. Little fox child has a bigger story to tell than I thought!

5) In other news, Diana Wynne Jones has died. If anyone demonstrates the effect of children's fantastika on creative folk, it is her. Many writers fondly remember escaping into her books. I never thought of her as an influence, but as more people talk about her work her effect on the collective imagination is obvious. It underscores for me the importance of good children's literature for our own children.

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