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LiveJournal for Stephen Dedman.
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| Sunday, May 18th, 2008 |
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Just finished the first draft of Immunity! Does happy dance on way to shower. |
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| Monday, May 5th, 2008 |
| Saturday, May 3rd, 2008 |
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In my e-mail this morning, one acceptance (from Tales of the Unanticipated) and one rejection (from Fantasy Magazine)... so May is off and running. April was fairly quiet by comparison; I haven't finished the latest article I've been writing for Pyramid, or even started the new short story I'm thinking of writing, though I did get past the dreaded 3/4 mark on Immunity. Two submissions, only one of new work. Two publications - a review in The West Australian, and an article in Pyramid. Two rejections, but one of those was from TOTU: both sides of a foolscap page covered with comments from their editors, which should explain why they're one of my favourite markets. Okay, enough of the past. Let's see whether I can finish the novel and start a new story this month. |
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| for Shaun Tan's The Arrival, this time from Neil Gaiman. | ||||
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| Thursday, May 1st, 2008 |
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| A wonderful night at the movies, from the trailers for The Dark Knight Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and The Incredible Hulk, through to the glee-inducing extra scene after the credits. | ||||
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| Monday, April 28th, 2008 |
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Hot on the heels of the presentation of the Nebula Awards (and the results of the SFWA Election), here are the nominees for this year's Sidewise Award: Best Short Form:
Best Long Form
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| Friday, April 25th, 2008 |
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| No-one's guessed Nos 2-4, 6, or 9 yet, but for here are the answers to ( Questions 1, 5, 7, 8 and 10 ) | ||||
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| Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 |
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I've written 1500 words of Immunity today and gone over the 80,000 word mark, so I figured it'd be a good time to take a break and do the promised quiz. You know the drill by now. These are the first lines from novels or short stories that I've read: name the story and the author. 1. I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time. 2. It starts with this faint sound that pulls me out of sleep: a sort of calliope music played on an ensemble of toy instruments. 3. African drums in the darkness sullen as tar. 4. Two pieces of yesterday were in Captain Davidson's mind when he woke, and he lay looking at them in the darkness for a while. 5. It was a moonless night, which was good for the purposes of Solid Jackson. 6. On August 23, the day before the hurricane struck, Max and Bonnie Lamb awoke early, made love twice and rode the shuttle bus to Disney World. 7. You can never tell what a drunken Irishman will do. 8. Fox is a television character, and she isn't dead yet. 9. Arrows carpeted the ground, thousands upon thousands of them, standing from the Earth like some strange crop. 10. Usually I'm not much interested in other people's mail. |
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| Friday, April 18th, 2008 |
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| Seen while browsing through New Scientist's Evolution: 24 Myths and Misconceptions; a link to video of a salamander that coils up and rolls downhill a la the mythical hoop snake or M. C. Escher's Curl-Up. | ||||
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| Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 |
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| for Shaun Tan's The Arrival - shortlisted for three Will Eisner Awards! | ||||||
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| Sunday, April 13th, 2008 |
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| "An Italian woman artist who was hitch-hiking to the Middle East dressed as a bride to promote world peace has been found murdered inTurkey." | ||||||
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| Saturday, April 12th, 2008 |
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| Okay, I know I promised a first or last line quiz RSN, but I'm currently too busy marking assignments. In the meantime, though, Chris Lawson at Talking Squid has linked to (and commented on) the American Book Review's lists of the 100 Best First Lines and 100 Best Last Lines of novels. Yes, there will be a test afterwards. | ||||||
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| Excellent advice for writers on the proper response to rejections, from fellow Stoker nominee Nicholas Kaufmann. | ||||
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| Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 |
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| Popular Mechanics lists the ten most prophetic sf movies. It's an interesting list, but it makes me even more sorry that no-one has yet filmed The Space Merchants or The Forever War. | ||||
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| Uwe Boll has promised not to direct any more movies if a million people sign this petition. | ||||||
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| Saturday, April 5th, 2008 |
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| ( Not a Swancon masquerade photo ) | ||||
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| Excellent advice here from John Scalzi, on how to talk to authors at cons and other gatherings. | ||||
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There is a sort-of-tradition, dating back to Swancon 3, that I will receive something shortly after Swancon that I would dearly have liked to show off at Swancon - a publication, a pretty cheque, some good news, something of that nature. Unfortunately, this year was something of a break with that tradition. I'm still waiting. Publications: 'Teeth', online at Clarkesworld Magazine; 'The Nameless' in Black Box, 'Supporting Cast: The Equipped and the Dead' in Pyramid. Sales: one article to Pyramid; one new short-short and three reprints to The Mammoth Book of Erotic Confessions. Submissions: two new book reviews, one story. Highlights: prk and amarillion's wedding; meeting robshearman and catching up with friends at Swancon; the look on mondyboy's face when I told him that working for Big Finish meant that Doctor Who DVDs and books became tax-deductible research expenses; Borderlands Issue 10 appearing on schedule.Low points: the deaths of two writers whose work enormously influenced my own career, Gary Gygax and Sir Arthur C. Clarke. RIP. |
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| Saturday, March 29th, 2008 |
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| From a wonderfully entertaining article by Rachel Donadio from The New York Times' Book Review, about literary preferences as an indicator of compatability: 'Let’s face it — this may be a gender issue. Brainy women are probably more sensitive to literary deal breakers than are brainy men. (Rare is the guy who’d throw a pretty girl out of bed for revealing he rimperfect taste in books.) After all, women read more, especially whenit comes to fiction. “It’s really great if you find a guy that reads, period,” said Beverly West, an author of “Bibliotherapy: The Girl’s Guide to Books for Every Phase of Our Lives.” Jessa Crispin, a bloggerat the literary site Bookslut.com, agrees. “Most of my friends and men in my life are nonreaders,” she said, but “now that you mention it, if I went over to a man’s house and there were those books about life’s lessons learned from dogs, I would probably keep my clothes on.”' | ||||||
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| Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 |
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Catching up with friends, if too briefly in most cases, and making plans with those who live in Perth to meet more than once a year. Rob Shearman: his unofficial commentary on Dalek; enthusing, along with Lee Battersby, dalekboy, mondyboy, and I, about the joys of working on Doctor Who tie-ins for Big Finish; and his rather more downbeat account of writing television 'shitcoms'.Seeing so many friends win awards - particularly ratfan winning a Tin Duck for 'The Sun People', rdmasters and leecetheartist winning the Mumfan, dalekboy winning the extremely rare Silver Swan, and girliejones winning so many Tin Ducks and Ditmars that I offered to lend her a trolley to carry them.The appearance of Borderlands 10. And the excellent academic stream (though as that was a very hard act for me, as next Swancon's Academic Program Coordinator, to follow, maybe I shouldn't sing its praises too highly. Consider this a very early call for papers - on SF, Fantasy, Horror, Slipstream, Futurism, Astronomy, Spaceflight, Forensics, Robotics, Exobiology...). |
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LiveJournal for Stephen Dedman.
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accomplished.
impressed.![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif){kind=small}
distressed.