Link roundup

1. Fascinating article on Full Fathom Five, James Frey's effort to generate books that can be turned into movies aimed at tweens. The article is written by Suzanne Mozes, and I'm a lot more interested in reading more by her than by anything that comes out from Frey and his ghost writers.

2. Nintendo sold half the number of copies of Metroid: Other M that it had expected to sell.

3. Fight Club soap on sale at Etsy.

*Buy Metroid toys at eBay.

Link roundup

1. Matt Fraction in a long, very interesting interview:

But Casanova I know for a fact I've not made a penny on. It's all gone back to the twins, to try to pay back their page rate and get them to a point where they've not been working for free. But, I mean, Gabriel drew all of his volume without seeing a dime and Fabio did his. Now those checks drib and drab in, call them minor at best, it's no way to make a living. People do, people get lucky, but we're not those guys. We did not catch that lightning in a bottle.

Seriously, read the whole thing. The interviewer explains why Josh Hartnett was his worst ever interview. Via.

2. Very high-res poster featuring the various mysteries of Lost.

3. Vonda McIntyre talks about writing Star Trek novels:

The only potential glitch in the Star Trek books came about because I couldn't figure out how to write a love scene where the protagonists called each other by their surnames. So I gave Mr. Sulu a first name, "Hikaru," which is from The Tale of Genji. I was blissfully unaware of the glitch till long after the fact; someone at Paramount objected to the idea of the character's having a given name, for reasons unclear to me.

*Buy Casanova at Amazon (it's very good).

Domo stars in a Star Wars commercial (link roundup)

Domo stars in a commercial for the Clone Wars cartoon in Japan. (And by "cartoon," I mean weekly animated toy commercial.)

And a few more links:

1. Scott Turow on the importance of persistence in becoming a writer:

"Presumed Innocent was written over a six to seven year period with intervals in between where I was figuring out the end of the book and writing other stuff ... My life as a writer was carried on against the odds. I had written four unpublished novels by then.

Via.

2. Relatedly, Malcolm Gladwell says:

I see storytelling like a puzzle: you arrange details for people until you get them in just the right order.

3. And speaking of authors, Neil Gaman's stance on public speaking is pretty funny:

Q. How can I get Neil Gaiman to make an appearance at my school/convention/event?
A. Contact Lisa Bransdorf at the Greater Talent Network. Tell her you want Neil to appear somewhere. Have her tell you how much it costs. Have her say it again in case you misheard it the first time. Tell her you could get Bill Clinton for that money. Have her tell you that you couldn't even get ten minutes of Bill Clinton for that money but it's true, he's not cheap.

On the other hand, I'm really busy, and I ought to be writing, so pricing appearances somewhere between ridiculously high and obscenely high helps to discourage most of the people who want me to come and talk to them. Which I could make a full time profession, if I didn't say 'no' a lot.

His appearance fee was the scandal of the day earlier this week.

*Previously: Domo/Jaws mashup.

*Buy Domo toys at eBay.

Lisa Black's clockwork taxidermy (link roundup)

A few of Lisa Black's modified taxidermied creatures.

And a few more links:

1. Painting giant Easter eggs.

2. How to write an episode of Law & Order. Via.

3. Operators of the Standard Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles pled guilty to negligent discharge of pollutants. In January, a maintenance worker poured chlorine and muriatic acid into a storm drain on top of the hotel. The chemicals created a cloud of noxious gas that entered the nearby Metro station on the following morning and made people ill.

*Previously: Taxidermy fantasy creatures.

*Buy taxidermy at eBay.

Found metal chicken sculpture

Found metal chicken sculpture by Scottoons.

Here's a few more random links:

1. Mario Puzo wrote the Godfather because he was "tired of being an artist." And he had an ugly encounter with Frank Sinatra due to the Johnny Fontane character. More interesting anecdotes here. Via.


2. Go figure, scientists think space elevators might not be realistic after all. Relatedly, I just learned that AMC is turning Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars into a tv series.


3. Forum thread filled with accusations against Shocker Toys and responses by a Shocker Toys rep. Via.


4. Andre Agassi's former manager (and former close friend) has filed a lawsuit against Steffi Graf, alleging she owes him $50k.


*Previously: Organization against space elevators.

*Buy Marvel Legends toys at eBay.

Best haiku ever

I received an email advertising 826LA's summer writing courses for kids. It includes this haiku by Anthony Vasquez, age 6:

Wolf

Wolves like to AH-OOOOOH
They like to eat people and
Play guitar softly

The summer courses sound great. For example:

Write Your Own Detective Series

Students ages 8 to 11 will collectively create one adventurous main character and then write their own detective mystery stories for the series. At the end of 4 weeks, we'll have a detective series filled with all those important mystery elements: clues, plot twists, and more! If you've got a closetful of red herrings to share, please, do tell and sign up to help.

Photo: The room Roald Dahl wrote in

Link. Via.

*Previously: Photos of Robyn Miller's Grandfather's Workshop.

Elmore Leonard's (Illustrated) 10 Rules of Writing

Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing. I've easily read half a dozen books by Elmore Leonard.

How to coast to a writing career

Valleywag has a long list of tips including:

Pitch editors by sending them one-paragraph emails describing short, say 300-word articles you'd like to write. Aim for the lowest person on the masthead whose title includes the word "editor," except for "contributing editor" which means "freelancer in jammies."

AVOID: Hardware product reviews. Do you want a house full of boxes and a divorce? Even Walt Mossberg's wife flips out about the boxes. Plus eventually, someone will steal a review loaner camera or laptop on its way back to the manufacturer, who'll then invoice you for it. Great: A $2,500 bill for a $500 article.

Do software reviews. Most companies will give you a reviewer's guide you can just rewrite. Find one bad, reproducible bug. Google's good for that. File.

Neil Gaiman "mentally timeslipped" 70 years into the past to write "Stardust"

Apparently, I'm just not weird enough to be a professional writer. Link. Via Light Reading.

Video: Doris Lessing expressing a complete lack of interest in her Nobel proze

More here.

Interesting: How Paul Thomas Anderson came to adapt Upton Sinclair's "Oil"

After finishing Punch-Drunk Love in 2002, Boogie Nights director Paul Thomas Anderson found himself fumbling for a follow-up. ''I was really sick of the way I was writing,'' he says. ''Everything looked as though I had written it, and that was a horrible feeling.'' Purely as an exercise, Anderson decided to adapt a scene from a novel he had just discovered: Oil!, Upton Sinclair's 1927 take on the grueling, greedy business of prospecting for black gold in California. ''It was a buoy, just to keep writing,'' says the director. ''I didn't think I would end up adapting the [whole] book, but it turned out that way.''

Read more.

Headline of the Day: "Gonorrhea is nothing to 'clap' about"

Courtesy of The Daily Evergreen. Via Alison Go.

And speaking of Gonorrhea, you can buy a plush version here.

In a fight between Neal Stephenson and William Gibson, who would win?

Seems everywhere I look someone's linking to another interview with William Gibson, and all of the interviews have been pretty boring (I say this as a big Gibson fan). It reminded me of a great Neal Stephenson interview on Slashdot. One question was:

In a fight between you and William Gibson, who would win?

Neal:

You don't have to settle for mere idle speculation. Let me tell you how it came out on the three occasions when we did fight.

The first time was a year or two after SNOW CRASH came out. I was doing a reading/signing at White Dwarf Books in Vancouver. Gibson stopped by to say hello and extended his hand as if to shake. But I remembered something Bruce Sterling had told me. For, at the time, Sterling and I had formed a pact to fight Gibson. Gibson had been regrown in a vat from scraps of DNA after Sterling had crashed an LNG tanker into Gibson's Stealth pleasure barge in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. During the regeneration process, telescoping Carbonite stilettos had been incorporated into Gibson's arms. Remembering this in the nick of time, I grabbed the signing table and flipped it up between us. Of course the Carbonite stilettos pierced it as if it were cork board, but this spoiled his aim long enough for me to whip my wakizashi out from between my shoulder blades and swing at his head. He deflected the blow with a force blast that sprained my wrist. The falling table knocked over a space heater and set fire to the store. Everyone else fled. Gibson and I dueled among blazing stacks of books for a while. Slowly I gained the upper hand, for, on defense, his Praying Mantis style was no match for my Flying Cloud technique. But I lost him behind a cloud of smoke. Then I had to get out of the place. The streets were crowded with his black-suited minions and I had to turn into a swarm of locusts and fly back to Seattle.

The second time was a few years later when Gibson came through Seattle on his IDORU tour. Between doing some drive-by signings at local bookstores, he came and devastated my quarter of the city. I had been in a trance for seven days and seven nights and was unaware of these goings-on, but he came to me in a vision and taunted me, and left a message on my cellphone. That evening he was doing a reading at Kane Hall on the University of Washington campus. Swathed in black, I climbed to the top of the hall, mesmerized his snipers, sliced a hole in the roof using a plasma cutter, let myself into the catwalks above the stage, and then leapt down upon him from forty feet above. But I had forgotten that he had once studied in the same monastery as I, and knew all of my techniques. He rolled away at the last moment. I struck only the lectern, smashing it to kindling. Snatching up one jagged shard of oak I adopted the Mountain Tiger position just as you would expect. He pulled off his wireless mike and began to whirl it around his head. From there, the fight proceeded along predictable lines. As a stalemate developed we began to resort more and more to the use of pure energy, modulated by Red Lotus incantations of the third Sung group, which eventually to the collapse of the building's roof and the loss of eight hundred lives. But as they were only peasants, we did not care.

Our third fight occurred at the Peace Arch on the U.S./Canadian border between Seattle and Vancouver. Gibson wished to retire from that sort of lifestyle that required ceaseless training in the martial arts and sleeping outdoors under the rain. He only wished to sit in his garden brushing out novels on rice paper. But honor dictated that he must fight me for a third time first. Of course the Peace Arch did not remain standing for long. Before long my sword arm hung useless at my side. One of my psi blasts kicked up a large divot of earth and rubble, uncovering a silver metallic object, hitherto buried, that seemed to have been crafted by an industrial designer. It was a nitro-veridian device that had been buried there by Sterling. We were able to fly clear before it detonated. The blast caused a seismic rupture that split off a sizable part of Canada and created what we now know as Vancouver Island. This was the last fight between me and Gibson. For both of us, by studying certain ancient prophecies, had independently arrived at the same conclusion, namely that Sterling's professed interest in industrial design was a mere cover for work in superweapons. Gibson and I formed a pact to fight Sterling. So far we have made little headway in seeking out his lair of brushed steel and white LEDs, because I had a dentist appointment and Gibson had to attend a writers' conference, but keep an eye on Slashdot for any further developments.

Read the rest of the interview here.

"San Francisco Columnist Wins Rove Derangement Syndrome Contest"

Not really a very interesting post, but certainly an intriguing blog heading courtesy of P.J. Gladnick.

A genuinely funny story by a nine-year-old

This is the start of a contest-winning story by Rohan Patel:

One day, a boy named Rohan was celebrating his birthday in his bedroom.

A monster was behind him.

The monster had green goo and green, scaly skin with wide, red eyes and no teeth!

The boy was about to cut his birthday cake.

The monster was hiding behind him and was holding a knife right on top of his shoulder.

Click through to see how the story turns out.