SIROTI: The Week in Review

I read a lot of stuff on the internet. It cuts into my writing time. That's my excuse for not updating this blog more often, and I'm sticking to it.

So, what Stuff have I Read On The Internet this past week?

Journey to Planet JoCo series. I’m not sure how I stumbled upon John Scalzi’s blog, Whatever, but there I discovered two things I had never heard of before: Jonathan Coulton and sci-fi songwriter. Each interview in the series is short and mostly humorous. You can read or listen to them. I read the interviews looking for any tidbits on how Coulton approaches storytelling in his medium, and I came away thinking simplicity and honesty is key. There’s not a lot of room in a song to be verbose and expositional, so the simplest tales told as candidly as possible make his songs relatable and enjoyable, and quite emotional, at times. Listening to his music (among which are the hit songs to the Portal games) are an added bonus.

Is SF Still The Genre of Big Ideas? Seven notable speculative fiction aficionados, including Daniel Abraham and Alistair Reynolds, answered the question, offering great insights into how they viewed the genre itself, where it’s been, and where it’s going. I left my thoughts in the comments section there, the gist of which is: the question is a tad presumptuous.

Shame by Pam Noles. If you ever wondered why race matters in a work of fiction, this moving essay might just give you some profound answers and a new perspective.

The Most Comma Mistakes. Because you can never read too many explanations of the rules for commas. The one that got me was the Identification Crisis comma.

The Art of Fiction, Dorothy Parker. Witty and frank.


What have you been reading lately?


Photo credit: "catch 22 nately" by schammond available under CC BY 2.0