Day: February 11, 2010

Day after snowday

It was back to work for me this morning, after yesterday’s unexpected snow day. The roads were still pretty terrible, at least between here and the train station, but at least the trains themselves were running on time. (Or whatever the Long Island Railroad decides to define as “on time.”) It felt a little like Monday, oddly enough, which just makes the fact that tomorrow is Friday — with a three-day weekend after it, no less — all the sweeter.

We had a couple of planning meetings for upcoming conferences at work today, including one I’ll be attending in San Jose at the end of March. (On my birthday, as it happens.) I shoveled a little more snow this evening, to clear the foot of the driveway, and discovered a huge branch that had fallen from the neighbor’s tree into our back yard sometime last night. And that’s about as exciting as my day ever got.

But hey, tomorrow’s Friday.

Thursday various

  • “I will come and find them and kill them so dead I’ll murder their ancestors!” Yeah, that sounds like Harlan Ellison.

    I don’t think he’s being completely unreasonable, despite the typical fervor of his invective. The publisher might have been tempted to rewrite his blurb, and I don’t think it should have done so without his permission. (We edit author endorsements at work all the time, usually for length, but also for other reasons, like if it repeats words or phrases used in other blurbs or in the book’s description. But we always ask the endorser’s permission first.) But I do note with amusement, as others do at the link above, that Ellison’s alter-only-under-pain-of-death endorsement contains a spelling error.

  • Some rookie mistakes: advice for first-time novelists. [via]

  • At the beginning of the year, I made the odd — and, given that I work in publishing, probably self-defeating — pledge not to buy any new books in 2010. I did this for one reason: to compel me to get through the mountain of as yet unread books that I already own. (“Mountain” here being a relative term.) Yet it seems like every day, there’s a new book — or, in this case, set of books — that I’d like to own. I may just have to break down and declare this pledge, this moratorium on buying new books, a failure. [via]

  • Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Yeah, but only the boring stuff before 1877. [via]
  • And finally, How to Report the News. [via]