m. c. de marco

Via Pyr-o-mania: Wordle is

a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like.

Pyr blogger Matthew Sturges Wordled his novel.

I found the The Well-Bitten Hand via The End of Science Fiction, linked by SF Diplomat. Both articles put a stake through science fiction, a genre whose time has, apparently, gone. “The Well-Bitten Hand” discusses the shambling undead corpse of sci-fi, ten years dead by John Barnes’ account, as part of the general mortality of genres. He eulogizes:

And it is a genre that flourished among mostly English-speaking, mostly middle-class, mostly Caucasian readers from the late 20’s to the early 90’s of the last century — in other words, for about seventy years.

Being the heirs of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, we then strapped the dearly departed to a steel table in our laboratory, wired it up to the lightning rod, and waited for a storm to fill the genre with eerie, unnatural life. Our monster shambles on to this very day.

I’ve found some interesting articles on genre since I added some publishers and critics to the aggregator. First up is Jo Walton’s love-hate relationship with fantasy at Tor.com:

I hate it because it’s boring. It’s all the same. It’s warmed over Tolkien—not even variations on a theme from Tolkien, but repetition of the same theme from Tolkien, on one note.

While it's true that a writer never has a vacation, I did finally get to watch Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog over the long weekend. It hardly needs my recommendation after being viewed over 2.2 million times in its first week and topping the iTunes charts for weeks afterwards.

The site was down for about 20 minutes for a Drupal upgrade. The management apologizes for any inconvenience.

Via Language Log and also Universal Hub: a grammar vigilante from Somerville and his accomplice were fined and banned from the national park system after editing a historic sign. The Arizona Republic reported last week that

Jeff Michael Deck, 28, of Somerville, Mass., and Benjamin Douglas Herson, 28, of Virginia Beach, Va., pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Flagstaff after damaging a rare, hand-painted sign in Grand Canyon National Park.

Via SFScope: Night Shade Books is seeking zombie novels by October 31st. Fortunately I have one right here…