Recent Reads: The Art of Asking

I found THE ART OF ASKING to be a rather strange read. A lot of it was familiar to me in one way or another: I’ve watched Amanda Palmer’s TED Talk, I followed her Kickstarter and its aftermath, I periodically read her blog, I used to read Neil Gaiman’s blog regularly, etc. I’m not a fan of either Palmer or Gaiman, which is to say their art doesn’t particularly speak to me, but I’ve met them both, albeit briefly, and it’s hard to be in my line of work and…

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Ten years!

My authors’ copies of STONE’S THROE have arrived! As is now traditional, they are being displayed by a particularly handsome model. The particularly handsome model then wished to take pictures of ME with the book. :) And the end result of all of this is the Ten Year Shelf: the complete (full-length) works, 2005-2015: 24 books representing in the area of 2.5 million words! Holy beans. :) ytd wordcount: 46,100

Irish literary bursary awards clinic

Ireland offers bursaries to artists of varying walks of life. Last night I went to a clinic on Writing Your Bursary, which had some interesting information, like, they had €867K worth of applicants last year and were able to fund about €80K’s worth of them. o.O I’m not clear on whether that was for the full year or for each half of the year, but I think it was for the full year. They have somewhere around 150 applicants per funding period and fund about 15 of them. There were…

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Storyteller

I just remembered something embarrassing. *laughs* My first Usenet/email name/handle/display name was “Storyteller”. I mean, I was 17, okay? So I can forgive me for being a little dorktastic, but in retrospect it makes me laugh because it’s so…17 and pretentious. Or dreamy-eyed or whatever you want to call it, but as dorky as it was, it was also how I perceived myself, either as I was or as I wanted to be. I wanted to tell stories to people. I’ve always wanted to tell stories to people: my earliest…

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Loncon!

Loncon was pretty amazing. It was well-run, with the only really visible snafu being that they weren’t prepared for 3000 people to show up at 9am Thursday, imagining, instead, that they’d show up more gradually through the weekend. So Thursday there was a Very Long Line to pick up registration materials, but they handled it super well and kept it moving. A highlight was my friend Kate, after walking from one end of the very long convention centre concourse to the end where Loncon was taking place and then discovering…

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