Super excited to see The New Voices Award competition go live. Amazon Publishing has partnered with OWN IT! to bring this competition into being with a goal of addressing issues around inclusion and representation in commercial fiction.
There is still time for folks to get their works into the competiton by going here and submitting.
Good luck.
One of the reasons I like Twitter is that people can use it to create personas and characters. Sometimes these are fake accounts of real characters or faux profiles mocking celebrities and sometimes they are the imagined accounts of fictional characters like the example below:
http://twitter.com/#!/feministhulk/status/6095881145155584
What happens far less, but something I believe will begin to happen more (and has been part of several projects I’ve seen), is original or newly created fictional characters inhabiting social and web spaces. Penguin used Twitter and blogs to tell Slice, one of the stories in their We Tell Stories experiment.
http://twitter.com/#!/Slicequeen/status/778703546
Which brings me to the IMF Dublin Diary a twitter and blog creation of another Twitterer and blogger, The Mire. That word creation is the important word, because this is creation, it is art in the true (if un-stuffy) sense. The imagined thoughts of the IMF’s (not) pointman in Dublin, it is rich satire and high comedy (though dark given its content) and what is more it uses the medium very well.
http://twitter.com/#!/IMFDublinDiary/status/9288019202805760
You could argue that all it does is take an old idea and transfer it to a new medium and while that’s true, I think it does it very well. The execution is precise and measured, the tone feels right and the reflections on Irish society, ministers and civil servants have, at least for those of us living through what are strange and interesting times, a ring of truth, along with a splash of whimsy and a sprinkle of insanity.
http://twitter.com/#!/IMFDublinDiary/status/9178234826530816
Really love this line, but it’s a pretty good article all told!
The trick is to minimize those liberties, and to make sure that when you’re writing about historical figures you “stay true to the spirit of that person”. This was the advice given to me by the late and great George Macdonald Fraser, author of the Flashman novels, whom I interviewed shortly before his death in 2008.
He claimed to have broken this rule only twice – with Otto von Bismarck, the architect of German unification, and Nicholas Ignatieff, a Russian adventurer and spy – and felt justified in doing so because the former “was a swine” and the latter “a pretty hard man” if not an arch-villain. A made-up protagonist, of course, gives the author the greatest licence, but even he or she must not stretch credulity too far.
Great piece in the NYT about an unheralded female Irish playwright:
IN the first half of the 1930s Teresa Deevy, a deaf writer from a small city in the southeast of Ireland, was one of the most prolific and acclaimed female playwrights in the world. She was “the most important dramatist writing for the Irish theater,” her fellow playwright Lennox Robinson wrote in The Dublin Magazine. Her most famous drama, “Katie Roche” (1936), a complex portrait of a lower-class servant with dreams of grandeur, inspired the critic St. John Ervine to write in the London newspaper The Observer, “Miss Deevy may be a genius.”
Then Deevy all but disappeared. The Abbey Theater in Dublin, which had produced six of her plays in seven years, started rejecting her work, and her prolific output slowed down considerably. Today she is rarely mentioned in theater courses; it’s difficult to find her plays. “Katie Roche” is occasionally produced, but her other works remain unpublished and ignored.
via Resurrecting Teresa Deevy’s Lost Irish Voice – NYTimes.com.
(HT fmacconghail)
One of my favourite US Food sites, Serious Eats, has a sub section dedicated to burgers. It makes for pretty compelling reading if you, like me, happen to love burgers though eat them considerably less than you THINK about eating them.
Today’s post is a classic of the type and worth linking to for that alone:
Needless to say, he jumped at the excuse to hit In-N-Out. $120 in overnight delivery fees later, the UPS man showed up at my door at 9:30 the next morning, golden package in hand.** Inside were two regular Double-Doubles, two Animal Style Double-Doubles, two plain cooked beef patties, two packets of Spread, and one large chunk of dry ice to freak out Dumpling with.
I knew that the flavor of a frozen-then-thawed burger could never compare to the freshness of the original, but nevertheless I felt compelled to resurrect them—not a minor feat in and of itself!
After a totally failed attempt at reheating one whole, I realized that the best way is to separate it into individual components, and reheat each individually, tossing the veg and replacing them with fresh ones. Within the hour, I had my lunch of Zombie In-N-Out burgers:
via The Burger Lab: The Ins-n-Outs of an In-N-Out Double-Double, Animal-Style | A Hamburger Today.
Eoin Purcell's Blog 