I've been meaning post some links for ages. Some of these are a few weeks old, but far from stale.
- I often find myself disliking movies everyone loves. I hate this – I'd far rather enjoy a film than pick holes in it. This year I had huge problems with Moon and District 9. Some of my reasons for disliking the latter are summed up in this article
- still fighting the war
- While I find it hard to forgive his ads ("you do an advert, you're off the artistic role call"), David Mitchell's article Let's admit it. Hypocrisy oils the wheels is a brilliant piece on political hypocrisy
- I loved this story, about how the blogger behind linkmachinego
guessed the identity of Belle-de-Jour. He then set up a tripwire so he'd know if someone else found out. The Belle-de-jour saga has been interesting, with some fascinating suspects including Sarah Champion, Stewart Home (also), or Andrew Orlowski. It's been heartwarming to see how many people guessed the secret then never told anyone. - Max Dunbar has written a great post on Why Self-Publishing Doesn't Work. The piece makes a great antidote to the Kool-Aid about self publishing.
- A wicked post on NaNoWriMo from Ariana Osbourne
Hey James
I’m having trouble correlating the excellent Max Dunbar article ‘Why Self-Publishing Doesn’t Work’ you have linked to with your opinions about ‘Swindon Orbital’. Perhaps you can clarify that for me somehow?
r.
I edited out a rambling commentary on the Max Dunbar post and probably should have kept it in. I read Max’s article as focussing more on self-publishing fiction, particularly novels, which I think is a problematic area. However, I think self-publishing can work for small-scale, focussed works, as I’ve said here (the ‘Let’s Have a Golden Age’ post):
http://literaturenetwork.org/?p=1240
At some point I want to do a proper post on this, but I suspect it will finally turn up sometime in 2010…