Links of Interest (March 5th 2009 through August 13th 2009)

Audible.com to sell 2 DRM-FREE titles
It appears Audible.com is going to try releasing Cory Doctorow's next two audiobooks without DRM (a first for Audible.com as far as I know).

Skulpt
"Skulpt is an entirely in-browser implementation of Python."

Modernizr
Modernizr is a Javascript library that allows client side detection of CSS3 and HTML5 browser features. It allows you to write CSS with conditionals through one of my personal favorite bits of CSS magic: classes on the body tag. It also gives you the ability to do the same in our Javascript.

epub-tools
A collection of open source (BSD) tools for generating and managing ePub documents. Adobe's Java based EPUBGen was just added. Tools now exist for conversion to ePub from Word, RTF, DocBook, TEI, and FictionBook.

Doozers Get "Fraggle Rock" Spin-Off
It's animated, and aimed at ages four to seven, but I'll probably check it out with the kids.

The Zelazny Project
"We plan to print a complete collection of Roger Zelazny's short fiction and poetry, in (most likely) six hardcover volumes. We expect to include all published fiction and poetry we can find, however obscurely published, and a number of unpublished works retrieved from Zelazny's archived papers. We also expect to include the shorter early versions of several novels, several novel excerpts that were published independently as short works and a few of Zelazny's articles on topics of interest to him."

Go Listen: James Patrick Kelly Interview

Tee Morris posted a great interview with James Patrick Kelly (author of, among other things, the excellent Hugo Award winning novella Burn) on The Survival Guide to Writing Fantasy. Jim really goes into his thoughts on podcasting fiction. Now I’m extra bummed I missed him when he was at the library recently.

Holly Lisle’s writing clinics on sale

Just wanted to let people know that Holly put her three writing clinics on sale ($2 off each) through Friday (March 9th) at her online e-book shop.

I can personally recommend them, especially the language clinic. I’m currently working on my second language for Miracles and I’m enjoying the heck out of it. The books are clear and concise, and most importantly they make the process fun (and manageable, but fun is more important). If any of this even sounds vaguely interesting you owe it to yourself to check them out (the shop pages contain Table of Contents and excepts):

DragonPage: Cover to Cover 2.0

My first, and still one of my favorite podcasts, The Dragon Page Cover to Cover changed their format last week, and added Michael A. Stackpole to the mix. So far, so good. I haven’t heard this week’s episode yet, but it looks like they want some feedback on expanding book coverage beyond Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror.

One Pass Revision: Day 3, Part 2 (55/563)

Manuscript Slog Page Count
55/563

Nothing went at all to plan today, but I got a bit more done.

Chapters 3 and 4 have a number of POV characters. I didn’t head hop within scenes, but I did change characters at scene breaks. I don’t think it’s at all confusing. I had considered rewriting each chapter as a single POV, but I’m not sure I can unless I want to have some very short chapters, or I can come up with some very interesting new material. Chapter 2 was the same way, but I was able to easily reassign the scenes to other characters and make an even split between two of them.

I’m going to push on and hope for the best. I’ll keep trying for single POV per chapter and if it works out everywhere else I’ll have to come back to this stuff. I’ll just make a note in the notebook for now.