Remake or mistake?

I like Shakespeare. I took a Shakespeare year in high school, essentially. Two electives, one for the fall, one for the spring. We watched the movies rather than read the plays, and while we did have tests, they were easy if you'd been paying attention. My high school English teacher had concentrated on Shakespeare in college, and his love of the work combined with his command of the material made for an amazing experience which has stuck with me.

From Wikimedia Commons

How Many Novels Have YOU Written?

Just something I have to get off my chest.

It really bugs me when I see and hear comments like "It takes her ten years to write a book!" (Donna Tartt) and "It took him six years to write the last one....too long!" (George R. R. Martin).

Most of the people making these comments are not, I think, writers. I don't like to make assumptions, but they are, so why not?

Found on Tumblr

I really need a snappy title for my link posts

All right, another lazy link roundup (ooh, should I call it that? Lazy Link Roundup™? Has somebody already thought of that?)

I'm about 4k words behind on my CampNaNoWriMo project. Still doable, certainly. I haven't lowered my word count goal yet.

Found on Imgur, but also on this Buzzfeed post

The Ethics of Space Travel

You'd think somebody with as much nuclear paranoia as mine would have considered the amount of radiation a person would be exposed to on a trip to Mars. But I didn't. I think to some degree, I assumed ships were shielded and left it at that. It's how it works in the movies, right?

Picture of Space Shuttle Atlantis, from NASA web site

Book Brownies (the fae kind, not chocolates)

A couple of times in the past year, I've had a strange sort of book luck.

See, we have a book sale at the library, both for items the library itself has withdrawn and also for donated items. Books are a dollar, fifty cents if they're trade paperbacks. You might imagine I come home with more book sale books than I ought, though I do try to exercise a measure of control.

Two times in the past year, I've walked past the book sale and found the exact book I was looking for, for the low low bargain price of one George Washington.

Selections from my bookmarks

I've been bookmarking links for years. You know how it goes; you see something you want to read, but maybe you're not in the mood for it right that second. Or maybe you don't have time. So it goes.

My bookmarks are fairly..er.."organized". I have many folders, have had good intentions for all of the headings. Some of them pertain directly to particular writing projects (so I've got ones called "Rebel yell" and "Detroit"), at least three are for recipes I've almost certainly never cooked, and many are just things I thought might be interesting. One folder is called "inspiration", because of the piles of information in it, there's sure to be story fodder.

So, while looking at those bookmarks instead of editing The Last Song, I found a few I figured I'd share. In a way, they're loosely connected in my mind.

I thought these pictures were eye-catching, and would eventually lead me to some story or another. They're all from the 40's, if memory serves, though they're in color (!).

This one is from XKCD, and is a Radiation Dose Chart, using Sieverts, which is the unit for an absorbed dose, named after Rolf Maximilian Sievert, who studied the biological effects of radiation.

Here's A-E on The Observatory ~ The Tough Guide to the Known Galaxy. Links on the bottom take you to the rest of the definitions on the site. I'm glad I re-found this one, as I've been trying to build the vernacular for my science fiction space culture. The writer also has the blog Rocketpunk Manifesto, which looks to have even more great information on it.

And I forgot about this charming Forbes article, Why I Named my Dog After Neil Armstrong, published in 2012 not long after Neil Armstrong himself passed away.

Wheels in the sky

Did you know that you can see all kinds of recent pictures of the moon, courtesy of the Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter?  They in fact released a mosaic image of the north pole of the moon, something that blows my mind.

 

(artist rendering of LRO, from NASA page)

It got me thinking about other orbiters we have. Because we do have other orbiters.