Birdbrain(ed) Book Blog

I think I may make this a weekly thing. Click on images to go to their sites, etc.!

An Ode to the Mass Market Paperback @ The Literary Omnivore

Rookie:

I don’t have the answers. Rookie is not your guide to Being a Teen. It is not a pamphlet on How to Be a Young Woman. (If it were, it would be published by American Girl and your aunt would’ve given it to you in the fifth grade.) It is, quite simply, a bunch of writing and art we like and believe in. While there’s always danger in generalizing a whole group of people, I do think some experiences are somewhat universal to being a teenager, specifically a female one. Rookie is a place to make the best of the beautiful pain and cringe-worthy awkwardness of being an adolescent girl. When it becomes harder to appreciate these things, we also have good plain fun and visual pleasure. When you’re sick of having to be happy all the time, we have lots of eye-rolling rants, too. (from the editor’s letter)

Stephen Moffat explains some things about Doctor Who @ HitFix

Must Epic Fantasy Be Set in the Past? @ N.K. Jemisin’s blog

Cory Doctorow:

But the reality of books was this: a publisher’s rep would come in and tell us breathlessly about the lead titles – how much promotion they were up for, how much the house believed in the title, how well the author had done before. We’d order a pile of hardcovers, generally a smaller pile than we’d been asked to take, and usually, they’d sell modestly well. Then we’d return the leftovers, and some months later, they’d resurface as remainders, with their dustjackets clipped or magic-markered lines drawn on their page-edges. Then they’d come in as paperbacks, hang around for a few months longer, and vanish. Sometimes, a copy or two would surface as used trade-ins, and sometimes a regular would ask us to order a copy, but within a short time, the book would no longer be in the publisher’s catalog in any form. It would be gone.

On Femmephobia:

Femmephobia can also be seen in marketing. We have diet soda, and we have diet soda FOR MEN; we have loofahs, and we have loofahs FOR MEN; we have canned soup, and we have canned soup FOR MEN. Men cannot be expected to consume feminine things like body care items or diet food or soup in cans (!?) unless it is specifically marked out as Not Girly, and therefore Not Bad.

Project Gutenberg Founder Michael S. Hart Has Died @ GalleyCat

The Art of Zoo City:

I like art. I like using it in my writing, name-checking the artists I admire or the works that have affected me, making them a part of the texture of the story. But I realise I can only try to make words as powerful and provocative and profound as those images. And that make me feel jealous and inadequate, but also really grateful that it’s out there.