Super Sweet Blogging Award

My friend Catherine "Ganymeder" Russell bestowed upon me the most colorful blogging award I've seen yet. It's also the most appetizing.

I actually postponed posting about this one until I was allowed to snack. I've been on a strict diet during my editing sprints, but today I got a little candy, and life got a little better.

The rules are fairly standard. Answer five sweet questions, and the pass the hop onto whoever you like. Here we go:

1. Cookies or Cake?
If this counts ice cream cake, then cake. If not, then cookies.

2. Chocolate or Vanilla?
Vanilla is highly underrated, but it's chocolate. It has too many applications independent of ice cream and baking.

3. Favorite Sweet Treat?
Shifts on the mood, definitely. Sometimes I've got to have Reese's Cups, or ice cream cake, or muddy buddies. None of which I'm allowed right now, so I've just made myself miserable!

4. When do you crave sweet things the most?
Usually as I'm passing through a stressful self-regulated activity, like marathon editing. I want that reward, and holding it off is big. Typically I crave that snack more in the throes of the labor than when it's done and I'm allowed it. I also don't often allow it.  Today I'm on my last push on Last House in the Sky, having nearly all the revisions done. I hit my penultimate landmark last night, and am celebrating right now with a couple handfuls of Reese's Pieces.

5. Sweet Nick Name?
Invincible Jello. You'll have to ask my friends why.

My Three Sweet Recipients
-Danielle La Paglia: has put up with so much from me lately, and is generous with digital Fritos.

-Theresa Bazelli: my favor writing baker. I sometimes avoided her blog for fear of the cravings her kitchen photos would give me.

-Chuck Allen: just this week he took to Twitter offering to help any writer who was stuck and needed to talk out problems. That's a sweetheart.

Lit Corner: Google Reader Retires, What Can Replace It?

As of July 1st, Google will retire its Google Reader program. The Friend Connect and Follower feature on Blogspot blogs will also disappear along with it. It's a favorite widget among Blogspot bloggers; one of the first pieces of encouragement many of us give each other is to click our avatar into place. The connection between the two services has been like a friendlier RSS.

What are you looking for to replace the service? If you're not looking for a Google Reader or Friend Connect replacement, why?

While the Google Friend Connect widget is also like a popularity badge, it never got on my nerves. It was particularly nice to see if other friends liked a blog as well. It seemed like such an efficient way to add something to your feeds, and Google did the legwork for you.

J.A. Bennett pointed me toward Bloglovin, which offers to important all of your Google Reader preferences with a log-in. It's been scoped out and lasted long enough to prove it isn't a scam. Signing up and importing my bookmarks took all of two minutes, and they offer an array of buttons to throw onto your blog so others can follow you. I'm testing one out on the upper right today. How does it look? None are as personal - the counter of followers itself feels more aggrandizing than Friend Connect's tiles of faces.

I picked the pink button because pink is bad ass.

A few articles have buzzed about Feedly playing successor to Google Reader. It seems slightly neater than Bloglovin, and certainly more reminiscent of Reader's presentation. That import jaunt took ten seconds, and it services other kinds of sites too, including Youtube. It's definitely worth having a look as it feels tighter, even though Bloglovin's site is technically more minimalistic.

But neither is as convenient as Reader could be for my routine. When I logged in to make this post, I had Reader set up to show me all the recent posts on my dashboard. It was blogging inlaid with blogging, perfect timing and synchronized. If someone knows how to wedge such functionality back into the program after July 1st using any service, I'll be keenly interested.

12 Questions for SF/F/H Readers

John DeNardo of SF Signal introduced (and possibly created) a little questionnaire for SciFi, Fantasy and Horror readers. They're interesting questions because, as common as most are, they split people in huge ways. I'm sharing them and my answers here; if you're interested, please follow suit in the Comments, or link back here on your own blogs. 

1.         The last sf/f/h book I read and enjoyed was:

Roger Zelazny's The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth. Incredible short story collection; "Divine Madness" has one of the most affecting endings I've ever read.

2.         The last sf/f/h book I read and did not enjoy was:

Diana Wynne Jones's Howl's Moving Castle. The characterization and prose style just were not for me. Didn't help that I read it while insanely ill.

3.         A sf/f/h book that I would recommend to new sf/f/h readers is:

J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. What the hell? You're not exposed to any of the genres, so give this a shot and see if the roots of Fantasy are for you. If it is, then we can have many happy chats.

4.         A sf/f/h book that I would recommend to seasoned sf/f/h readers is:

I Won Two More Liebsters!

So I've been bad about awards in the last couple of months, given all my health problems and family distractions. Last night I made a point of making good on at least two blogger goodies handed to me by very considerate people who didn't deserve to have me take this long. I've won a pair of Liebsters, which require you to answer eleven questions, reveal eleven personal facts, and tag eleven more bloggers. Given that I've won this at least three times before, I'm going to track down even more people. I will, however, give you the darned dirt.

The more recent came from Franny Stevenson, a buddy from the A-to-Z Challenge. She had these eleven questions for me:

1. Do you have a nickname?

People play around with my last name; "The Wiz," or Monica Marier calls me "Wisard," which I like. But mostly people just call me "John."

2. Who’s your favourite writer?

I don't have a singular favorite author; what inspires and entertains me changes so often. But some of my favorites are Homer, J.R.R. Tolkien, Shirley Jackson, Douglas Adams, Mark Twain, Dante Alighieri, Eudora Welty, Gail Simone, Akira Toriyama, Hiroaki Samura and Stephen King.

3. If you could switch life with someone who’d you choose? And why?

Reflections Post for the A-to-Z Challenge

Well that wasn't as hard as I expected. Blogging every day for years strengthened the parts of the mind that do this kind of work, but I anticipated it to be more challenging to keep up, especially after I caught my lung infection. There's probably something to be said for writing about a world you've spent years making up and can keep making up minutes before going live.

No, I didn't fudge. Everything I posted pertained to fiction I've written, or that is on the docket.
  

There were definitely shortcomings. I look back at several days with many interesting comments that I simply didn't have the ability to answer, choosing instead to lie in a coughing heap on my bed. And I know there are many Fantasy-oriented blogs that participated in the challenge that I simply never found. Hopefully next year will have more specified sorting options when people sign up; the "Writing" tab only helped so much.

As the only downsides, though, the blog hop was great fun. I seldom write explicit world-building like my twenty-six posts, and found that kind of irreverent prose very fun to write. Sometimes it was a challenge to keep things short; especially after a week of reading thirty entries a day, I know I cherished people who could keep their posts to one screen-length. I wonder how many people felt I was slacking off, and how many were annoyed when my entries grew huge, like on W-day. Commenters were very polite, as expected. I've yet to run into a proper blog hop troll.

What I wanted most was to meet some passionate and interesting bloggers, and I got that. Dan Miller  and Jenelle Schmidt were total pleasures to talk to at all times, and the bloghop got me talking to Laura Eno again, which was long overdue. At one point I think Jean Yates offered to be my new mom. I even got lucky late in the game, crossing paths with people like Samantha Geary, who had the most narratively ambitious A-to-Z's. Her and Shell Flower - I just can't imagine writing and sharing a big on-going story like that. Maybe that means it's what I have to try next year.

The question now is how many people keep chatting after the event has ended. If all those relationships evaporate in May, then all was for naught. Any who've lasted with me this far know they can find me here, still plugging away daily, and on Twitter.

A-to-Z Challenge?

So I'm considering joining to the A-to-Z Challenge this year. Every April this group of bloggers attempts to post every day, corresponding with a letter of the alphabet, and hop around to see each others' progress. While I've been posting daily for years, I've never done an entire month on one theme.



Themes are arbitrary to the challenge, beyond the obvious one of the alphabet. My friend Beverly Fox is going to try blogging about photographs. I've heard someone is going to do dinosaurs, which will at least garner my daily traffic. I want that challenge for the same reason I tried to serialize The Only Thing Worse is the Cure: I don't know how, and I'd like to learn.

The only theme I'm craving, though, is worldbuilding, and particularly exploring the world of my novels. I'm waiting for betas to get back to me and haven't undertaken another huge task yet. So I figure I'll ask you, generous readers: would an April about the A,B,C's of The House That Nobody Built and Last House in the Sky interest you? Getting to know the history of its disasters, its populations of hungry robots and sauropods? Visit not only civilization, but the wilds of The Frontier and The Uncanny Valley? Maintaining that, whatever letters fell on Fridays, would simply force me to write flash fiction for those bits of my world.

I already know that 'A' is for "Apocalypses."

Teaser Tuesday: Across the Nightingale Floor by Lian Hearn

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly blog hop hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. My book for this week is Lian Hearn's Across the Nightingale Floor, an Asian-influenced Fantasy novel about two young people caught in a destructive feud between noble houses. This quote comes from Page 4.

"I told myself they
had run away:
My mother had taken
my sisters to the
safety of the forest.
I would go
and find them
just as soon as
I had found out
who was screaming."

It's a simple novel which I've just finished reviewing. It's heavy in foreign tropes, and wouldn't be a bad introduction to Japanese Fantasy, even though Hearn is Australian.

Everyone is welcome to Teaser Tuesday. The rules are as simple as:
• Grab your current book
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• Avoid spoilers! Don't give too much away or you'll ruin it for the very people you're suggesting it to.
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers