Inside the Blogosphere: SF&F’s Bedroom Antics

I was recently asked to participate in a round table discussion on sex in SF/F hosted at Grasping for the Wind.

Several bloggers were asked:

In SF&F, should sex be included in the narrative or not? Should there be different standards for its inclusion in young adult or adult literature? What should those standards be? What are your personal standards and why?

New Books of Interest in October: Stephenson and McKillip

Among the books that caught my eye were the following two titles (nothing else really caught my imagination this month):


McKillip, Patricia A. : The Bell at Sealey Head
Fantasy novel set in a mansion, Aislinn House, on the outskirts of the seaside town Sealey Head, in which the ancient Lady Eglantyne lies dying.
• The publisher’s site has a
brief description, and a Q&A with McKillip
Stephenson, Neal : Anathem
Science fiction novel about a monastic order on the planet Arbre that maintains secular knowledge, threatened by an extraterrestrial force that portends global disaster.

• The publisher’s site has this description, with its ‘browse inside’ feature.
• Stephenson’s
page for the book links excerpts from reviews, a Wiredinterview, a trailer and video interviews, seven tracks of music “from the World of Anathem“, and excerpts from the book’s Dictionary.




Wiki for Writers: Caution

This is a follow-up to my previous post on using a Wiki to organize writing work. I’m personally not sure it’s going to work for me. The Tiddly Wiki mentioned last time only allows for editing on screen and not adding other documents, so although it looked nice I decided to look at some of the other Wikis out there. I have found that you basically need to pay a corporate style subscription fee if you want to post any reasonable amount of content – i.e. over a GB. 

Having had a mess around with one of the Wiki platforms I actually doubt that it will add anything over having an organized file system on PC and making sure I back up important documents. 
So looks like this was just a big red herring to prevent me getting on with the actual writing!