magpie's shiny things

This week was all about the short sto­ries. Many avail­able free on the ‘net

From the World SF blog. The City of Silence by Ma Boyong. A lit­tle too easy update of 1984 for the web ruled city. I sus­pect that there is bet­ter mate­r­i­al by the same writer.

The House of Aunts. Zen ChoTo at GigaNotoSaurus. I don’t usu­al­ly read hor­ror. I loved this one. A teenag­er hemmed in by a pas­sel of nosy, inter­fer­ing, undy­ing­ly loy­al aun­ties. A girl’s first crush and a lot of humor.

I read a cou­ple of sto­ries writ­ten by some­one I sort of know that dis­ap­point­ed me great­ly. There is zero chance that he’d find this lit­tle post and yet… I can’t bring myself to point you all to an instruc­tive exam­ple of flat writ­ing. Conflict avoid­ed by writ­ing about the con­flict rather than the sto­ries — whew.

I’m read­ing a lot about the act (crime?) of writ­ing. Mostly web stuff — most­ly lost in space.

On the longer form front.

An Everlasting Meal — Tamar Adler. A cook­book worth read­ing for both the ideas and the prose. I’ve just start­ed. Pleased with it.

Tons of stuff land­ing on the Kindle and in the post office box. A Dorothy Parker bio, Fran Lebowitz (smart ass girls — could it be a theme?) Osama — Lavie Tidhar (alter­nate present polit­i­cal), Palimpset — CV (how cities grow — folk­loric.)  Samples of a hand­ful of things.

It was a week for hunt­ing and gath­er­ing and plun­der­ing oth­er peo­ples’ read­ing lists. Next week — cook­ing and eat­ing my haul.

Happy Friday my dears.