Sunday Link Love

• Found this through Beth Revis – Intergalactic Academy, an awesome blog about YA science fiction.

• Ohmygosh, I forgot to link this in my post  7 Favorite Talking Cats, Part 2! It’s a Puss In Boots custom My Little Pony. Appropriate, no? Awesome, yes.

• I’m loving Neil Gaiman’s All Hallow’s Read tradition.

• Did you know that there’s an Occupy Writers? It’s true. There is.

• Major thanks to KD Sarge for pointing me out to Set Phasers to Lol! And now I procrastinate on everything forever.

• There’s a BABY MONKEY CAM ON THE INTERNET. And now I procrastinate on everything forever.

• Informative video about how the NYT Bestseller List works:

To recap, my ROW 80 goals: 

• 1. Finish outlines for the three books.

• 2. After the outlines are finished, write 4000 words a week on KtLO.

• 3. Write a short short for every meeting of the monthly critique group. 

Something surprising happened this week, from Wednesday evening into most of Thursday. I just got absolutely possessed by my outline. It was bizarre – suddenly, after spinning my wheels for a couple weeks, I knew what I needed to do! And then I did it. And I felt like this:

No lie, probably some of this:

• As I sit here to type this, I find myself surprisingly wordless about the 10 year anniversary of 9/11. I just don’t know what to say, other than I can’t believe it’s been 10 years. And that you should go read Meg Cabot’s essay about what it was like to be blocks away from the tragedy while it was happening, because she has better words than I do.

• Sommer Leigh has already featured on my Sunday Link Love, but maybe she should stop being so awesome then. This week, her post for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group (a group I’m currently not in, despite the fact that I certainly qualify for the criteria) had me smiling. Again, all writer-types should see this, insecure or not.

• Two years ago, a new best friend introduced me to the wonders of X-Files, which I had previously only recognized as “that weird show whose opening credits traumatized me as a kid”. Something that immediately hooked me about X-Files was how it felt like getting great, stand-alone mini-movies in every episode, and like Doctor Who, they could reinvent themselves all they wanted and come back as a completely different show every week. If you’re interested in X-Files, here’s a great list of episodes to get you started.

• I’m excited for this movie, even though I might be the only person in the universe who didn’t like Juno that much.

• More Alyssa Rosenberg, because she’s also awesome, but also because I think this is an important conversation. Honestly? In a sexist world, we need some of our female characters to function as role models, but that doesn’t mean that all writers have that responsibility. I don’t write role models. Sometimes I even depict females who are incompetent, not because they’re female, but because individual variation among gender is a true thing. And because I happen to love reading and writing stories that turn horrible, horrible people into sympathetic characters.

• Stole this from Ari Susu-Mago – Get Out of There Cat! Wherein cats forget that they’re cats and that they should not be wherever they are.

• Oh man, I discovered Elana Johnson’s blog this week, and I’m in heaven. I love finding good blogs that go back a few years so that I can archive trawl. And I thought that this post, about what people should blog about, was particularly good.

• I got 2 parakeets yesterday! I am so excite. I never had pets growing up, because my mom is allergic to everything. My dad had a cat, but it was his cat, not my cat. Plus I ended up becoming severely allergic to his cat.
• By accident, I got a male and female parakeet, but the Internet tells me this shouldn’t be a problem so long as I don’t put a nest in their cage. I named them Lucy and Desi. +100 if you get the reference, which is not particularly hard. I would post pictures, but right now they’re still terrified of me so I don’t think I should approach them with strange objects such as a camera.
• I can already tell they have distinct personalities. Desi is chill and sleeps all the time and has even nuzzled my finger, while Lucy refuses to sleep because she is still convinced that I want to eat her or something. But I respect her survival instinct. This is pretty much in line with what everyone says about male/female parakeets, which is that the females are harder to train.

• Which brings me to my point: Whipper the parakeet. Seriously, he is adorable.