On Reviewers, and Paying Them

On Friday Twitter announced their new Twitter Fiction Festival, a “virtual storytelling celebration.” The festival will feature “creative experiments in storytelling from authors around the world,” and you can submit story proposals over here.

Japanese director Satoshi Kon died last Tuesday at the age of 46. His last words, a rambling text that his family uploaded to the Internet following his death, have just been translated to English: “Everyone, thank you for all the truly great memories. I loved the world I lived in.”

Novels written by accomplished writers about failed artists are nothing new. What is new is seeing a once-successful novel about a failed artist — one that’s been out-of-print for twenty years — get a burst of renewed attention.

Last week, popular science fiction author John Scalzi wrote a contentious (but necessary) blog post that likened the lives of straight white males to “the easiest difficulty setting” in the “videogame” known as life. While comments on the original post had to be closed due to uproar, the piece was reposted to Kotaku where the discussion rages on.