Jessica Love explores a little of the science behind every weary reader’s nemesis: zoning out.
Analyzing the Scumbag Brain
He’ll Ask You For a Napkin
Mallory Ortberg of The Toast, whose Ayn Rand-inspired versions of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and You’ve Got Mail we told you about a few months ago, is back it at again. Now Rand (er, I mean, Ortberg) has her sights set on the dubiously libertarian children’s classic If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. If we give you the article, you’ll probably ask us for an essay by Gary Percesepe about meeting Ayn Rand’s editor to go along with it.
You Will Survive
“You can only advocate for yourself when you know what it is you want from the experience. You’d be surprised by how many people go into this process and are unclear about what they hope to get out of it.” Over at the Amazon Author Insights blog, Katrin Schumann offers a checklist of seven tips to survive submitting your writing to editors, including this note about articulating your goals beforehand. (Ed. note: Amazon helps us pay the bills around here!)
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Writing While Pretty
“I very quickly realized that if you want to seem as a serious writer, you can’t possibly look like a person who looks in the mirror.” Author, Boots spokesperson, Year-in-Reading alum, and all-around badass Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks to The New York Times about beauty, feminism, and writing.
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The Cat in the Hat
“Ted has another peculiar hobby — that of collecting hats of every description.” Art imitated life for Theodor Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Seuss, hat collector extraordinaire.
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Kurt Vonnegut’s Doodles
When Kurt Vonnegut wasn’t writing, he was drawing. “The making of pictures is to writing what laughing gas is to the Asian influenza,” he said. The New Yorker has a slideshow of 10 of his cubist sketches. You can find more of his doodles in the new book Kurt Vonnegut Drawings.
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Twi-Hard
At The Daily Beast, a bounty of Twilight-iana, including an interview with New Moon director Chris Weitz (aka the man who ruined The Golden Compass) and pictures of Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson et al before Twilight.
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