Janet Fitch’s writing tip #9, on writing scenes:

What is a scene? a) A scene starts and ends in one place at one time […] b) A scene starts in one place emotionally and ends in another place emotionally. Starts angry, ends embar­rassed. Starts lovestruck, ends disgusted. c) Something happens in a scene, whereby the character cannot go back to the way things were before.

The Telegraph’s Harry Mount detects a lighter mood and a sense of humour among the books selected for this year’s Man Booker Prize. (The exclusion of Monty Python’s Big Red Book from the 1972 longlist remains contentious.)

Mike Shatzkin, discussing the recent spate of authors who are sidestepping the tradi­tional publishing model and going it alone, ponders the ‘unbundling of the publisher’s suite of services to the author’:

Publishers still pay advances although they’re doing their best to scale them back. Many don’t provide the same level of editing services that they used to; they often expect more books to be delivered by each of their editors and they also lean to agents they can trust to do a lot of the work of putting a book in shape.

As thorough an account as you are likely to find concerning nineteenth-century encounters between human beings and giant squid.

(via Pharyngula)

Get Lamp is a documentary that looks back at the era of text-based computer games. If you were born before, say, 1980, you might remember these. Basically, to get through the game, you had to type things like Go east, Take hammer, Touch lady, etc.

In the words of the documentary makers:

They presented puzzles, tricks and traps to be overcome. They were filled with suspense, humor and sadness. And they offered a unique type of joy as players discovered how to negotiate the obstacles and think their way to victory.

I remember playing a sort of ‘hardboiled crime’ text adventure on our old Amstrad CPC6128, and I surely must have played Zork at some point.

I later spent many hours playing Leisure Suit Larry, a more graph­ically advanced (and graphic!) incarn­ation of the adventure game, in which issuing instruc­tions such as Touch lady were not only acceptable but encouraged.

(via Galleycat)

Novelist David Mitchell, in an essay on historical fiction, coinciding with the release of The thousand autumns of Jacob de Zoet:

To a degree, the historical novelist must create a sort of dialect — I call it ‘Bygonese’ — which is inaccurate but plausible. Like a coat of antique-effect varnish on a pine new dresser, it is both synthetic and the least-worst solution.