July 15, 2003
(1) Threatened with cancellation by financially-strapped Michigan State University, the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop has been urging people to write to MSU’s administrators. A good idea if you care about the ongoing conversation that is the SF world. If nothing else, Clarion and its institutionally-unrelated sibling Clarion West are surely, over the years, among the most successful workshops in the world at the task of successfully teaching people to write fiction that sells. (Disclosure: I was editor-in-residence at Clarion last year and will be teaching at Clarion West later this month.)
(2) Tom Tomorrow’s Great Big Book of Tomorrow is a full-throttle extravaganza of lefty cartoon goodness, featuring both words and pictures, color and B&W, and most importantly, wise-ass penguins and cute little dogs. Buy it from your favorite bookseller—or go directly to Mr. Tomorrow’s highly decorative weblog and buy it through his own Powell’s link, thus giving Brooklyn’s hardest-working cartoonist a modest additional stipend. No American bathroom should be without this highly browsable work!
(3) Finally, Crooked Timber is the latest and possibly greatest “superblog”, in which multiple stars of the weblog world (Chris Bertram, Harry Brighouse, Daniel Davies, Henry Farrell, Maria Farrell, Kieran Healy, Jon Mandle, and Brian Weatherson, in this case) pool their efforts to form a single, frequently-updated, and terrifyingly intelligent uber-site, with Ginger Baker on drums.
That Powell's link is broken; you typoed the attribute as "herf" instead of "href".
I was one of those who emailed MSU about the funding. They assured me that since there are obviously so many concerned people who want to see Clarion continue, our contributes will surely provide enough money to solve the problem.
I was rather surprised to get their response within a couple of hours of sending the email.
Hard-Hitting Moderator: Teresa Nielsen Hayden.
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