9 Ways To Jumpstart Your Writing Goal
Keep writing. Keep doing it and doing it. Even in the moments when it's so hurtful to think about writing. ~Heather Armstrong

Fleming letters raise thousands
Letters between James Bond author Ian Fleming and his "Miss Moneypenny" have fetched £14,340 at auction - almost five times more than expected.

Fritz Leiber, master of Shakespearean sci-fi
The colourful alcohol-soaked career of Fritz Leiber began in theatre. His father, Fritz Leiber Sr, was a veteran actor (notable for having his portrait painted every time he took on a new role), and the sometime owner of the Shakespearean theatre company that gave Lieber Jr his first job.

The politics of sci-fi
While awards for speculative fiction may be more democratic than their literary cousins, they are no less a hotbed of political intrigue. With the genre awards season approaching, the shortlists for the Hugos, the Nebulas and the Damon Knight Grandmaster prize reveal some of the dynamics driving contemporary speculative fiction.

A Princess Seeking a Voice
Ursula K. Le Guin began her research for her new book, "Lavinia," by reading Virgil's epic poem "The Aeneid" in the original Latin. "Very, very slowly," she said in an interview. "Ten lines a day."

The fantastic appeal of fantasy
The more rational the world gets, the more we demand the irrational in our fiction, says Mark Chadbourn

Is the Short Fiction Market in Trouble?
Nobody questions the relevance of genre short fiction, but there is some debate about the health of the market itself. From your perspective, is the short fiction market in trouble? If not, why the debate? If so, what is the cause?

Thanks to Al Nyveldt for providing a most useful extension/widget to track my most popular posts.

You can see what it looks like to the right. I had started with just the "Top 5". That quickly changed to the "Top 7" just because I figured why not show a couple more than just 5? Of course, 7 is kind of an odd number. You don't see Letterman doing a "Top 7", after all. So, I bumped it up to the current number that it is now, 10.

The widget is great. It allows me to showcase posts beyond those that show up on my home page while also giving me and my readers a quick look at how many views each post has gotten.

The interesting thing about displaying my popular posts is seeing how they almost jockey for position. Just days after I bumped the display count to 10, one of the posts fell off as newer entries (here and here) overtook it. It seems to be staying fairly consistent now, with my John Grisham post racking up the most views by far. I expect it to continue to change, though, as fresh posts overtake the "stale" ones.

side note: The only reason the John Grisham post is so high is because of the image I chose for the post. I can tell this because Google Analytics shows a lot of hits from Google Images and references those keywords. Seems Jurassic Park is alive and well.

If you have such a feature available via your blogging software, I highly recommend making use of it!

This week's Tor Free E-book giveaway features Reiffen’s Choice by S.C. Butler.

You can also download The Disunited States of America by Harry Turtledove, which was last week's giveaway.

Enjoy.