Another round of interesting things I came across, out a day late because yesterday was post-xmas shopping day and, more importantly, a day after xmas bike ride to burn off some of those xmas day calories.
Here they are.
My friend Megan is a librarian at a major metropolitan library. She recently asked me "why don't sci-fi and fantasy readers use libraries?" I was taken aback - I figured that genre fans everywhere used libraries and that would include readers of science fiction. But no, apparently they don't.
If you're a writer, there are many hurdles to overcome.
Conventional wisdom among geologists has always been that the first several million years in Earth's 4.5 billion-year history were an age of lava and fire. Nothing could possibly live in on the burning planet until at least 3.2 billion years ago - or so scientists thought.
Ah, the information dump. That wordy bit of fictional exposition, during which all the background information the reader needs to enjoy a story is expressed in one great big pile of, well, dump.
Two California companies have invented technologies that quite literally create ads customized to the moments in which they're being viewed. This is a really cool and scary idea.
You’re writing a novel and you’re curious to see just how many words you’ve written. 10,000. Good. Keep going.