Links: Writing and the web
Junited is here so there's lots of links around! Check out all the participants and I have my Junited list of daily links.
A lovely post about Home by James:
I had come all this way to a place I had dreamed of, had the best of times, and heard the most wonderful of stories. Yet, my heart still yearned for home
James is also thinking about a chat community for web writers.
The Internet Needs More Cross-Pollinators by Brennan is about fandom spaces and all the spaces of the internet, about bridges between them, the metabolism of a living internet:
The Internet is supposed to be hundreds of websites, created and owned by people and not massive for-profit companies.
Since then Brennan has been cooking with gas, Announcing folk.zone: An attempt to build the IndieWeb commons myself and talking about A New IndieWeb Publication? or: I Want to Start Something and Be Bad at It.
Tracy Durnell wrote Imagining human-oriented online posts with some very cool ideas - I especially like the temporal, anti-memetic, and Choose Your Own.
that got me thinking beyond the style and structure of writing (e.g. listicle, poem, autofiction) to the structure of a post: what might novel human-oriented online formats look like? How can indie self-publishers signal that our work is authentic and connect with human readers through our personal websites? The indie web is the avant-garde of modern publishing, and there’s so much more we could explore.
Also enjoyed Tracy's Mental Defrag. I've always thought of sleep as defragging.
When Dystopian Sci-Fi Ruled the Cola Wars by We Are The Mutants is the sort of thing I didn't know I needed to read an article about but absolutely loved.
My Favorite New Books! Plus a Rant about Escapism! from Charlie Jane Anders, particularly the We Can’t Let the Haters Dispense All the Candy section
someone asked how we felt about the notion that a queer-cozy or queernormative world is mere escapism, keeping people from doing the important work of confronting all the horrors that are going on in the real world.
I want everybody to live very close by small cypress.
My Heart and Other Planets, 'a web-based chapbook of five linked science fiction stories by the speculative fiction writer Dafydd McKimm.'
Framed as a series of reflections by an itinerant poet in the far future, the stories explore the strange inhabitants and cultures of five alien worlds - Esh, Mim, Yon, Ys, and Vorn - and what they in turn might reveal about the longings and desires of those of us born on Earth.
Elle makes great points in Too long for middle grade about matching the audience and the style, her preference for 'long lines weaving around meaning like a snake around a branch before reaching the final punctuation.'
How Publishing Actually Works by Nick Mamatas at The Republic of Letters:
publishing is a nineteenth-century production-driven manufacturing industry, not unlike the Big Three automakers, but the writers and compilers of books are artisanal creators. This contradiction is the cause of many of the anxieties and confusions experienced by aspiring novelists and even working professionals.
A fascinating attempt to reconciliation of legacies, Let's save the enlightenment baby from it's muddied bathwater from Aeon
Censured by the Left for its philosophy-washing of Empire, the Enlightenment is further under fire from the populist Right who see the long arm of its influence in the foundations of our established political institutions and the traditional architecture of representative democracy and professional expertise
Lastly, in case anyone hasn't seen Cauenapier's town square, via MenoTexts as well as the follow ups Turn your site into a place people can bump into each other and Two days of Town Square.
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