RIASS stuff:
Lisa Stasse's The Forsaken and my frustrations with dystopian YA'Sorry guys, I get a bit ranty in this one.
Review:'Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man'by Joseph Heller'Rating: 
'A wry look at the problems of an author who has nothing left to contribute, but still wants to write.
Possible truths and Helen Dunmore's Talking to the Dead'Rating: 'We all know that I love unreliable narrators, so it's little surprised that I adored this one!
My husband (nerdy software developer) and I are going to be up in Sydney over the 26th and 27th of February. If youd like to catch up while were there, drop me a line at readinasinglesitting AT gmail.com.
Other bookish stuff:
Ben Schrank on Harry Potter and fan culture'There were jokes about fan fiction that I didnt get. And then the fan-fiction professor got up and began to make direct references to The Man who had commodified Potter'Aha! I knew when I was being insulted! I could work with that. I felt Harry smile down on me. Because I work in? big publishing and am The Man. I wouldnt have to focus on Dumbledore or anything related to Muggle Studies, Mudbloods or how Ron really feels about Hermione. And then the professor made some more jokes I didnt get, there was polite clapping and I was introduced.
and a Q&A with Schrank I think it is valuable to have had experience on both side of the fence, because it does help with empathy for everybody's side of things. I can say I feel sympathy for the author's side of publishing, the agent's side of publishing, and the challenges of all of it and how hard it is to get anything done.
A thoughtful post about the pros and cons of self-publishing (the comments are worth reading, too)
How to speed read Oddly enough, Im not a huge fan of speed reading: I like to be able to take in everything that Im reading, and enjoy the ride. I just read a lot (and obviously, for this site, fairly short books)
Interview with art designer Maria T Middleton Ill sketch ideas/thoughts while Im reading and then discuss them with the editor to make sure were on the same page. I think editorial input is really helpful because most editors have a vision for a project and I like to use that vision as a spring-board for the design.
11 weirdly spelled words and how they got that way
Publisher convinced author to delete revelation that the main character in a popular memoir was abusive (interestingly, Ive been consciously avoiding this one in spite of all the ads Ive been seeing everywhere. Rightly so, apparently. 'In an email, Valdes tells me that, although she doesn't dispute the truth of what she originally wrote in the post,'she removed it at the request of her publisher. (Update: Valdes now says the request came from her agent.) Speaking of her publisher, in the blog post in question, a cached version of which is still searchable online, she claims that her publisher has 'essentially shunned' her as a result of the inconvenient real-world demise of her written fairy tale.
Programmers on how to turn data into journalism and why it matters''The power that you wield as a journalist is attention. You bring attention to a thing, and that attention has good and bad consequences. And decisions that you make are often about what happens when attention is brought to this thing, says programmer Matt Waite.
Interesting article on BitTorrent and piracy lawsuits Wiley gets the lawyers in while Tim Ferris tries to leverage the platform as a way of getting potential readers to sample his new book.
Scholastic Launches New Multi-Platform Fantasy Series
Why you should credit peoples hard work And also not steal it in the first place.
A Literary Tour of Historical Y.A
Hunter S Thompsons daily routine'is, um, as expected, really.
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