RIASS stuff:
Interview: Jennifer Laurens, author of Grace Doll, on immortality in fiction
Humour as an art form: Michael Frissore on having a laugh in fiction
The Folio Society: beautiful books for book lovers'Your eyeballs will thank you for clicking this link. Really.
Evil in-laws, spineless husbands and Kirsty Crawford's The Secret Life of Husbands'Rating: 
Other bookish stuff:
Writers, have you ever considered writing by hand?'Lets just say that with my handwriting I could easily pass as a doctor. I regularly take notes by hand (any conference I go to Im there with pen and paper), and I plan or work out plot points by hand, but when Im actually composing Im all about the keyboard and that wonderful, wonderful delete button.
Are writers too insulated from their readers?'Unlike writers, readers have only one part to satisfy. What I mean by that is,'Writers must wrestle with the technical details of a story while trying to enjoy it. Readers only want to enjoy it. To lose sight of this dynamic is to lose sight of our ultimate aim. This is something my husband, an entrepreneurial type, is always going on about. Hes all about short cycles of development, followed by market feedbackhe needs to know that people really want something before investing time and money into it. On the other hand, all too often books are only seen by their target audience after theyve been published.
I can agree with the sentiment on this watch!
Peta Jinnath Anderson on what makes a story'I love the insight Peta has about what is important to one reader being different from what is important to another reader. There is no right, no wrong ' there is only simply, beautifully, story.
New Zealand publishing: the land of the long white cloud has a silver lining'NZs publishing industry is on par with that of much of the west, and theres a strong emphasis on local work.
What is science fiction for, anyway?'Perhaps, rather than rehashing the perennial genre is exhausted/dying/dead debate it would be helpful to take a step back, and articulate what we think genre'should'be, and start from there If we want to advance our understanding of the art form, and if we want to advance the quality (howsoever it gets defined) of that art form, shouldn't we at some point spell out where we want it go?
Ten tropes in YA'Yep, pretty much. Stay tuned for a mildly ranty review later today.
Rose Tremain on the art of not winning literary prizes'The most significant hurdle of all is finding the resources to defeat the almost inevitable 48-hour blues that follow the non-win, and the energy to return to the work in hand, unaffected by whats just happened to a different book. Every writer I know feels more or less contented or discontented with day-to-day life according to how his or her writing is going. Many, many things will affect this, but I know that the non-win of a prize can seem to infect the ongoing work with a badness-virus and lay the author low.
The reading habits of Orhan Pamuk'The worst books are also bad novels. Just as good books give me the joys of being alive, bad novels depress me and as I notice this sentiment coming from the pages, I stop. I also do not hesitate to walk out of a movie house if the film is bad. Life is short, and we should respect every moment of it.
Why ebook distribution is completely and utterly broken and how to fix it''Problems include lack of choice in availability, DRM issues, and propriety formats such as the special Kindle file type. A key one is territorial distribution rights that mirror those of the print book model, and which seems baffling in the digital world. Publishers need to dispense with this nonsense and move to global rights, and global distribution, for any given language, says the author. Of course, if this is going to happen, authors need to be able to be compensated accordinglyforeign rights can be essential to an authors career.
The very long tail: how magazines can make their archives sing'Magazines are packaging up their archives in order to sell them to customers at an attractive price. Many are also looking to make them searchable so that they can serve research purposes. The author notes, however, that if magazines are going to continue to do this, they need to look to the future and ensure that their current content is timeless enough that users will get value out of it in the future.
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With the exception of maybe 3 of those YA tropes, that list could be applied to urban fantasy. I suspect those tropes trickled down from urban fantasy, especially as uf authors started branching out into the YA market (after the success of Twilight).
Great point, Kat, and thats something Ive been thinking about of late. Ive been finding a surprising number of similarities between category romances and the YA Im reading (and yes, certainly UF), and I think youre really on to something about the trickling down of these tropes from authors moving from one age group to another.
That watch is fantastic! I want it. :)
I like how the blogger points out that most of us like a cliche or too, and actively seek them out. Im not a big fan of triangles, but there is a series or too where I quite enjoy that dynamic among the characters. I think it depends on if there is a reason the author has used that trope as to whether or not I will enjoy the book over all even if it has a cliche or two.
Im fine with cliches, depending on how theyre done. To be honest, I think any writing rules are a bit sillyits all in the execution, and the very skilled can get away with anything!
Good point about the love triangle. If theres a purpose and its actually an integral part of the story Im happy to read about one. But so often theyre just a cheap way of adding tension, and thats what I dislike about them. :)