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I have a daughter.  Last night we were playing around with the site GirlSense.com.  On the site you can design different fashions and accessories, as well as buy the fashion creations of other users.  I’ve seen other avatar makers in the past, but the amount of detail you can do on these clothes, bags, shoes, etc. is pretty amazing.

And it occurred to me that this will be the future of fashion.  Visions of the future often put people in identical silver jumpsuits, as if we’ve “gotten over” our obsession with outward appearances.  But fashion is a creative pursuit.  […]

Some people blow through a book in a day or two, while others take a couple of weeks or more. Many people just inhale them like a sweet breeze, one after the other, without stopping in between. I’m worse than that — I just forget the endings of books I enjoy. (Truth is, I don’t even finish books I don’t love.) To most avid readers, books are not only an unquestionable right, but they are taken for granted as a vital component of life.

It’s like when the tourists cruise through the Sistine Chapel, look up and say, “Look honey, […]

By Scott Nicholson

Dean Koontz has made the observation that novels are like annuities, earning income for writers over a lifetime. Well, that’s true for Koontz and a handful of writers who manage to keep books in print and on the shelves.

Given the constraints of shelf space, the product pipeline that requires a 30-day flushing of “out with the old, in with the new,” and the vagaries of sales numbers and warehousing, the publishing-industry model almost guarantees a writer will have NO books on the shelf in their old age, precisely the time when they need income the most […]

This post about self-publishing is from February, but new to me.  It makes a persuasive case against self-publishing.

Professional editors of the level I work with now make money. Grown-up money that I cannot pay them, because I am not a rich person and never will be. Let alone copyediting, typsetting, and cover art (which is vastly important, don’t be fooled). I have zero interest in paying out $7000-$15000 before the book gets published, and almost certainly seeing minimal profit (especially since that 70% Amazon deal everyone’s so sweet on has a whole lot of strings attached). I like it

I’ve spent the day reading a self-published sci-fi potboiler–first in a trilogy–that I bought in the Amazon Kindle store after reading the entire sample. The grammatical and writing errors in the sample were few enough for me to go ahead and spend $3.99. As the book progressed, however, I became increasingly distracted by mounting disregard for my investment in time.

This writer has little use for commas, except for what I suppose is garnish. And he fails at every opportunity to trim superfluous words: “The boots she wore on her feet” is a mild example. Crashing several sentences together is […]

There’s an interesting post at the Nation called The Trouble with Amazon that’s a few shades too negative about Amazon’s influence on publishing.  Though Amazon has done some seriously shady things regarding pricing and strong-arming publishers, it also has advantages.  The main issue I have with the piece is this:

Take the issue of choice: when it comes to the books it stocks, Amazon makes no pretense of selectivity. Provided it carries an ISBN and isn’t offensive, Amazon is happy to sell any book Joe Schmo cares to publish. “We want to make every book available—the good, the bad and