Something a little more serious than usual: libel and defamation. A computer, an internet connection, and one or more functional digits is pretty much all you need to be an irresponsible journalist these days.
“What journalist? I’m a blogger,” you’re saying. The truth is, if you’re making an unprivileged publication of another person’s statements to a third party–ie writing it on a publicly accessible blog–you’re one-quarter of the way to defamation.
Clearly it’s worth educating yourself about defamation and its cousins libel and slander. Luckily, OurMedia has a concise online guide for bloggers. And if you’ve been synergizing all morning, they even have links to an executive summary to get you up to speed and proactive.
Read it before you update your site about the Moon Landing Hoax with nine-point proof of Chandrayaan-1′s real mission, and save yourself the embarrassment of being punched in the face by a living legend. Or being sued for libel. Mostly the latter.
A water clock or clepsydra (Greek kleptein, to steal; hydro, water) is any timekeeper operated by means of a regulated flow of liquid into (inflow type) or out from (outflow type) a vessel where the amount is then measured.
It’s cropped up twice in one-hundred pages of The Strange Nation of Rafael Mendes. It sounds like a venereal disease.
Over at the guardian, Sam Jordison asks if brilliant writing is what separates sf from litritcha.
As soon as someone writes a really good sci-fi book it nearly always seems to get reclassified as something else. It’s a bit like the way members of the Ireland cricket team become English once they reach a certain level.
The Road, The Time Traveler’s Wife, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Slaughterhouse Five, Never Let Me Go… and those are just off the top of my head. So yeah. Why is it that when we suck, we’re writing sf, but when we rule, suddenly we’re sitting at the cool kids’ table? And by we I mean you. And occasionally me.
Just something I found and liked. An excerpt:
The trouble: You want Thing A but are stuck with Thing B.
Shit, you say, turning Thing B around in your hands. Look at this thing, you say. It’s as dull as a bucket of dirt. It’s not half as interesting as a sculpture of a dog pissing on a dead man’s shoe in the rain, and you don’t have one of those. You don’t have Thing A, either.
I can relate. From the now defunct Backwards City Review.
An online literary journal out of Toronto that publishes fiction, reviews and poetry (though they’re not currently interested in poetry, according to the site). The gory details on submissions:
TDR publishes four new short stories every three months (i.e., in September, December, March and June). There is no minimum or maximum length requirement.
Submissions for each issue will be received in the month prior to publication. For example, if you want your story to be considered for the September issue, send it to us in August.
Please: only one story per writer per submission period.
They pay $100 for short fiction and submissions are electronic, which is convenient. They also have a good guide for students (read: new writers) and a massive list of helpful links.