Things Smart and Interesting (Updated)

Lilith Saintcrow saying smart things about dealing with rejection.

Don't be the guy in this post by Teresa Nielsen Hayden, and do click through to see Colleen Lindsay's original post.

Michael Stackpole saying smart things about making your fiction more visible online.

Via Jay Lake, Carrie Vaughn being smart on initiative. The post was inspired by another post that Carrie linked to. It's by Kurt Busiek and it's a really interesting article on the same subject plus rule breaking as a natural mode for breaking into comics because, fundamentally there are no rules. Much of what he has to say is also applicable to books, though not all, and it's always important to remember that certain sorts of rule breaking are counter-productive.

What Lynne Thomas said in re: the idiot at the new Dr. Who special screening.

Interesting guest poster Milena Popova over at Charlie Stross's blog. Talking about why content is a public good. I find her economic arguments about the nature of content to be fairly convincing on some levels. I'm much less in alignment with her conclusions. In part because she cites Cory Doctorow as evidence and well, I don't think that Cory's generalizable, no matter how much he protests otherwise. I think that some of what he does can be made to work for other writers, but an awful lot of it works because he's Cory Doctorow and he has self-publicity skills and platform building skills that the vast majority of authors simply don't. Updated to add:And C.E. Petit also has problems. Very interesting rebuttal.