books

Ryan North and I are having a BOOKWAR

It started here. In the words of Ryan North:

You probably read about my amazing friend Chip’s amazing relationship with an amazing Applebee’s. If not, do so. It is amazing; that is the word that I think applies to it, if I had to choose one.

Last week my friends and I were talking about this incredibly-awful “how to go viral” article someone wrote about the story (first line: “Going Viral is the number one aspiration of everyone and their next door neighbor”). “This is how the world ends,” I said.
Around the same time I got an email from a friend, Andrew Pickles, who wanted to take some photos of me as a new subject, rather than the ones he normally uses. I said sure! One of the photos we took was this one:

I made it my Facebook profile picture and David Malki (comics creator, FORMER FRIEND) somehow got ahold of it and turned it into this:

That first shot was fired (by me, I admit) about a week ago and OH MY, we DID NOT REALIZE what we were unleashing.

The war is currently raging on my Tumblr and Ryan’s Tumblr, and we have collected all the volleys to date — with nice big pictures of everything — at: BOOKWAR.TUMBLR.COM

Check out: A Period Literary Corpus

A quick followup to last week’s post about anachronisms in period storytelling. In the comments, Howard pointed out this undertaking by author Mary Robinette Kowal, whose novels are set in the world of Jane Austen:

There are a lot of words which are obviously anachronisms but there others which aren’t. Short of looking up every word in a novel, there’s no way to really know if a seemingly innocuous word like “hello” exists yet.

So here’s my plan for Glamour in Glass.

I’ve created a list of all the words that are in the collected works of Jane Austen to use for my spellcheck dictionary. It will flag any word that she didn’t use and I can then look those up to see if it was in use in 1815… [read more]

I love this idea. I wish it were easier to dial up, say, the corpus of 1910s-1930s adventure stories, or whatever you wanted. Another tool among many to help writers approach a period-accurate feel if desired. I’d love to hear about things others have done along the same lines — leave a comment if you know of any more examples! [Comments]