WWWednesday: October 2, 2019

Happy Fall! Autumn Leaves

Conventions:

Tad Daley shared some more WorldCon pictures on File 770.

Some self-promotion; I’ll be attending AtomaCon in November. It’s a cozy South Carolina convention. I’m not a guest, just a participant, but look forward to meeting any FanLit fans who might attend.

Awards:

Gollancz and Ben Aaronovitch are sponsoring a fiction contest open to Black, Asian and minority ethnic writers in Britain. (The British term is BAME.) This sounds like an excellent contest and a very good idea. Here’s more detail.

I didn’t know there was a Ngaio Marsh Award for New Zealand crime writers, but of course there is! Here are the 2019 winners. It’s not genre, just interesting.

Books and Writing:

A bookshop of one’s own… Kelly Link and Gavin Grant of Small Beer Press (and Link of the amazing stories) are opening a bookstore in Easthampton, MA. The shop will feature Small Beer titles and carry other works as well.

Here’s an odd story collection on the theme of love, by the creator of the animated series Bojack Horseman. The article continues with a number of notable reads for September.

Over at Tor.com, Alex Brown shares some notable short fiction from September.

Locus shares some new releases.

Self-Promotion, still more: The Wand That Rocks the Cradle is available on Amazon. I have a story in it.

Felix the Cat is 100 years old.

On Mary Robinette Kowal’s blog, Rebecca Schaeffer shares some insight into her magical-creature-black-market series, especially the second book, Only Ashes Remain.

SF Poetry provides some Halloween-themed poems read aloud. (Thanks to File 770.)

Autumn landscape. Golden autumn scene in a park with falling leaves.

TV and Movies:

Enjoy Screen Rant’s analysis of 10 terrible spinoffs that did not need to be made.

Entertainment Weekly has a list of the actors who will be playing superheroes in the CW crossover event Crisis on Infinite Earth, scheduled to air starting in December.

Syfy’s series Killjoys ended its run last week. Over at Three if by Space, Thom Allison talks about the pleasure of playing Pree, what the show was like and what’s next for him.

Quick, everyone act surprised! Sony and Disney worked it out, and Spiderman will get to be in two more movies in the MCU. Yay.

Okay, this is harrowing. Ruby Rose, star of the CW’s new Batwoman, reveals that she had emergency surgery to correct two discs which, untreated, might have led to paralysis.

Internet:

In honor of Rosh Hashanah, here is a video of Sarah Rice singing an old Yiddish lullaby called “Raisins and Almonds.” I had only ever heard it as an instrumental. It’s nearly six minutes long. Enjoy it.

Weird Earth:

Eight varieties on nematode were found in California’s Mono Lake, a lake known for its high concentration of arsenic. One is especially unusual – it has three sexes. While the heading of this article made me think of Vonda McIntyre’s Dreamsnake (and it made the File 770 contributor think of that too), to steal a line from Orphan Black, the worm’s sexuality is not the most interesting thing about it.

After nearly 30 years, Daniel Monnier is finishing a sculpture in nature, on a semi-secret towpath tunnel in Frances.