Hogmanay is the Scottish New Year’s Eve celebration. Here are a few of the enduring traditions.
Tomorrow, January 6, is Epiphany, Three Kings Day or Twelfth Night, and has its own set of traditions. To wrap things up, I tracked down Mary Berry’s King’s Cake recipe on Pinterest. (It’s a super-deluxe fruit cake, but so much more British than ours.)
File770 highlighted the problems some authors are having with Amazon Kindle direct Publishing (KDP). Lexi Ostrow gives a blow-by-blow of her horrendous experience here. Nothing about this is good, but the big red flag for me is that Amazon snags your royalties—without explanation or a grievance process. Writer Susan Lyn shares a brief comment about a similar experience.
UPDATE: File 770 reports that Ostrow’s books are back. Apparently, the author is still struggling to get her royalties credited.
MarsCon, 2022, originally planned for late January, has rescheduled to March. They plan to be an in-person convention.
Walter Mosley was awarded the Sankofa Freedom Award.
The James Webb space telescope is successfully deployed.
On this podcast, Premee Mohamad talks about flipping SF tropes on their heads.
In the Sfnal year, there is Best of Last Year Season, Nomination Season, and Awards Season. We’re still in the first one. Hugo-award-winning Nerds of the Feather offer their thoughts on last year’s best.
Raven Bookstore, in Lawrence, Kansas, is now 49% employee-owned. Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C, is now unionized.
If you read a lot in the field, you’ve noticed that you don’t see a lot of cover blurbs by John Scalzi. In spite of that, someone on Twitter made the statement that Scalzi wholesale blurbs the books of his friends. Scalzi took to Twitter to clarify and then reposted on The Whatever.
Boba Fett goes to renew his library card. Image from Empire Magazine
Why is it The Book of Boba Fett? Does Boba Fett read? Really? Anyway, here’s a positive review from Plugged In.
Den of Geek reviews the New Year’s Doctor Who special, Eve of the Daleks.
Locus reports that several authors and publishers won a lawsuit against a Ukrainian company for piracy.
There were two interesting articles about publishing that I ran across, the first via a link in the second: No…
My pleasure, Robin! And yes, it surely is some kind of an experience, to be sure....
Thanks for the solution to a mystery many decades old. One of my favourite novels, this. Hilariously funny, completely unpredictable,…
Thank you. I’m all caught up. Back to reading Crimson Embers.
Enjoyed your review. I’m reading A War in Crimson Embers and am having the hardest time reminding myself where everybody…