Towse: views from the hill

January 3, 2007

Disabled the Snap Preview while I ponder …

Filed under: app,blog — Towse @ 8:41 pm

December 20, 2006

favicons

Filed under: app,blog — Towse @ 11:25 pm

After folks started nattering about them a while back, I decided to join the crowd and added my “you are stardust” favicon here a week or so back.

Added a purple prose favicon to Internet Resources earlier today.

Wrote about favicons and such on the blog over there.

Some day I’ll really need to rethink the blog layout for that site, but I’d abandoned that blog for almost two years and only recently started keeping it up-to-date again. Each time I edit it and pull up the blog it’s like yowww! that was then, where is now?

December 14, 2006

[BLOG] Pepys as of this day in the Year of Our Lord Sixteen Hundred And Sixty Three

Filed under: blog,URL — Towse @ 3:42 am

A link on Sour Grapes and then my search (undereducated ‘r’ me) for a translation for “AVT DOCE, AVT DISCE, AVT DISCEDE” took me back to a place I’ve been before: the Diary of Samuel Pepys, a very entertaining blog which Grapes hisself (iirc) told me about many many many moons ago.

Pepys’ diary is a blog which follows Pepys’ diary day-by-day with clicks to the appropriate “whatever is he talking about?” explanations.

Mrs. Pepys, btw, seems not to be an easy keeper.

Today’s entry (Sunday 13 December 1663) includes the following (run-on-sentences-r-Pepys) bit.

To church, where after sermon home, and to my office, before dinner, reading my vowes, and so home to dinner, where Tom came to me and he and I dined together, my wife not rising all day, and after dinner I made even accounts with him, and spent all the afternoon in my chamber talking of many things with him, and about Wheately’s daughter for a wife for him, and then about the Joyces and their father Fenner, how they are sometimes all honey one with another and then all turd, and a strange rude life there is among them.

Love that “sometimes all honey one with another and then all turd, and a strange rude life there is among them.”

Dysfunctional families ‘r’ us.

November 30, 2006

[BLOG] dooce

Filed under: blog — Towse @ 7:45 pm

I have a zillion feeds stashed away with my bloglines.

Don’t believe me? Look!

I roam around looking at things. Reading blogs I like. Clicking through on links on blogs I like. I find an interesting and/or quirky and/or beautiful and/or useful blog and I add its feed to my bloglines list and either follow the blog religiously in a not-quite-stalking way for days and weeks or I read it that day and then forget about it, leaving it sit there on the bloglines list until one day I’m drinking my second mug of espresso and clicking around and go, gee. … I don’t remember why I saved a link to … what’s dooce anyway?

This is dooce — a quirky, entertaining, refreshing, funny, intriguing, interesting blog outta Salt Lake City, Utah, by dooce AKA Heather B. Armstrong, formerly known as Heather B. Hamilton, wife, mother, no longer a practicing LDS. dooce is notorious or at least 15-minutes-of-fame famous for being fired from her job for blogging about her work, back when. (Her advice? My advice to you is BE YE NOT SO STUPID. Never write about work on the internet unless your boss knows and sanctions the fact that YOU ARE WRITING ABOUT WORK ON THE INTERNET.)

Enjoy.

November 14, 2006

[WR] [BLOG] Lit Agent X

Filed under: blog,writing — Towse @ 2:25 am

Lit Agent X is the not-hardly anonymous Rachel Vater at Lowenstein-Yost Associates.

I say “not-hardly anonymous” because people address her by name on the blog and her LiveJournal profile tells you not only who she is but that she’s been an agent at Lowenstein-Yost Associates since January 2006. Prior to this, I worked as an assistant agent with the Donald Maass Literary Agency. Before moving to NYC, I lived in Cincinnati, Ohio and worked at Writer’s Digest Books for 4 years as an editor.

Vater’s blog is informative. She gives a peek into the thought processes of an agent looking for clients and selling her clients’ work. She also writes about writing and how to improve yours.

Read. Enjoy.

November 12, 2006

[WR] [BLOG] SarahQuibbling

Filed under: blog,writing — Towse @ 9:24 pm

.SarahQuibbling., the blog of a forensic chemist in Baltimore who writes about evidence and crime labs and writing and Baltimore and … more.

September 5, 2006

[WR] www.pulpnoir.com – The Official Charlie Huston Website

Filed under: blog — Towse @ 5:40 pm

Hadn’t heard of Charlie Huston until I was reading Miss Snark and her critiques of query letters and first page(s) this morning. Someone’s query&pages were for a crime novel set in Houston.

Miss Snark said, “It doesn’t suck but it’s [it gets] a form letter rejection. There’s a reason everyone’s yapping about Charlie Huston…he took the usual expectations of genre and turned them on their ear. I’m looking for good writing but I also have to bring something fresh to the table.”

Charlie who?

With a quick search I found www.pulpnoir.com – The Official Charlie Huston Website.

Charlie has his bio and his blog and what all.

Charlie also has first chapters for CAUGHT STEALING, SIX BAD THINGS, and ALREADY DEAD. The print layout for SIX BAD THINGS is downright awful, but the first pages for all three are

       amazing.

Wondering what people mean when they say, “Start in media res.” or “Those first pages have to grab you by the throat.” or “Start with conflict. Start with action.”?

Charlie Huston is the poster boy for those folks.

Go. Read.

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