For fictional applications of some of this information, I recommend Sarah Waters’ novel, Affinity, a sort of romantic suspense novel set in Victorian England; several aspects of Spiritualism are central to its plot.

As you were.

I wish I could think of the author who did this, but I was reading about someone (whose writing I respect and whose invented names generally went well with her characters - that much I can remember) who looked around at her bookshelves and took random syllables from the names of the authors on the spines and mashed them together. (Maybe it was Laurie J. Marks of the Earth Logic series?)

If you know, Dear Reader, please aid my recollection. (And if you have any other wonderful tricks for naming characters, please share them!)

My personal favorite tip is #2: “Name the villains after people who wronged you in high school.”

And how did I arrive at a web site dedicated to dispensing advice for parents? Ah, the web works in mysterious ways, doesn’t it?

Lemony Snicket’s Bedtime Storytelling Tips | Tips Kids Everywhere - DailyCandy.

It could have been worse - I could have been re-reading The Standby Stephen King.

All this to say that I spent a good part of yesterday procrastinating on my writing by looking up food storage information and products on the web and internally debating the relative merits of single-burner, dual fuel camp stoves vs. butane or propane setups.

Can you tell I have a writing deadline looming on May 15?

such as

I love your story
Please send more soon. But only
ones without vampires.

and

liked your writing
but I didn’t get what was
with the big robot

Their levels of warm and personal to cool and impersonal (to restraining order style) rejections are fairly similar to what I’ve heard and seen other magazines do (in discussions I’ve had with a few readers/editors, and in gathering my own slips o’ doom), so I think this is useful beyond just submitting to this particular publication.

Yes.

This essay is dear to my heart, as one who loves Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities just as much as Ursula K. le Guin’s Earthsea books. (Also as one who has an MFA in poetry, and an English literature degree, whose favorite magazine is Realms of Fantasy.) Luckily, just because critics have made artificial dominions and divvied up the turf in various ways doesn’t mean writers and readers aren’t free to roam. Unless they want to write about what they are reading and try to get tenure, of course.

Read the essay.

Of course, they are still REALLY far away from editing memories in humans, but they seem to have been able to erase (in a broad/blunt way, at least) memories in lab rats with the injection of a chemical that interferes with the process. Not prevent them from being formed, but erase memories that were already there. Still, veddy interesting…

Also, because I live in a cave, I am FINALLY getting around to reading the #queryfail tweets, which seem to consist of about 73% duplicate postings, explanations about what #queryfail is, explanations of how to use hashtags, and exclamations about how funny the other postings are. There are some comic gems in there, though so far, no great epiphanies. “Wait–we shouldn’t send queries on scented paper???” (Throws the rest of the ream in the dumpster.)

Back in the Bronze Age (when the books now known as the Old Testament were written), society was decidedly patriarchal. Sons were prized; daughters, not so much. I’m sure there were many reasons for this, but I want to point out one set of reasons in particular: the lack of medical knowledge and care and (as a result) the very real dangers of childbirth, which were not shared equally. If you had a son, you didn’t have to worry about him growing up to die in childbirth. Women who survived their childbearing years lived longer than men (just as they do now), but running that gauntlet meant there were a lot fewer of them at the other side.

So passing property patrilinearly at that time was not necessarily a bad idea; men were more likely to live longer to care for the children. In this light, tracing one’s lineage through the fathers’ lines isn’t so crazy, either (although still not as accurate as matrilineal).

Fast forward about four thousand years. Medical advances have not eliminated the risks of childbirth, but they have reduced them to a level that would have astonished our forebears. Women live longer than men, on average, and many of the patriarchal holdovers in our culture look quaint if not downright stupid. (Some of them weren’t the best choices 4,000 years ago.)

And there are still folks like the Quiverfulls around, trying to drag Bronze Age family values into the twenty-first century, because they a) want to and think it’s advantageous to them, and b) really feel like biblical literalism is the way to go.

What does this have to do with writing? Well, I’m working on a story right now that takes place in a culture not all that dissimilar from the one that produced the books of the Old Testament, and in studying some of those Mesopotamian cultures, I’m struck by what a practical people they were (for the most part). Even many of the behaviors that seem ridiculous to us had some utility. This is not the case, however, if you take those behaviors and just transplant them willy-nilly to another time and place — say, to the United States in 2009.

But even those throwbacks have some reason for wanting to roll back the cultural clock, even though the behaviors they advocate are no longer advantageous to the broader culture (and they are therefore likely doomed to fail in their efforts). Perhaps they want to regain power they think they’ve lost in the cultural changes of the last (cough) four thousand years.

Anyway, when world-building, the cultures will and should be messy and the practices they present to address practical problems (like death in childbed) may not be elegant, but they should be at least somewhat functional. And splinter/fringe cultures are interesting in that they directly oppose some practices of the mainstream culture and can serve to highlight some fracture or fault line in that dominant culture, some contested or shifting ground.