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Yesterday, I heard an old (old) interview with one of my favorite fantasy authors, Jeffrey Overstreet.  I was going to simply post a link to it on FaceBook, but then realized that there are many other links that I’d want to include, and it would end up being something just shy of a blog post. So, er, I decided to actually write a blog post.

Now, to start you off, here’s a post that I wrote about my review of Auralia’s Colors by Jeffrey Overstreet.  The link to the actual review is in that post, but the post contains a bit of overspill that I couldn’t put directly into the actual review. This is one of the most creative and well written fantasy novels that I’ve ever read. Period.

Anyway, so, the interview that I heard is with my favorite irreverent Reverend (former reverend, actually) Steve Brown. He interviewed Jeffrey Overstreet for his (J.O.’s) first book, Through A Screen Darkly- which is a non-fic about movies. See, his day job is being a movie critic. Fiction is what he does in his off hours.

Anyway, they get into some pretty interesting discussions, and, to Steve Brown Etc’s producer’s incredible joy, brought up Empire Strikes Back. Seriously, the producer guy is a little disturbing in his devotion to Star Wars. Anyway, for those of you who enjoy talk radio, you might find the interview interesting, though my favorite parts are probably the “movie trailers” they interrupt the interview with. Such as “Nuns. With Guns.” and the touching story of a cross dressing lesbian trapped in a man’s body, and his struggle to understand why he prefers to wear men’s clothes and is attracted to women.

Now, I love that because of the interview with one of my favorite authors (it’s about 40 minutes long and about 30-35 minutes is the interview). However, Steve Brown had Jeffrey Overstreet back to discuss The Golden Compass back when the movie was still out and people actually gave a crap. Whether you care about the G.C. or not, if you’re into fantasy, it’s still pretty interesting to hear his take on it- being a fantasy novelist AND a movie critic. Really interesting combo for this type of topic. To be honest, this might have been the interview where they discussed Empire Strikes Back. It was yesterday that I listened to them, so it’s all getting a little jumbled now.

And, just because it’s easier to drop links here than to actually try to find mom’s email address and then convince her to actually read the email, I wanted mom to hear this interview with the author of What’s a Christian To Do With Harry Potter? and The Gospel According to Harry Potter. Since I’m an HP geek from way back and used to listen to MuggleNet’s weekly podcasts ALL THE TIME, I was totally into this interview and got shivers several times when Connie Neal made points that I’d totally missed in my own reading. I’d always focused on Harry as the savior figure rather than as the saved. Some of her insight totally blew me away, and made me just want to hook her up with the MuggleNet peeps just so I could hear it!

Or really, fiction writers of all sorts, but mostly for novelists.

I’m not sure what’s been going on for the past few days, but lately I’ve been meeting more and more publishing industry pros and aspiring novelists on Twitter. And along with that comes the influx of linkage.

Ok, so the single most important website for an aspiring novelist is Miss Snark. That’s a given. If you’ve never read this viciously wonderful agent, you need to. Go back to the very first post and read all the way up to her last (she’s hung up her stilettos for good) post. Take notes. Bookmark the Crapometer for when you’re getting ready to query. Read through it again. Take more notes. Follow all instructions and consider all advice. Just do it. Besides, it’s fun!

Now, Miss Snark I’ve known about for years, and have read almost every post on her site. However, #QueryFail is brand new. And it’s not a site; it’s a hashtag. In other words, it’s a stream of tweets from Twitter that are all on one subject, specially marked out using a hashtag. You don’t need to be a member of Twitter to read #QueryFail, but you do need an account if you want to respond to any of them.

What QueryFail is, is a day set aside by agent Colleen Lindsay for all Twitter savvy agents and editors to vent their query frustrations in the form of a 140 character tweet. Many of the tweets are actual lines from queries that the agent/editor rejected such as “Like my protagonist, I definitely could be described as overachiever, and I naturally have hair like Lady Godiva.”, “My book is about a friendship based upon mutual vomiting practices in high school.”, and my favorite- “This book is The Notebook meets The Lord of the Rings.”

You’ll need to scroll through several days of tweets about #queryfail if you choose to follow the above link to access it, but there’s a downloadable file of the actual QueryFail tweets from the actual day at that link.  The agents are planning to make this a regular thing, but no schedule has been set. And by the way? #QueryFail even got attention from The Guardian. No joke! There’s also a #novelfail, but I haven’t had much time to check into that.

And the third page that you may want to consider, is a 25 point list of why your fiction is being passed over, courtesy of Andromeda Spaceways. It’s funny, but not hilarious. Dirty, but not filthy. But all in all, a pretty good list.

So, Normal Joe’s sponsor for today’s post on his wealth creation blog was pickles. And it made me hungry for pickles.

Thing is, the only pickles we have in the house are those sandwich stackers, right? And they’re just not the same. So I decided to make a grilled cheese and pickle sandwich for breakfast. And then I remembered that I had crumbled bacon for my salads….

So I thought “What a great opportunity to practice my video editing skillz!”. What I really should have thought is “What a great opportunity to practice my filming skillz!” But I didn’t.

So, even though I had the tripod attached to my Flip, I still held it by hand and gave you guys plenty of time to study my husband’s egg pan instead of the pan I was actually using. Aren’t I just so thoughtful?