New site for interested authors

Friend of the book Matt over at skullring.org has started putting original fiction up on his site.

I'll let him explain it.

I'm planning on offering fiction on my all purpose weird/horror blog http://skullring.org/under the Creative Commons license (http://creativecommons.org/ ).

I'll be accepting fiction submissions for the site, which currently gets about 300 to 500 hits a day. Any fiction that is sent to me should be licensed under the CC license.

There won't be a bit of money involved, but if you've got any orphaned stories that deserve to see daylight, consider sending them along. I'll be considering the following material: fantasy, horror, slipstream, New Weird, sci fi. Basically anything creepy, dark, strange, or exotic. Material can range from flash fiction on up. I'll even take story fragments, as long as it's entertaining.

After a while, I'll offer an archive of the stories online. Any author that submits a story can have a link directed to their online website, or other contact information as they request. There won't be anywhere else I'll be publishing the stories; they're yours. I'm not interested in making money, and I'll be doing the same thing myself with some of my own stories.

Shoot your material over to mattormeg@gmail.com, if you're interested. Subject line: creative commons story: author/title .

Matt's a decent guy, so interested authors should keep him in mind.

Corey Redekop - the Simpsons character!

Librarians - hipper than we ever thought

There's a great article in the NY Times about the new renaissance in hipster librarians.

On a Sunday night last month at Daddy’s, a bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, more than a dozen people in their 20s and 30s gathered at a professional soiree, drinking frozen margaritas and nibbling store-bought cookies. With their thrift-store inspired clothes and abundant tattoos, they looked as if they could be filmmakers, Web designers, coffee shop purveyors or artists.

When talk turned to a dance party the group had recently given at a nearby restaurant, their profession became clearer.

“Did you try the special drinks?” Sarah Gentile, 29, asked Jennifer Yao, 31, referring to the colorfully named cocktails.

“I got the Joy of Sex,” Ms. Yao replied. “I thought for sure it was French Women Don’t Get Fat.”

Ms. Yao could be forgiven for being confused: the drink was numbered and the guests had to guess the name. “613.96 C,” said Ms. Yao, cryptically, then apologized: “Sorry if I talk in Dewey.”

That would be the Dewey Decimal System. The groups’ members were librarians. Or, in some cases, guybrarians.

“He hates being called that,” said Sarah Murphy, one of the evening’s organizers and a founder of the Desk Set, a social group for librarians and library students.

Ms. Murphy was speaking of Jeff Buckley, a reference librarian at a law firm, who had a tattoo of the logo from the Federal Depository Library Program peeking out of his black T-shirt sleeve.

Librarians? Aren’t they supposed to be bespectacled women with a love of classic books and a perpetual annoyance with talkative patrons — the ultimate humorless shushers?

Not any more. With so much of the job involving technology and with a focus now on finding and sharing information beyond just what is available in books, a new type of librarian is emerging — the kind that, according to the Web site Librarian Avengers, is “looking to put the ‘hep cat’ in cataloguing.”

Read the article in its entirety here.

Thanks to Morley Walker (arts editor for the Winnipeg Free Press, honourary shelf monkey, and all-around good dude) for the heads-up.

Shelf Monkey: Blogosphere review.

There's a new rave review by E. Ann Bardawill (of the blog Something Fell), containing this ready-made blurb:

"Shelf Monkey is great read. Funny and deeply light - it’s like Douglas Adams meets Rex Murphy, rents a hotel room for the weekend and indulges in wild, uninhibited cunning linguistics. After such a satisfying tale, do not be surprised by the urge to light up a cigarette even if you don’t actually smoke."

Nice. And I never knew that about Rex.

Read it here.