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james_davis_nicoll) wrote2026-04-21 06:51 pm
james_davis_nicoll) wrote2026-04-21 06:30 pm
2022 2024 2025 2026
Novel 1151 1420 1078 1153
Novella 807 962 739 807
Novelette 463 755 394 414
Short Story 632 720 610 507
Series 707 677 621 687
Graphic/Comic 340 457 265 362
Related 453 775 431 479
Dramatic, Long 597 763 610 650
Dramatic, Short 386 490 451 471
Game -- 334 298 357
Editor, Short 319 530 322 305
Editor, Long 182 254 162 234
Pro Artist 233 270 214 228
Semiprozine 312 338 334 324
Fanzine 243 286 243 224
Fancast 384 693 376 370
Fan Writer 368 363 329 308
Fan Artist 230 180 186 176
Poem -- -- 219 202
Lodestar 451 345 268 244
Astounding 416 349 341 290![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
scalziwhatever_feed) wrote2026-04-21 07:49 pm
Just because something is created with a younger audience in mind, doesn’t mean it can’t be enjoyed by all. After all, whomst among us doesn’t love the idea of magic cats? Author Christian Bieck is here today to show us the result of his NaNoWriMo creation, A Basquet of Cats.
CHRISTIAN BIECK:
At some point early in their writing journey, every writer learns that a good way to start a story is by having an interesting what-if. So one day a few years ago I asked my family, “What if cats had magic?”
“That’s not a what-if,” our son said. He’s a walking encyclopedia, and generally knows what he’s talking about. “Cats do have magic. They can turn invisible.”
“Mrt?” Rex, our ginger tabby, said from behind me.
I turned to him; he was sitting on the back rest of the sofa. “Where did you suddenly come from?” I asked.
“And they have short-range teleportation abilities,” my wife said.
“And some mind magic,” our son said.
Rex said nothing, but his smug look clearly told me I should have known that.
“I did know that,” I said to him. “So what do I do now?”
I’m going at this Big Idea essay all wrong, aren’t I? Let’s try again:
It all started with a family game of Microscope.
For the less nerdy among this blog’s readers, Microscope is a cooperative world-building/setting-creation game. Players create a fictional timeline, and then events and people within that timeline to any depth desired. Afterwards, you can jump in and roleplay a scene.
We set the game in an alternate Earth medieval France. And the “people” to cats—cats that have even more magic than our real-world ones. Our main character was the friend, companion, familiar, however you call it, of a human mage, the Archmage of France and Spain. (Mages obviously also existed at the time.) Other mages were visiting his tower with their own cat companions, and something happened to them: the first event. Now the cats had to find out what had happened. Murder mystery with cats!
We spent a pleasurable afternoon fleshing out the story, as it was, ending up with a stack of index cards, but without an answer to the question what happened to the mages. Didn’t matter, it was fun. That was in December 2019.
Fast forward to late October 2021. An online article reminded me of the annual writing event called National Novel Writing Month, a.k.a. NaNoWriMo, and on the spur of the moment, I decided to take up the challenge and restart my fiction writing after a ten year break. My first NaNo attempt in 2009 had been successful in that I did finish a novel, but less so in terms of quality of output. So around 2011, I had decided to put fiction writing on hiatus and focus on improving my craft through the non-fiction writing I was doing in my day job.
So, what to write for Nano 2021? What if I used that Microscope game as a basis for my novel? What if, on top of their normal, natural magic, there were special cats with special skills? With mind-based magic, a magic that was quite different from that of human mages. And a mind-to-mind connection to said humans. And what if something happens to the main character’s mage, and the protagonist and his friends have to set it right?
I couldn’t find the index cards from the game anymore, but I didn’t really need them. I had my main characters and the inciting incident in my head; the beats in 3 disaster structure were quickly sketched out, and the story of A Basquet of Cats practically wrote itself. With the active help of Rex, and our female gray tabby Neko, who helpfully provided dialogue. (Have you ever had that thing where you look at the companion animals living with you, and comic-style speech bubbles pop up over their head, telling you exactly what they would be saying in that moment? No? I am sure John knows exactly what I mean . . .)
Okay, maybe “wrote itself” is a bit of an exaggeration, because even for a fantasy novel you need a (to naive me) surprising amount of research if your setting is alternate history Earth. What time exactly? (13th century, when Aquitaine was English.) How does the magic work? (No spoilers, just that Basque is the human language of magic, and “Abracadabra” in Basque is “Horrela izango da!”) How close to real cats are my cats? (Close. But they are cats, and that has consequences for the way they see the world. And how they behave. And communicate. And, and, and.) Do other animals feature? (Yes! But the PoVs are all cats!)
And then there was the question: for what audience was I writing Basquet? A story with animal protagonists feels like a kids’ book, so that was my starting point. I ended up writing a story that I would have wanted to read as a teenager, and be happy to re-read at any point later in life: an adventure story, a story of friendship, of responsibility, and of learning to value the good things in life and in relationships. My publisher calls it “For young adults and animal lovers of all ages”, and he’s exactly right.
I dream that Rex and Neko would also read and be pleased with the story.
(Full disclosure: I made up that dialogue at the beginning. But it could totally have happened that way; after all, real-life cats do have magic. Don’t they?)
A Basquet of Cats: Amazon US|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
Author socials: Website|Bluesky|Linktree
Read an excerpt.
scalziwhatever_feed) wrote2026-04-21 07:22 pm
This is fabulous news: The entire Old Man’s War series, from OMW to The Shattering Peace, has been nominated for the Best Series Hugo this year. What a lovely accolade. Here is the entire category:
And here is the full list of finalists for this year. In my category as well as in others are writers and editors and artists and others who I like and admire. This is an excellent year for the Hugos, and I’m delighted to be part of it.
Also, yes, I will be attending Worldcon this year. In addition to anything else, I am DJing a dance!
— JS
standardebooks_new_feed) wrote2026-04-21 06:48 pmjames_davis_nicoll) wrote2026-04-21 02:42 pmstandardebooks_new_feed) wrote2026-04-21 06:31 pmstandardebooks_new_feed) wrote2026-04-21 05:47 pmjames_davis_nicoll) wrote2026-04-21 08:07 am
scalziwhatever_feed) wrote2026-04-21 05:28 amThe Astra Awards are an award given out by the Hollywood Creative Alliance, and in previous years have been primarily for film and television, but this year they have branched out into books as well, across seventeen categories including Best Science Fiction Novel. And what do you know, in this inaugural year for the book awards, When the Moon Hits Your Eye was the winner. I am, of course absolutely delighted.
The awards were livestreamed, which I have posted above, and you can see my acceptance speech starting at 28:56 (if you don’t want to watch the whole thing, the full list of finalists and winners is available here). In my speech I specifically thank my editors Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Mal Frazier, as well as my agent Ethan Ellenberg and my manager Joel Gotler, but also generally everyone who worked on the book up and down the production chain. There would be no book without their work.
In any event, how cool is this? It’s made my day. Winning awards is fun.
— JS
excuseoftheday_feed) wrote2026-04-21 12:00 ammerriamwebster_feed) wrote2026-04-21 01:00 amMerriam-Webster's Word of the Day for April 21, 2026 is:
orthography • \or-THAH-gruh-fee\ • noun
Orthography refers to the way in which the words of a language are spelled, or to the art of writing words with the proper letters according to standard usage.
// As the winner of several spelling bees, she impressed her teachers with her exceptional grasp of orthography.
Examples:
“Ormin, a medieval monk, sought to bring order to English orthography by addinng morre letterrs to worrds. August Thibaudin, a London professor, tried 9dding n3mbers. Our ideas for simplifying spelling have ranged from the rashonal to the redikulus to the döunnryt ubsërrd, and with each whimsical solution we seem to get further away from cognitive stability.” — Gabe Henry, Enough is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Eezier to Spell, 2025
Did you know?
The concept of orthography (a term that comes from the Greek words orthos, meaning “right or true,” and graphein, meaning “to write”) was not something that really concerned English speakers until the introduction of the printing press in England during the 15th century. From that point on, English spelling became progressively more uniform. Our orthography has been relatively stable since the 1755 publication of Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language, with the notable exception of certain spelling reforms, such as the change of musick to music. Incidentally, many of these reforms were championed by Merriam-Webster’s own Noah Webster.
votd_feed) wrote2026-04-21 12:00 pmazurelunatic) wrote2026-04-20 07:30 pm
Branch: refs/heads/main Home: https://github.com/dreamwidth/dreamwidth Commit: 6dc7b32ef3eed8378f40270d35c3a0b7a45dd21b https://github.com/dreamwidth/dreamwidth/commit/6dc7b32ef3eed8378f40270d35c3a0b7a45dd21b Author: Mark Smith mark@dreamwidth.org Date: 2026-04-20 (Mon, 20 Apr 2026)
Changed paths: M cgi-bin/DW/External/Userinfo.pm
Log Message:
Drop high-cardinality username tag from extacct stats
The username:$user tag on dw.worker.extacct.{success,failure} tracked each remote external-site user individually, making it the top metric by active series count in Grafana Cloud billing. Site alone is bounded to the DW::External::Site enum and gives the actionable dimension.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) noreply@anthropic.com
Commit: ad345841bf9b424ceb6bf65be2136b88fb612301 https://github.com/dreamwidth/dreamwidth/commit/ad345841bf9b424ceb6bf65be2136b88fb612301 Author: Mark Smith mark@dreamwidth.org Date: 2026-04-20 (Mon, 20 Apr 2026)
Changed paths: M cgi-bin/DW/Controller/Importer.pm M cgi-bin/DW/Logic/Importer.pm
Log Message:
Validate importer hostname against source whitelist
The /tools/importer UI offered a dropdown of three allowed sources (livejournal.com, insanejournal.com, dreamwidth.org), but set_import_data_for_user accepted whatever hostname the POST carried and INSERTed it straight into import_data. A crafted POST could inject arbitrary hostnames, which then flowed into the new hostname: tag on dw.worker.importer.job_completed as a cardinality-injection vector.
Extracts the allowed-source list into DW::Logic::Importer->allowed_sources so the controller's dropdown rendering and the logic layer's validation share one definition, and rejects any hostname not in the list.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) noreply@anthropic.com
Compare: https://github.com/dreamwidth/dreamwidth/compare/00b8f85a98e0...ad345841bf9b
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james_davis_nicoll) wrote2026-04-20 02:11 pm
scalziwhatever_feed) wrote2026-04-20 04:49 pm
When we explore our minds, our thoughts, and who we are as a person, we don’t always like what we find. Author Dan Rice takes a deep dive into the idea of accepting one’s true self, even if some facets are uglier than others. Grab a mirror for some self-reflection and follow along in the Big Idea for his newest novel, The Bane of Dragons.
DAN RICE:
Sometimes you have to go down the rabbit hole.
The challenge I faced when writing The Bane of Dragons was to send Allison on an adventure with a climax that ended her story and the series with a bang instead of a fizzle. Luckily, Allison had rabbit holes to go down, one that she had explored many times before and another she had only ever gazed upon.
The rabbit hole Allison spends much time spelunking is her inner self. In those dark tunnels she wrestled with, negotiated with, and sometimes was defeated by her literal internal monster that always pined for escape and to supplant her. This device provides ample ongoing conflict throughout the series after the monster wakes up in the first book, Dragons Walk Among Us. Allison’s titanic clashes with her inner monster, which she comes to understand is another facet of herself, mirrors the struggles young adults face as they pass from adolescence to adulthood, albeit in dramatic and often bloody fashion.
The other rabbit hole Allison must explore is the slipstream, described as a superhighway through the multiverse. Since encountering this pathway to alternate dimensions in the first book, she has dreamed of traveling it, and, while both sleeping and awake, has been commanded by a stentorian voice to enter the slipstream. It is something she both yearns for and fears. In The Bane of Dragons, it’s a yearning she must give in to and a fear she must face. The only way to protect everyone she loves is to travel the slipstream and discover exactly what’s waiting for her on the other side.
What Allison and her motley companions discover are strange worlds and monstrous aliens. They are captured by angry, terrestrial octopi, whom they attempt to negotiate with, with nebulous results. Instead of taking the fight to the monsters threatening Earth, Allison is handed over as a prisoner to her nemesis, General Bane. But not all is what it seems on the surface, and even the deadly General Bane, with whom Allison shares a kinship by way of her inner monster, is a prisoner of sorts, pining for freedom.
To free Bane and hopefully protect everyone she loves, Allison must finally come to ultimate terms with her inner monster. In the end, that means looking into the mirror and accepting herself, both the human and the monster with its fangs and claws and transgressive desires. Only by becoming one with her monster can she communicate to Bane and others like him how to break the bonds that hold them.
Just like in real life, young adult characters sometimes need to go down the rabbit holes, both those that spark curiosity and those that cause dread. It’s the only way to learn, mature, and find self-acceptance.
—-
The Bane of Dragons: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Books-A-Million
james_davis_nicoll) wrote2026-04-20 12:11 pm
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