Hugo 2014: Best Graphic Story

August 15th, 2014

Given the thousands of comics and graphics novels published every year, not to mention web comics, it’s really surprising the nominees weren’t better. I suspect there’s a strong aversion to including any superhero comics in the group. There’s no other way to explain their complete absence from the nominees, especially given that any midlist mainstream Marvel/DC title is the equal of all but one of the nominees.
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Hugo 2014: Best Related Work

August 15th, 2014

The Best Related Work category was really weak this year. I voted for Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction by Jeff VanderMeer, with Jeremy Zerfoss. It’s the only one of the nominees that’s truly ambitious, and represents serious effort and thought. It’s not the best How to write book I’ve read, but it’s at least something.
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Hugo 2014: The Novels

July 28th, 2014

This year for the first time I’m making a real effort to read all the Hugo nominees. First up: the novels.
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The Right Books

June 12th, 2014

Third Flatiron has published my short story, The Right Books in their summer anthology Master Minds. You can read it on Kindle, DRM-free Pub, or just plain paper.

Master Minds cover: human kissing robot

After 20-some-odd nonfiction books, and probably hundreds of articles, this is my first published work of fiction so I’m pretty psyched about it. More to come!

Best Series Finale Ever

April 3rd, 2014

Monday’s final How I Met Your Mother episode is going to go down in the history books as the best wrapup to a series ever. It shows just what can be accomplished when the show runners really know where they’re going and plan it out in advance. It’s particularly impressive coming off of the worst season of the show ever.
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Web Hosting with WYSIWYG Editing

March 29th, 2014

I’m looking for a simple HTML web host that is suitable for non-technical users. Here are my absolute requirements:

  1. Must support custom domains (no www.host.com/~username)
  2. Must have a built-in editor that is sufficiently WYSIWYG for someone with zero HTML skills to use. (Google Sites would meet this requirement, for example.)
  3. Must allow me to import an existing site of static HTML pages with all links intact. (Google sites fails this requirement.)
  4. Must not add any sort of header, footer, JavaScript, sidebar, or other junk to the pages. (Google sites also fails this requirement.)
  5. No lockin. All pages must be served in and easily exportable as plain vanilla HTML.

I don’t need databases, JavaScript, or a lot of other advanced features. #1 is commonly met, but everything I’ve looked at so far fails either #2, #3, or #4.

Is there such a product on the market?
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