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If you’re a word geek like me, you probably try to keep track of what’s going on in the wide wide world of style manuals. One of the standards in the biz is the Chicago Manual of Style.  I’ve used Chicago for years but even if I didn’t (because, say, I was having to use Associated Press style, yuck foo), I would find a job that let me switch, just because I love the Q&A they (actually, master editor Carol Fisher Saller) write each month.  Here’s a sample:

Q. My library shelves are full. I need to make some difficult decisions to make space for new arrivals. Is there any reason to keep my CMOS 14th and 15th editions?

A. What a question. If you had more children, would you give away your firstborn? Find a board and build another shelf.

via Chicago Style Q&A: New Questions and Answers.

The Elements of Style by Sarah Hafner

I just heard that the intensely talented writer Sarah Hafner died last weekend. Some readers may know her through the chapbook of her stories that I published back in the 1990s, Some Girls. Others may know her work from her fabulous novel, the hilarious The Elements of Style.

Space Alien quilt by Sarah Hafner

Still others may have known Sarah in a completely different, but still amazingly creative, capacity. Sarah was a fine designer, and developed a number of quilt designs over the years. I’m lucky enough to own one of her space alien quilts.

Sarah is survived by her husband John, who sent this email to Sarah’s friends:

It is with the greatest sadness that I must tell you my beloved wife, Sarah Hafner, passed away unexpectedly on Saturday, December 4, 2010. She died at Franklin Baystate Medical Center, where she was treated for a rare and sudden intestinal illness. Sarah and I spent more than 14 years of a vibrant life together and had a love filled marriage.

Sarah was a much more interesting person than I could ever be. I simply held up high the pedestal where she could shine.

I hope that you will stop by or call me, from time to time, in this now duller place, and raise a memory high to this star. To remember this bright, artistic, talented, passionately honest, and loving wife of mine, to enjoy her works of creativity and wide range of interests.

Sarah’s body will be cremated this week. We will be sitting shiva–the traditional Jewish week of mourning–each day between the hours of 5 and 7pm, starting this Friday, December 10th and continuing through December 16th.

I only met Sarah once, at a trade show in San Francisco where she was hawking her quilts. Still, we worked together for several years, first on her stories, then again trying to find a publisher for Elements of Style.

I miss her very much.

An Arts and Crafts wallpaper image by way of illustration of the blooming of the green building industry.

As we’ve reported in the past, the “green” building industry (new, retrofit, and prefab) is booming. Here’s a round up of reports about the ongoingess of it all, news-hooked on a report from McGraw-Hill Construction.

Despite a deep economic recession, the U.S. green building market has expanded dramatically since 2008 and is projected to double its size by 2015, says a new report by McGraw-Hill Construction.

The report comes as the private U.S. Green Building Council holds its annual Greenbuild conference this week in Chicago, which has attracted tens of thousands of attendees from more than 100 countries and more than 900 companies exhibiting their green products.

via Report: Green building market booms in weak economy – Green House – USATODAY.com.

The report, “Green Outlook 2011: Green Trends Driving Growth,” found that green building represented 25 percent of all new construction activity in 2010 and that the value of green building construction starts was up 50 percent from 2008 to 2010 — from $42 billion to $55 billion-$71 billion.

The report, according to Earth and Industry, says that

Not only are new homes in the U.S. getting smaller, they are getting greener….

green building represented 25 percent of all new construction activity in 2010 and that the value of green building construction starts was up 50 percent from 2008 to 2010 — from $42 billion to $55 billion-$71 billion.

And the growth spurt isn’t over. According to projections, by 2015, the size of the green building market is expected to grow to $135 billion. Read the rest of this entry »

I just posted this to my blog at work:

Philip Leigh has a really interesting piece about the future of publishing on MediaPost.

He writes that just as “the printing press transformed publishing, the true cultural significance of blogging — which is only incipient at present — will be a consequence of its production process. ”

When I was in comm school, we called that technological determinism and, after much debate, arrived at the conclusion that in fact cultural change is so complex than attributing change to any one cause is always going to result in fallacy and misdirection.

That said, there is certainly some great insight into Leigh’s analysis. The invention of the rotary press circa 1830 resulted in an explosion called the newspaper industry. (Which had previously been low-budget, low-circulation affairs that mainly announced ship movements.)

But we have to ask a question here: was the rotary press invented out of whole cloth or was it invented because there was a need for high-speed print-production capability?

via A Little History, and the Future of Publishing – Marketing, News, and Educational Communications.

November is National Novel-Writing Month. If writing an entire novel in 30 days strikes you as damn near impossible, just head over to the NaNoWriMo website and check out how many people have actually done it: More than 165,000 people participated in 2009, and more than 30,000 managed to crank out the 50,000-word goal.

Of course, you probably aren’t going to produce great literature in just a month. Infinite Jest and its ilk require more than just a month of writing. But the goal isn’t to produce a best-seller — it’s to jump-start your novel and get you past the fear of the time and effort involved. As the website says, “The only thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output … the kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks and write on the fly.”

To write a 50,000-word novel in a month — even a bad novel — takes a certain perseverance and dedication, as well as some careful planning. Here’s our guide to ensuring you fall into the group that actually finishes the project.

via Write a Novel in a Month – Wired How-To Wiki.

via 11 Types of People You Meet on a Hike | Hiking Boots Blog:

The Mysterious Lady + Cute Puppy – Much like some mystical apparition, she glides across the leafy ground and acknowledges you just enough to make you wonder if she actually did. Then a baby dog pokes his head from her carrier, and you wonder if she even knows it’s there. You start to say something, and just like that, she’s gone.

Generosity by Richard Powers

Richard Powers is a master of sleight-of-hand. He writes novels full of science but escapes being called a science fiction writer. In Generosity: An Enhancement, the latest novel by the MacArthur “genius” grant and National Book Award winner (for The Echo Maker), Powers feints and flourishes in order to — presto-magico — pull together two seemingly unrelated themes: genetic engineering and creative nonfiction.

In Powers’ hands, the relation between the two themes is laid bare: they both are concerned with the nature, manipulation, and enhancement of reality. In recent years, we’ve seen the formerly innocuous genre of memoir mutate into the high-stakes blockbuster industry of creative nonfiction. And woe unto he who fudges the truth in his memoir, who tells a lie, however small. What used to be par for the course in memoir is now a cardinal sin: remember James Frey and A Million Little Pieces? Read the rest of this entry »

I just found a couple more reviews of On Joanna Russ, to which I contributed an essay. This review is by Paul Kincaid, and was featured on The SF Site; snip:

Anyone who came into science fiction during the late 60s and 70s would have been aware of Joanna Russ. Even if you never read any of her relatively few novels or stories, you couldn’t avoid the name. Of the three great women writers who did so much to transform science fiction at this time, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Tiptree Jr., and Russ, Russ was far and away the most controversial. So much so that it was known for her name to be greeted with boos at an sf convention, and believe me even in the conservative world of fandom that was unusual.

Joanna Russ is an incredibly important figure in the history of science fiction and the author of a couple of novels and several short stories that deserve to endure. This beautifully produced collection of essays is a fitting tribute to her, and even those who know Russ’s work well will learn from many of these essays. Even so, this is still only telling part of the story about an elusive and complex writer. We’d be better off if all her work were back in print, but until that happens this is a superb reminder of what a valuable and important writer she is.

The other review is by Cheryl Morgan who makes a point about book reviewing that is near and dear to my heart; snip:

it occurs to me that those people who complain that book reviews should always be neutral and objective, and not bring in the reviewers personal viewpoint in any way, are very like those people who claim that books that have no obvious character ethnicity (and are therefore default white) are good because they are “colorblind”. If you get criticized for standing out from the cultural norm it is probably because you have said something interesting and subversive.

Naked Lunch by William Burroughs 50th Anniversary Edition

You enter the moment of the “naked lunch” when you realize just what that is quivering at the end of your fork. We’ve been staring at that living, gelatinous mass for 50 years now – and we still don’t know what it is.

It’s a novel. It’s a poem. It’s (as one shrill Amazon reviewer has it) the ranting of a LIBERAL ATHEIST JUNKY. It’s (drug-induced or not, take your pick) stream-of-consciousness. It’s the first prose cut-up. It’s pornography. It’s the end (or beginning) of (post-)modernism. It’s The Bomb, it’s a how-to-be-a-writer manual. Here’s the definitive answer to all that: Yes, it is. Naked Lunch is all that and more.

Naked Lunch is one of the most written-about books of the twentieth century. It’s up there with Ulysses and The Wasteland for the title of “book most likely to generate a graduate thesis.” That’s because, like those other two, it’s an open text: you’re quite likely to find there precisely what you go looking for.

Everything, that is (as a different Amazon reviewer complained) except stuff about lunch and nudity: “doesn’t anybody like to eat in the nude?” Read the rest of this entry »

Wino, the Seattle-based magazine for wine lovers with an attitude, has just posted my latest column on the science of wine and the importance of micronutrients on grapes.

When humans don’t get enough zinc, we can get sick with cancer and suffer immune-system dysfunction. The same is true of plants. Micronutrients such as boron, zinc and copper, although only a tiny part of a plant’s diet, can have a profound effect on the plant’s health.

via Higher Learning: A Pinch of This, a Dash of That -.