learning curve
I had never attempted a regular column before I took this gig back in 1998–has it been five years already?–and after thirty-two installments, I’m still finding my way. Originally I thought I’d just write up cool links in whatever order I stumbled across them. But in very short order I abandoned the random-walk-through-cyberspace strategy in favor of typing words like "robots" and "slipstream" into Google <www.google.com> and then discussing what popped up. The problem with this approach is that I regularly run across all kinds of sites that won’t slide neatly into a themed column, or else I find one that would have been perfect for that column I turned in last September. So in this installment I’d like to serve up a gallimaufry of tasty URLs that didn’t quite fit anywhere else.
utility
Onlineconversion.com <http://www.onlineconversion.com> may not be the sexiest site I’ve ever mentioned in this column, but it is indispensable to this science fiction writer who would love to think in metric but who is hopelessly mired in the English system of measurement. In addition to all the standard conversions, the site can convert cups to liters, Algerian dinars to Australian dollars, and light years to parsecs. It can estimate your blood alcohol level, calculate your Body Mass Index and translate your name into Morse Code. And for what it’s worth, it informs me that I am almost ten years old in dog years.
The Speech Accent Archive <http://classweb.gmu.edu/accent> is one of the most fascinating sites I’ve ever come across. It examines the accented speech of speakers from many different backgrounds. There are two hundred and eighty-two samples of folks reading a standard text. Their native tongues range from Afrikaans to Zulu with stops along the way for speakers of Bafang (Cameroon), Oromo (Ethiopia) and Tok Pisin (Papua, New Guinea). As the site’s administrator, Professor Stephen Weinberger of George Mason University, points out, "Everyone who speaks a language, speaks it with an accent." As a writer, I’ve always found one of the thorniest problems in creating believable dialogue is that of translating accents onto the page. This site is a revelation.
Whatis.com <http://whatis.techtarget.com> can be intimidating to the casual browser. Editors Lowell Thing and Margaret Rouse call it "a knowledge exploration tool about information technology, especially about the Internet and computers." Its over four thousand definitions range from the esoteric (when your cell phone makes a transition from one base station to an adjacent one it’s called a handoff) to the arcane (The stathenry is the unit of inductance in the small-unit metric system, equivalent to 8.9876 x 1011 henrys). Actually there’s lots of good stuff here that even an English major like yours truly can grasp. If geekspeak perplexes you, this is the place on the web to come for an explanation.
The Cliché Finder <http://www.westegg.com/cliché> is the brainchild of S. Morgan Friedman. If your sentences are dull as dishwater, and you think that maybe you ought to make a long story short, then this might be your place in the sun for fixing your wagon and getting your show on the road. I should say, however, that I was surprised at some of what Mr. Friedman considers to be clichés. For example, I think calling someone "ugly enough to make a freight train take a dirt road" is a perfectly fine insult. And "Never pet a burning dog" seems like sage advice to me. Oh well, to each his own.
For years I’ve kept a reference book called What’s What: A Visual Glossary of the Physical World close at hand. The book, first published in 1981, would seem to be out of print, but as so often happens, the web has done it one better. How Stuff Works <http://www.howstuffworks.com> is a compendium of explanations of everything from how lawsuits work to how the odometer in your car works. The articles are massively linked, so that it’s possible to spend hours discovering wonderful new things. This is a magical site, cited by Time <http://www.time.com/time> as one of its fifty best for the past two years.
new zines
Ideomancer <http://www.ideomancer.com> is without doubt the slickest of three new e-zines. The site is superbly designed; you can browse the contents in HTML or PDF and by clicking to the site map, you can easily access all the materials in the archives. The editorial tastes at Ideomancer are eclectic; clicking various buttons on the home page will whisk you to an array of science fiction, fantasy, horror, slipstream, flash, and classic stories. The classics would all seem to be in the public domain, with such canonical writers as Jack London <http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/London> and Edgar Allan Poe <http://www.eapoe.org> mingling with those whose work is less well known, like M.R. James <http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~pardos/GS.html> and Algernon Blackwood <http://www.creative.net/~alang/lit/horror/blackwd.sht>. Among the living writers you’ll find gracing the pages of Ideomancer are Stephen Dedman <http://eidolon.net/homesite.html?author=stephen_dedman>, Tim Pratt <http://www.journalscape.com/tim>, Jeremy Tolbert <http://www.tuginternet.com/jeremy/>, and Emily Gaskin <http://www.emilygaskin.com>, to name but a few.
Mars Dust <http://www.marsdust.com/home.htm> is a quarterly e-zine with an attitude. Literally. Right on the home page is a button labeled Attitude that transports you to the fervid opinions of Publisher Jason Prentice Ahlquist. But in addition to showcasing some fine fiction, Mars Dust also delivers features devoted to arts, fashion, comics, games, and hip hop and rock music. In keeping with its attitude, the design of this site gets in your face and dares you not to pay attention. Some of the writers who have recently appeared in Mars Dust are John Shirley <http://www.darkecho.com/JohnShirley>, Mary Soon Lee <http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~mslee/hp.html>, Charles Coleman Finlay <http://home.earthlink.net/~ccfinlay>, and Michael Jasper <http://www.sff.net/people/michaeljasper>.
Utterly unlike Mars Dust, The Fortean Bureau <http://www.forteanbureau.com> is elegant and understated. The site is brought to you by Jeremy and Sarah Tolbert, who have focused almost exclusively on fiction. Although they have published established writers like Bruce Boston <http://hometown.aol.com/bruboston> and Jay Lake <http://www.jlake.com>, their forte (sorry, couldn’t resist) is showcasing new talent. If you want to know who is going to be making waves in the next couple of years, check out stories by Timons Esaias <http://www.timonsesaias.com>, Lena DeTar <http://lena-d.tripod.com>, Greg Beatty <http://home.earthlink.net/%7Egbeatty>, and Marissa K. Lingen <http://www.marissalingen.com> and the other stars-in-waiting at The Fortean Bureau.
insider stuff
Possibly the most egregious oversight in my career as your web columnist is that I have failed to mention Ralan’s SpecFic & Humor Webstravaganza <http://www.ralan.com> until now. This is a must click site for all writers, featuring one of the web’s most comprehensive lists of novel, anthology, magazine, and electronic fiction markets. Ralan posts guidelines for all markets and reports on response times. For example, if you send a story to Asimov’s, it will take Gardner an average of sixty-six days to get back to you. Ralan also lists humor markets and writing contests. Click on Writing Help and you’ll learn everything you need to know about manuscript format; click on Writing Links and you’ll find more than six hundred sites to check out. I should note that Ralan Conley is himself a writer and has posted links to his own online stories on this site.
Similar to Ralan’s is the excellent Preditors & Editors <http://anotherealm.com/prededitors>. It is a resource "intended as a simple compendium for the serious writer, composer, game designer, or artist to consult for information, regardless of genre." So while Ralan concentrates on our little slice of the creative universe, Preditors & Editors takes a broader view and includes information on journalism, screenwriting, and art. The site has a listing of agents and game publishers, it recommends software, warns against scams, and lists conventions. Editor and Founder David Kuzminski <http://home.att.net/~d.l.kuzminski/index.html> is yet another writer who has unselfishly shared his knowledge with those who are making a career building worlds out of words.
Night Shade Books <http://www.nightshadebooks.com> is a small press publisher located in Portland, Oregon. According to the site, the editors are "dedicated to finding an audience for quality fiction that doesn’t fit neatly into genre classifications." This is a noble endeavor and I urge you to support their efforts. But the reason I mention the site is not because of the fine books they sell but because the Discussion Board <http://www.nightshadebooks.com/cgi-bin/discus/discus.cgi> is the one of the liveliest on the net. Not only is it the official conversation pit for worthy competitors Argosy <http://www.argosymag.com>, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction <http://www.sfsite.com/fsf>, Infinity Plus <http://www.infinityplus.co.uk>, and Infinite Matrix <http://www.infinitematrix.net>, but it’s where big name writers like Michael Bishop, Pat Cadigan, Elizabeth Hand, Michael Moorcock, and Lucius Shepard–to name but five–post regularly in topics of their own. I’m not sure how such an astonishing group has accreted around this particular board, but rest assured, it’s well worth a click.
Warning to movie buffs! If you continue reading past this sentence you may find yourself coming back to reality sometime next week and wondering where the time went. Everyone knows that before a movie can exist, there must be a screenplay. But how many of us have actually read a genuine screenplay, much less the one from which our fave flick was shot? Well, there is actually a Movie Scripts And Screenplays Webring <http://w.webring.com/hub?ring=screenplayring>, but I’d like to point you toward two of my favorites, Drew’s Script-O-Rama <http://www.script-o-rama.com> and Sci-Fi Scripts <http://www.scifiscripts.com/default.html>. Sci-Fi Scripts is very good on recent genre releases and doesn’t necessarily discriminate between the sucky and the sublime. Script-O-Rama, on the other hand, delivers not only a generous helping of the fantastic but also screenplays for films that have nothing to do with rockets or elves or vampires. And there’s a link page on Script-O-Rama that will take you to pages featuring scripts from many of your favorite television shows. Buffy <http://www.upn.com/shows/buffy> fans, reach for your mice!
exit
Enough of this hodge podge, this farrago, this mishmash ragbag witch’s brew. Next time we’ll try to bring some order to the chaos that is the web.
