I just don't have enough hours in the day

Right, so my glorious plan to write up and post a (few) reviews of Magic Burns clearly never came about. I had absolutely no free time last week between my editing classes starting back up and the arrival of my five-year-old niece.

Honestly, I didn't have time for much of anything with her around, including sleep.

So, instead of having posts, we're going to have bullet points of things I that I want to talk about but, but will just mention instead. (Because they deserve a mention at the very least.)

-Amazon coming out with its own print on demand (POD) service that they're going to require other publishing houses to use. Despite the fact that Amazon says that by using (their) one service consumers will really get books faster, what it actually means is that Amazon is going to have a stranglehold on the POD market and other publishing house will either have to suck it up and pay what Amazon charges, or they won't be able to sell their POD books through Amazon.

-The state of Indiana is passing a law that will require will require any businesses that sell “sexually explicit material” to register with the state government.
1) Seriously? We're going there?
2) Who is going to define "sexually explicit material"?

-This looks good. Comics, The Red Scare, what's not to love? (note: I linked to Powell's, which, is a first for me. Not linking to Amazon is going to require a lot of work.)

-Nothing But Red, the anthology featuring Joss Whedon's essay about the brutal death of Du'a Khalil Aswad, is available.

In April 2007, a group of men pulled seventeen-year-old Du’a Khalil Aswad into a mob. They proceeded to stone and beat her to death, a supposed "honor" killing for allegedly falling in love with a man of a different faith. Several camera phones recorded the entire incident from the front row, and videos later surfaced online. One month later, popular filmmaker Joss Whedon expressed his despair and outrage at the misogyny in all cultures on a fan-run blog. "Because it’s no longer enough to be a decent person," he wrote. "It’s no longer enough to shake our heads and make concerned grimaces at the news. True enlightened activism is the only thing that can save humanity from itself. I’ve always had a bent towards apocalyptic fiction, and I’m beginning to understand why. I look and I see the earth in flames. Her face was nothing but red." The arts anthology Nothing But Red was conceived as a way to raise both awareness of the issues he spoke of, as well as money for the charity Equality Now.


Buy a copy.