Why ancient Rome matters to the modern world
Failure in Iraq, debates about freedom, expenses scandals, sex advice … the Romans seem versions of ourselves. But then there’s the slavery and the babies on rubbish heaps. We need to understand ancient Rome, but should we take lessons from it?
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Mark Twain’s Rules for Good Writing
Mark Twain’s 18 rules for writing – part of his response to the fiction of James Fenimore Cooper.
Mark Twain (1835-1910) is the writer who once observed, ‘The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.’
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The quietest corner of London
In London’s bustling centre lies a centuries-old brotherhood, hidden from even most locals.
Four hundred years ago, a fabulously wealthy arms dealer and moneylender named Thomas Sutton was approaching death. As part of his legacy, he decided to convert his magnificent London home, itself a former Carthusian monastery founded in 1371, into an almshouse and school. He decreed that 80 impoverished gentlemen should be sheltered and fed there, and left a fortune equivalent to £200 million today to ensure his vision. The home became known as Sutton’s Hospital at Charterhouse.
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Greek tomb was ‘for Alexander the Great’s friend Hephaestion’
An archaeologist investigating an ancient Greek tomb from Alexander the Great’s era suggests it was a shrine for his closest friend Hephaestion.
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Do You Really Know How To “Show, Don’t Tell”?
When you write in Deep POV, like so many books today, even your narrative must Show, Don’t Tell. It should read as though the character is speaking rather than author intrusion. Years ago, books used an omniscient narrator, but today readers expect more. It is at the editing stage where you can amp your writing to the next level by concentrating on these changes.
Read more here.
Why Writers Make The Best Friends [Infographic]
Writers make great friends (just not for the reasons you may think).
Check it out here.
So many different fandoms…
Sometimes, I’ve been thinking about how many different fandoms there must be. I encounter other fanfic writers online and many times they have quite a few fandoms too, but not one single fandom is the same as any of mine. Or they might have one or two in common with me but nothing else. I write or have written in about 100 fandoms, counting the Nordic ones, but of course I’ve read and been involved with many other fandoms that I haven’t written in. At least several hundred. Especially if I’m not counting just tv and movies, but books too and I know there are plenty of other mediums as well. Can there be literally millions of fandoms? I suppose it’s possible. In a way, I wish there were better ways of finding the ones I’ll like and passing by all the ones that don’t seem interesting to me. It would make things easier. Now I’m not just talking about fandoms I might write about, but also any I might like to read and/or watch.
How many fandoms are you involved in? Do you know?
Search for Egypt’s Nefertiti gains new momentum
A queen’s tomb may lay hidden behind King Tutankhamun’s final resting place
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Internet nostalgia
I just read a headline for an article about what sites people used early in the internet’s history. That made me think about what sites I used to go to maybe not ‘when the internet was young’ because apparently that was a very long time ago, but at the beginning of my own internet history.
I think that most of those sites were very common. Most people have probably used them some years ago – yahoo, google, aol (?). I chatted on ICQ and had quite a few friends then. About.com was another site I used to go to a lot. There were even chat rooms back then. The site still exists, but I haven’t seen any updates for several years (probably at least five years). Tumblr and Livejournal were two very important sites for me, but sadly I had to leave them.
I still use Care2. I have been on WordPress for a very long time. There’s even a blogger/blogspot blog that I don’t use, not my very first one, because I had one very early on, one that I deleted when google bought it.
Do I miss any of the old sites? No. I can’t say I do. The ones I’m using now are good enough, maybe better than the old ones. I do miss my old friends. It seems strange that I who feel so extremely lonely, used to have so many online friends. Of course, they showed up, became a part of my life and left again, over and over again, that is different people did, but I did have so many friends to chat with that I rarely felt lonely.
Another strange fact is that some of the friends I felt I was so close to, are just gone from my memory. I have forgotten their names. How can that happen? I think I might still have emails from them on some old disk drive or CD, but will I ever find them? I don’t think so. Maybe I should just accept that I had a great time back then and now it’s over?
I had a great time reading and writing fan fiction and even became a little famous in my modest way. Here in Sweden I have been on tv to talk about my slash writing. It didn’t turn out the way I had hoped but I don’t regret doing it. A couple of scholars have used my knowledge of fan fiction in their papers. Occasionally, I have run across a mention of me and/or my fan fiction here and there on the internet. That makes me smile. I still enjoy fan fiction even if things aren’t the same as they used to. These days, I suspect the majority of young and/or new fan fiction fans have never heard of my fandoms so there won’t be anyone new who takes an interest. Most of the newer fandoms aren’t for me, so I won’t end up making any new friends either.
Maybe sooner or later everyone ends up feeling nostalgic for the good old days. That reminds me of a new song by a favorite singer of mine – Darin Zanyar. His new song (at least it’s new to me) is called ‘Take me back’ (in Swedish). It seems he too, is nostalgic for the past. His better days. Now I’m sure he’s going to see better days again, but I doubt that’s true for me. I wish he wasn’t just hot and talented but actually had some magic that could ‘take me back’.
Enjoy.
William Shakespeare’s dodgy dealing father ‘helped to fund son’s plays’
Playwright’s rags-to-riches story exposed as a myth by new research into Shakespeare family’s finances.
Read more here.
