Farewell, Anne McCaffrey

Sad news for all fans of Pern and of all her other series. After a long and very productive writing career, Anne McCaffrey is no more. A massive heart attack has taken her from this world.

She will be missed.

But her writing will stand for the ages.

Women, Men and Reviews

Kate Elliot has a very interesting post on her LiveJournal about disparaties in visibility and reception of books by men and women authors. She's brought up some very interesting issues related to the role of reviewing, of positive and negative publicity about the authors' personal lives (women authors are far more prone to getting treated as though their personal shortcomings reflect the value of their work, while men often get far more severe missteps forgiven), and of male vs. female gazes (what men observe is viewed as universally important, while what women look at is of importance only to women).

Bad News for Horror Readers and Writers

Due to the bad economy, The Twisted Library is putting all anthologies on hold for at least six months and some, the exact number to be determined, will be canceled altogether. Like Norilana Books, which has also had to postpone anthology publications and has had some editors take their anthologies elsewhere, The Twisted Library is a small press that is almost entirely the work of one person. Things had hung on for a little longer there because the publisher of The Twisted Library is a dentist and had been using money from his dental practice to float the anthologies, but as the economic crisis worsens, people are deferring routine dental care, which means less income for him, and a lot of it has to be put back into maintaining the overhead of his dental practice.

This is unfortunate because short stories in anthologies are one of the important ways for readers to be introduced to new writers. If you know that there will be at least two or three authors in it whose stories you are likely to enjoy, you can buy feeling confident that you'll get your money's worth, and thus take the risk of trying out stories by new writers that are also in there. After all, you've already paid your money, so everything else you gain is a bonus.