That Novel You're Workin' On

The Joy of Quiet

'In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.'


Read More: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/opinion/sunday/the-joy-of-quiet.html?pagewanted=all

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Is opening the cava in 750 words time and wishes you all bubbles and a goddamn delightful 2012. 

Japan leads the way in sexless love

Are a new generation of Japanese men really losing interest in sex? And if so, what's behind the malaise?

Tagged in the domestic media over the past few years as hikikomori (socially withdrawn boys), soshoku danshi (grass-eating/herbivore men, uninterested in meat, fleshly sex and physical or workplace competition), or just generally feckless, Japan's Y-chromosomed youth today elicit shrugs of "why?", followed by heaving sighs of disappointment from their postwar elders and members of the opposite sex. With the country's economy stagnant at best, its geopolitical foothold rapidly slipping into the crevice between China and the United States, and its northeast coastline still struggling with the aftermath of disaster and an ongoing nuclear crisis, the reaction to a failure of Japan's men to take the reins, even symbolically, has evolved from whispers of curiosity to charges of incompetence.

...

Why the generational malaise and indifference to sex? Theories abound. The most provocative to me, a Japanese-American and longtime Tokyo resident, is that Japanese women have become stronger socially and economically at the very same time that Japanese men have become more mole-ish and fully absorbed in virtual worlds, satiated by the very technological wizardry their forebears foisted upon them, and evenpreferring it to reality. "I don't like real women," one bloke superciliously sniffed on Japan's 2channel, the world's largest and most active internet bulletin board site. "They're too picky nowadays. I'd much rather have a virtual girlfriend."

Virtual girlfriends became a sensation last summer, when Japanese game-maker Konami released its second-generation of its popular Love Plus, called, aptly, Love Plus +, for the Nintendo DS gaming system. Konami skillfully arranged for an otherwise deadbeat beach resort town called Atami to host a Love Plus + holiday weekend. Players were invited to tote their virtual girlfriends, via the gaming console, to the actual resort town to cavort for a weekend in romantic bliss. The promotion wasabsurdly successful, with local resort operators reporting that it was their best weekend in decades.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/27/japan-men-sexless-love?INTCMP=SRCH

And, from the Wall Street Journal:

On Vacation With a Virtual Girlfriend 8/31/2010 6:00:00 PM

In Love Plus, a Japanese dating simulation game, players experience young romance with a virtual girlfriend. Some have even taken their beloved avatars to an island resort -- a real island resort. WSJ's Akiko Fujita takes a tour of Atami.

http://online.wsj.com/video/on-vacation-with-a-virtual-girlfriend/77E0EACD-0B57-49DD-876A-5FF74EFF0781.html

Oryx and Crake Revealed

About the Lecture (MIT, 2004)

Here are two facts Margaret Atwood wants you to know: She is the daughter of an entomologist -- the kind of scientist, Atwood says, who is “noteworthy for producing weird writer offspring”; and she hates books where “everybody’s happy all the time.” 

After 30 years of fiction writing, Atwood is expert at engineering an extreme spin on ordinary life, and pushing the everyday world to its limits. Her talk includes two readings from her latest novel, Oryx and Crake, which she describes as “a joke-filled, fun-packed rollicking adventure story about the downfall of the human race.” Science fiction? Well, only if environmental catastrophe and unforeseen genetic mutations seem farfetched, Atwood suggests. Science isn’t the villain here, though. Atwood embraces the notion of “improvements” on the human race: built-in sunblock, or digestive systems modified to process leaves and grass. As well as shedding light on her latest novel, Atwood reveals juicy tidbits from her early years: she once fancied a career in botany, and had she pursued it, she informs us, she “would be growing glow in the dark potatoes now.”

Watch: http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/196/

Weird Writing Habits of Famous Authors

Capote would supposedly write supine, with a glass of sherry in one hand and a pencil in another. In a 1957 Paris Review interview with Pati Hill, Capote explains: “I am a completely horizontal author. I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I’ve got to be puffing and sipping. As the afternoon wears on, I shift from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis. No, I don’t use a typewriter. Not in the beginning. I write my first version in longhand (pencil). Then I do a complete revision, also in longhand.”

http://flavorwire.com/193101/weird-writing-habits-of-famous-authors

Also, this: http://flavorwire.com/167127/famous-authors-and-their-typewriters

Writing Pages

Fron: http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/