Cover Operations

Book covers = fascinating.

Penguin gave an open call for cover submissions for Sam Taylor's forthcoming novel The Island at the End of the World. Book covers + crowdsourcing = gorgeous.

My favorites are:

































See all 25 finalists here.

Are we dead yet?

To find out the answer to this question (at least with regard to one possible demise), go here:

hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com.

Love it.

What Would You Do...

...with a Tiny House?

Here are some of my ideas. Let's start with the fairly obvious:

1. a writing cabana (sort of like Susan Shreve's backyard office)
2. a long-term vacation home, for summers off at the coast
3. a pool house
4. the perfect place from which to dole out candy on Halloween-- decorate your Tiny House as a sickly sweet cottage, dress as a witch, set up one of those huge gourd ovens with a roaring fire in it in the background, and tell each kid he has to come in before you'll give him any Snickers
5. another Halloween possibility (or any time, really)-- dress up as Emily Dickinson and give the trick-or-treaters pieces of wrinkly yellowed paper with Dove promises rewritten on them in calligraphy
6. finally-- a headquarters for my own chapter of the Babysitter's Club
7. a sweatshop (making high fashion knock-offs for moi, of course)
8. a home of their own for Kirsten, Molly, Kit, Samantha, etc.
9. a hookah den (password necessary)
10. a psycho S&M love shack (see The General's Daughter)

What else can you all come up with?

Room for One, Not Two

The first time I ever saw a SmartCar (in the year 2000-nd-nd), I was walking home from a pub near Covent Garden with my friend Stacy. She swung out her arm to stop me, pointed to the tiny gray vehicle tucked neatly between two compacts that looked enormous in comparison, and half-screamed, "It's so cute! I just want to hug it!"

Today's article about tiny houses on nytimes.com discusses a burgeoning movement of building little dwellings whose floor plans range from 75 to 750 square feet. A slide show accompanies the text, and the itty bitty houses it depicts gave me, for the first time in eight years, the urge to exclaim, "I want to hug it!"

Jay Shafer, founder of Tumbleweed Tiny House Company, lives in a 96-sq. ft. house, and he gives a virtual tour of the space here. His house is designed more compactly than a boat, with such design elements as a miniature electric fire, built-in bookshelves, and a cabinet containing a mini-fridge and-- the clincher for me-- toaster oven! Like many of the tiny houses I found online, Shafer's resembles a fairy tale cottage. No seven dwarves could fit in here, however, and the sharp slant of the walls in the sleeping loft make me itchy just looking at them.

I thought living in my 400-sq. ft. apartment was tight. Still, I find his and the other tiny houses highly appealing-- they're just so cute.

Above: Jay Shafer's tiny house (courtesy of Telstar Logistics).

Writers and Animals

My name is Sara, and I have a cat.

I talk about him quite a bit more than is considered polite, treating him in conversation and life as if he were a person, although I am quite aware from the fur covering my apartment, car upholstery and nasal passages that he is, indeed, an animal.

Just because I have a cat (or, for the righteous among you, a cat has me) doesn't mean I love all cats. But I do get a kick out of certain websites related to cats, and recently I've noticed that all of my newly discovered cat websites, including this one and this one*, have been recommendations from writers like him and her.

I here present to you my latest deep question of the universe:

Do writers love their pets more than the average person (perhaps because, if they are home writing, they spend more time with them than those of us who die slow deaths in, ahem, offices)? Or do they just have more time to search out pet-related websites (because they are home writing) and publish them on their blogs/personal websites (that they are tending to while procrastinating, perhaps, on "real" writing)?

*Although I visit these sites, I do not recommend them to everyone, or at least not to anyone unwilling to view the pictures posted with either complete irony or a complete lack thereof.

Pseudo-Olympians

These guys-- who are in pretty good shape, it seems to me-- recreated five Olympic events and competed against each other:

Not only is it amazing to see how they compare to actual Olympians, their video provides inspiration to try this stuff myself (except the hurdles-- I tore my ACL jumping over a hurdle in 9th grade). Why is it that exercise seems more fun when I set up challenges, especially competition, for myself? I enjoy the track workouts I've been doing (basic speed intervals) exponentially more than the long runs required for marathon training, which get so boring. I enjoy Pilates classes more than just stretching on a mat. Even the old Presidential Fitness tests in school got me going-- I ran my fastest mile ever during a presidential fitness test run in high school (although I admit I don't often run timed miles on the track at my fastest possible speed). Anyway, this is a concept many espouse but clearly works for me: specific challenges inspire greater results.

Now I just need to find a friend foolhardy enough to be my teammate/competition.

Last of the Mohicans, or Another Derivative Post

In his review of How Fiction Works, Walter Kirn took author James Woods to flight school, giving a sideways proposal that a better title for the book might be Why Readers Nap. Okay, fine. But what interested me when I read this review is why Kirn-- who published a novel on Slate and whose "strange story of an affair with the Dali Lama's ditsy public relations woman" was one of the most interesting, but most out-there, selections at last year's PEN/Faulkner gala (if I remember correctly, it was also one of the funniest)-- was chosen to review Woods' book, especially when the Sunday Book Review seems to attune reviewers and assignments so carefully (i.e. Christopher Dickey's review of Rick Bragg's book about his father).

Well, the NY Times blog Papercuts recently asserted that Kirn's review represents the latest battle in the unending galactic war between the two literary types, Paleface and Redskin, or as a certain professor at George Mason might call them, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. It's amazing to me that this debate continues as fiercely as ever-- doesn't it seem clear that each side will continue to have supporters, that each will experience its heyday (I would argue that currently, the Redskins are ahead) and then fall back for a while, only to surge again in the future?

I guess we'll have to wait for that one mythical writer who will merge both backgrounds, breaking the binary and bringing glory to us all, before the argument ends. (I predict that if male, he'll resemble Daniel Day Lewis, and if female, Madeleine Stowe.) Until then, I suggest we writers continue practicing our tracking skills or our military drills, whichever we may choose, rather than wasting time comparing whose weapon shoots better.