SF Signal has a page collecting links works from this year’s Hugo nomination list that are online for free. This is a great chance to read some of the year’s best speculative fiction - nearly all the nominated novellas, novelettes and short stories are online, and Harper Collins has even put up a substantial preview (71 pages) of Michael Chabon’s alternate history novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.

Out of the stories I’ve read so far, I particularly enjoyed Ted Chiang’s The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate (time travel, Arabian Nights style - also available as a free mp3 podcast episode from Starship Sofa) and Nancy Kress’ The Fountain of Age, a clever and affecting piece of science fiction.

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Always wanted to create comics but can’t draw? Try Bitstrips. Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing writes:

BitStrips is a fast, easy, sharing-friendly comic creation site — you make “characters” using a Wii-style menu, pose them and fill in dialog, layout your strips and monkey with the backgrounds, borrowing material from any of the thousands of strips that have been made to date. Once your strip is done, anyone can modify it — it becomes part of the commons. In the first two weeks of the site’s existence, more than 16,000 strips were created by the users of the service.

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Joel Rickett writes:

Some of the UK’s best young novelists are working with computer games designers to create digital short stories, each inspired by a classic work of literature but featuring games, blogs and web tools.

The first of the six stories is Charles Cumming’s The 21 Steps, based on John Buchan’s classic thriller The 39 Steps.

It uses Google Maps and Google Earth to follow the trail of a bewildered young Londoner who witnesses a murder and is forced to smuggle a mysterious liquid on to a plane.

The stories - which can be read online at wetellstories.co.uk - will feature clues that point to a seventh story hidden on the internet, culminating in a competition to win a £13,000 Penguin Classics library.

Link to the Guardian article

As you’ve probably noticed, we have a new design on WritingNews.org. The old one was getting a little - well, old - after fifteen months of use, and I think it’s time for something different.

More information:

• We’ll continue to revise our new look based on any feedback received.
• Site tested in Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. (The 30% of our visitors who still use IE 6, though, should consider something else - it’s a pain to code for, and there are many better options available.)
• We’ve modified styles that others have made in the past, but the new design was made from scratch for WritingNews.org.
• It’s also valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional - that is, the design itself is. It won’t technically validate until I take the time to clean up a few posts and sidebar items.

For reference, this was our old design:

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Keep Your Copyrights encourages authors to avoid abusive contracts and copyright agreements with their publishers by providing easy-to-undertand legal information about copyright issues.

A creator forewarned is a creator forearmed. This site is devoted to all authors and creators of works in the United States. It aims to make clear why you might want to keep your copyrights, and to provide information both to help you hold on to your rights and to grant on reasonable terms the rights you do license.

We encourage a more proactive attitude toward copyright management. We encourage creators to understand that you start with all the rights, and that you should actively decide what you want to do with them. Your copyright in fact consists of multiple rights, and you can grant one right (or part of one right) without giving away the others. Copyright was designed to serve artists and creators, but if you give everything up, that idea can just become lip service. Worse, if you give away too many rights, the business to whom you gave up your rights can use your copyrights against you to hinder your later efforts to create or to get paid.

Link (via BoingBoing)

HarperCollins announced Wednesday that it had set up a special link, http://mobile.harpercollins.com, that will allow browsers to view excerpts from more than a dozen new releases, including Michael C. White’s “Soul Catcher” and Michael Korda’s “Ike,” a biography of President Eisenhower.

“Reaching consumers on mobile devices and the Internet is increasingly important for publishers,” Brian Murray, president of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide, said in a statement that noted the publisher has some 10,000 titles already digitized.

Several publishers have been offering content for cell phone use and the iPhone, which already allows consumers to watch videos, take pictures, listen to music and surf the Web, is an obvious outlet for an industry anxious to boost sales and keep up with the latest technology.

Link to the Yahoo News article

Another author goes Creative Commons. SF author and blogger Cory Doctorow writes:

Lewis Shiner has begun to post all of his short fiction online for free, under a Creative Commons license. Lewis Shiner is one of the great science fiction writers of the last 30 years, author of the World Fantasy Award-winning novel Glimpses (a book I’ve re-read 10 times, which haunts me every time I hear a Beatles, Beach Boys, Doors, or Jimi Hendrix song). Unfortunately, all his novels are out of print (the exception being a new audiobook, which I just ordered). He also edited a seminal anti-war science fiction anthology, When The Music’s Over that I read until it came apart. Shiner was also an early cyberpunk, who had two stories in Bruce Sterling’s ground-breaking anthology Mirrorshades

Shiner posted his fiction along with a manifesto about the collapse of short fiction markets and the importance of short fiction as a way for writers to experiment and for readers to discover new writers. He calls the project the “Fiction Liberation Front.”

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We featured Google Documents a while ago, back when it was still Writely.  Now Google’s updated their online document and spreadsheet web app to allow better file organization.

Mark Frauenfelder, in his blog Rule the Web, writes:

Today, Google Docs & Spreadsheets has unveiled a a whole new look. Now, files are organized into folders, which makes navigating through your various documents a breeze. No more lost files.

If you haven’t given the service a look, now is an excellent time. GD&S does all kinds of nifty things that MSWord doesn’t, like let you collaborate on a document at the same time as someone else at another browser. It also saves automatically as you go, so someone could theoretically blow up your PC mid-sentence and your document would be safe, scattered around Google’s various servers. It would take a worldwide electromagnetic pulse to really get rid of a document stored with Google.

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