Online Reads

This poignant story, Flower Fairies, will only be available free until the end of the week, but Kristine Kathryn Rusch is offering a fiction story for our enjoyment on her blog every Monday, with the post staying complete for one week. Click the Free Fiction Monday tag to find the latest story:
http://kriswrites.com/2011/01/10/free-fiction-monday-flower-fairies/

Publishing

A solid article from Victoria Strauss on Writers Beware about the hype surrounding ebooks and self-publishing. She gives tips for looking beyond the hype to make decisions based on the full story:
http://accrispin.blogspot.com/2011/01/importance-of-context-part-1.html

I have a number of friends who have chosen to go the small press root, and I have done both editing and technical work for a couple small presses, so the question of whether to shoot for a large publisher versus a small press is one I’ve considered. This blog series put together by Michelle Davidson Argyle (five pages of which I’ve linked you to the first and you can follow the links at the bottom for the rest) offers a look at what makes small presses a good place for newer authors through testimonials from authors, an agent interview, and Q&A with a small press:
http://theinnocentflower.blogspot.com/2011/01/should-you-consider-small-publisher.html

Science

The more we explore about our own planet, the more we learn that we’d thought impossible, for example, that a border collie could develop a 1000+ word vocabulary:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110106144252.htm

That tree rings offer a map of annual weather conditions is a commonly known fact, but this group of scientists took that information a step further to correlate the good and harsh times in the Roman Empire’s known history with the local weather conditions by comparing a broad sample of tree rings:
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/01/fall-of-rome-recorded-in-trees.html?rss=1

Writing

For those interested in adding a touch of Medieval into your novels, Juliette Wade gives a quick grammar guide on how to use thee/thou/thy/your:
http://talktoyouniverse.blogspot.com/2011/01/pronoun-peeves-i-or-me-thou-or-thee.html