Holiday Linkage

I have to bail on you guys today to see my kid march in a Christmas parade, take care of a job for an editor and attend to some of the chores I've been neglecting. I think the dogs need a bath as well. Or maybe I do.

So that your stop here was not entirely wasted, and to hopefully help jumpstart a happy mood for December, here are some of my favorite holiday links:

The Official NORAD Santa Tracker is now counting down to the big night; stop by the countdown village to play some games and listen to some holiday tunes.



Each year I take a few minutes to Awwww over Jacquie Lawson's animated card The Snow Dog.

If you missed it like I did, you can watch a replay of the lighting of the National Christmas Tree here.

If you have any cool holiday links -- Christmas-related or otherwise -- please share them in comments.

Seriously Neat

I am off writing again, but so that your stop here was not wasted, some neat links to check out:

True humor in advertisement is a rare thing; brilliant storytelling is almost always non-existent. Find an ad that has both and a run time of only 1:28, and well, you have Nolan's Cheddar* (animal lovers will likely be furious about halfway through, but keep watching, it's not what you assume. You folks at work, try to watch it at home or when you can listen to the background music.)

SF writers often have to employ transport pods of some variety or another (usually for evacuation purposes when a big ship is about to blow) but it's often hard to imagine how many necessities of life you'd be able to fit in such a small space. But now Belgian architectural firm dmvA has built blob VB3*, a mobile living unit that contains storage, sleeping area, bathroom, kitchen and more in a big egg-shaped construct with a surprisingly futuristic-looking interior.

Online radio that boldly goes where no science show has gone before: The Naked Scientists, a very popular group of Cambridge University doctors and researchers who are using podcasts, live lectures and other internet resources to make science fun, interesting and overall less terrifying for the general public. You get smarter just listening to it (and I thought this might be a great resource for you homeschooling moms, too.)

For those of you who are fans of Randy Ingermanson's snowflake method of writing a novel, StoryHack.com designed a complimentary outlining freeware, Text Tree. This is "an outline based writer’s tool . . . designed make structured, understandable documents easily and quickly. Text Tree has been found useful for story writing, FAQ creation, novel planning, manual writing, software support, biographies, and lesson planning. What really sets Text Tree apart from other outliners is its export abilities. In other outliners, you make a outline of everything, then you have to cut and paste or go node by node to get your information out. Text Tree allows you to quickly export all or part of the information in your outline. For example, if you are organizing information to be displayed on the web, Text Tree can generate an html file with a table of contents to your information" (OS: Windows XP or higher, Java installed)

And last but not least, I have read the funniest galley-related blog post of all time. No lie; it was written by author Robin Becker, and features the arrival of the galley for her May '10 debut novel Brains: A Zombie Memoir.

*These two links were shamelessly filched from The Presurfer.