Friday, August 21, 2009

Time Flies When Y'er Having Fun...

... and MONTHS have slipped by since I've posted here - but three recent events have brought me back;

1) I actually got an email from someone who's read Mai Shangri-La and liked it! (perhaps being kind, she mentioned the heavy environmental front-loading, but goes on to give it a thumbs-up as a story) That got me thinking that I really need to keep MSL alive - and to move beyond it.

2) I came across a GREAT blog rebuttal to every climate-denier argument. Coby Beck has been blogging about the climate change since 2006, but this post, originally from July, 2008, at "A few things Ill-Considered" is a classic . How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic has it all.

3) I discovered a whole universe of "post-apocalyptic" fiction on what's becoming my favorite 1st stop reference center - Wikipedia. As a librarian, I know all the arguments for and against an open-source repositories of information, but for a quick and thorough overview of just about any topic, Wikipedia is, in my book, unbeatable.

So what do these three things have to do with the theme of this blog (which is ostensibly about pitching my novel Mai Shangri-La, but is really about the rapidly degrading global environment and our probable future if we follow this path to its logical conclusion.

The connection? I never really thought of Mai Shangri-La as a "post-apocalyptic" novel - but looking at it that way puts it in a whole new light - and opens up a whole new arena for promoting it. To that end, I registered with Wikipedia, and made my very own first contributions to that growing body of "open-source" information.

My first Wikipedia edit? I added Mai Shangri-la to the "ecological catastrophes" section of "List of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction". Now to sit back and see if anyone decides that my little novel just doesn't belong up there with my favorites like Sean McMullen's GreatWinter Series, or Margaret Atwood's "Oryx & Crake"...