Two very important things.

James Owen posted this from Frederick Pohl:

The times when a writer isn’t writing are called “writer’s slump.” Everybody has it, at least now and then. Nobody, or nobody I know, is wholly successful at dealing with it. I don’t know how to deal with it any more than anyone else., but what I do know is a way to postpone its happening, pretty well, most of the time, in a fashion that works, more or less, for me. What I do is set myself a daily quota of four pages. No more, no less; and I write those pages every day, no matter where I am, no matter how long it takes, if I die for it. Sometimes it takes forty-five minutes. Sometimes it takes eighteen hours. Sometimes I am reasonably satisfied with the words that go onto the paper, and quite a lot of the time I loathe them.

And Neil Gaiman posted something today that turned me into a blubbery wad of goo.

I decided to go back to art school a couple of years ago, and have some personal time. I have not had a vacation since I was 15-years-old, except for one week off in 2001. But there were clucks of disapproval when I took a year to get back to the place where making art is a delight instead of a burden.

And with that, go read:

Some writers need a while to charge their batteries, and then write their books very rapidly. Some writers write a page or so every day, rain or shine. Some writers run out of steam, and need to do whatever it is they happen to do until they’re ready to write again. Sometimes writers haven’t quite got the next book in a series ready in their heads, but they have something else all ready instead, so they write the thing that’s ready to go, prompting cries of outrage from people who want to know why the author could possibly write Book X while the fans were waiting for Book Y.

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Classic actress Claire Bloom will have a role in an upcoming episode of Doctor Who. Spoilers and gossip abound, click at your own risk.

I can’t wait for the first Klingon language Opera.

For Klingons, there’s Kahless, who dices 500 warriors with a sword forged from his own hair and some help from the Lady Lukara. To celebrate their victory, they make love in the ankle-deep blood.

A history of the Klingon language at Slate. This was pretty interesting.

Knowing that fans would be watching closely, Okrand worked out a full grammar. He cribbed from natural languages, borrowing sounds and sentence-building rules, switching sources whenever Klingon started operating too much like any one language in particular. He ended up with something that sounds like an ungodly combination of Hindi, Arabic, Tlingit, and Yiddish and works like a mix of Japanese, Turkish, and Mohawk. The linguistic features of Klingon are not especially unusual (at least to a linguist) when considered independently, but put together, they make for one hell of an alien language.

France passes new net piracy bill. Much rejoicing by some, hand wringing by others. You be the judge.

The new legislation operates under a three-stage system. A new state agency would first send illegal file-sharers a warning e-mail, then a letter, and finally cut off their connection for a year if they were caught a third time.

In Egypt, porn sites are banned from the web.

“Freedoms of expression and public rights should be restricted by maintaining the fundamentals of religion, morality and patriotism.”

I bet he doesn’t donate to the CBLDF.

South Park bad boys are presented with an autographed pic of Saddam Hussein. Hey, I loved Team America: World Police.

During his captivity, US marines forced Saddam, who was executed in 2006, to repeatedly watch the movie South Park: Bigger, Longer And Uncut, which shows him as gay, as well as the boyfriend of Satan. He was also regularly depicted in a similar manner during the TV series.

A short piece on Kenneth Brannagh, director of the upcoming Thor film.

At Playbill, the Addams Family Musical (not based on TV show), starring Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth:

Here’s how the producers characterize the story: “Storm clouds are gathering over the Addams Family manse. Daughter Wednesday, now 18, is experiencing a sensation that surprises and disgusts her — caring about another person. Young Pugsley, jealous of his sister’s attention, begs her to keep torturing him, severely, while mother Morticia, conflicted over her daughter’s lurch into womanhood, fears being upstaged and discarded…like yesterday’s road kill. All the while, father Gomez — master of the revels, mischievous and oblivious as ever — would prefer everything and everyone remain as it is. But when outsiders come to dinner, the events of one night will change forever this famously macabre family — a family so very different from your own…or maybe not.”

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