linky links

My friend Socrates Adams has this excellent story, Wide and Deep, up at Metazen. It's really short and very simple and incredibly poignant. I think it fits into the category of 'things I shouldn't be reading while enormously pregnant.' Kind of like watching all the Alien films back-to-back, like I did a couple of weekends ago. But Alien just made me look at my own belly in terror; Socrates' story nearly had me crying. Check it out.

Then there's this brilliant article about police crime reports that explores precision of language and the way that influences how your story is read and interpreted. When you're writing a scene, how does your choice of words subtly imply a position, a moral stance, an opinion, without you being too explicit about it? Here, Ellen Collett talks about the 'alchemy of inflection' - how the tiny accretion of detail through language filters, changes and ultimately makes your story. Good stuff.

And here are Mitchell and Webb tackling ignoramuses. Mwuahaha.