News

I’m a Forbes Web Celeb (again)!

Once again, Forbes Magazine has honored me by including me near the top of its list of 25 Web Celebrities, "the people who have turned their passions into new-media empires." How cool is that?

Cory Doctorow

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Part 004

Here's part four of my reading of my 2005 novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.

MP3 Link

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Part 003

Here's part three of my reading of my 2005 novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.

MP3 Link

Online Hugo nominating ballot is live

A couple weeks ago, I posted to let you know that nominations for the Hugo awards had just opened -- and promised to re-post once the online nomination form went live. I've just noticed that it's up -- handy if you want to save the hassle of printing out the form and putting it in the mail!

Here's the original post:

The 2008 Hugo award nominations have opened -- if you were a member of the 2008 WorldCon in Denver, or have bought a membership to the 2009 WorldCon in Montreal, you're eligible to nominate. I'll be sending in my nominations this week, and just in case you were wondering, here's the stuff I wrote that's eligible for this year's ballot:

* Best novel: Little Brother, Tor, 2008
* Best related book: Content, Tachyon, 2008
* Best novella: True Names (with Benjamin Rosenbaum), published in Fast Forward, Pyr Books, 2008, edited by Lou Anders
* Best novelette: The Things That Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away, Tor.com, July 2008

Nominating Ballot for the 2009 Hugo Awards
and John W. Campbell Award

Complete fan-reading of “Content”

Jan Rubak, a Canadian mathematician/physicist, has been reading aloud all the essays from my collection Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright and the Future of the Future and uploading them to the Internet Archive, and this week, he finished! He's even included some bonus material from John Perry Barlow. These are great readings and this was a gigantic undertaking -- thanks, Jan!

I've included a bonus chapter at the end with Barlow's "Economy of Ideas" plus a somewhat impassioned reading of "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" to round out the whole experience.

Sometime in the next month or two, I'll also upload some afterthoughts of my own as a final entry (but first I'm going to listen to the whole thing through from start to finish).

"Content" by Cory Doctorow

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Part 002

Here's part two of my reading of my 2005 novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.

MP3 Link

I’m a letterpress!

Jeff Macklin sez,

I have an old time letterpress shop in my garage, where I make things for kicks. I am a longtime lover of letterpress. I try to focus my energies on Canadians who I think are due some letterpress love. Clearly, you fall into this category, along with Louis Riel, Marshall McLuan, Buck 65, Emily Carr and Douglas Coupland, and I'm only just getting started.

I'm honored!

Cory Doctorow - Letterpress Print

Writing in the Age of Distraction

My latest Locus column, "Writing in the Age of Distraction" is up -- a grab-bag of practical tips for getting the writing done in the internet era.

We know that our readers are distracted and sometimes even overwhelmed by the myriad distractions that lie one click away on the Internet, but of course writers face the same glorious problem: the delirious world of information and communication and community that lurks behind your screen, one alt-tab away from your word-processor.

The single worst piece of writing advice I ever got was to stay away from the Internet because it would only waste my time and wouldn't help my writing. This advice was wrong creatively, professionally, artistically, and personally, but I know where the writer who doled it out was coming from. Every now and again, when I see a new website, game, or service, I sense the tug of an attention black hole: a time-sink that is just waiting to fill my every discretionary moment with distraction. As a co-parenting new father who writes at least a book per year, half-a-dozen columns a month, ten or more blog posts a day, plus assorted novellas and stories and speeches, I know just how short time can be and how dangerous distraction is.

But the Internet has been very good to me. It's informed my creativity and aesthetics, it's benefited me professionally and personally, and for every moment it steals, it gives back a hundred delights. I'd no sooner give it up than I'd give up fiction or any other pleasurable vice.

I think I've managed to balance things out through a few simple techniques that I've been refining for years. I still sometimes feel frazzled and info-whelmed, but that's rare. Most of the time, I'm on top of my workload and my muse. Here's how I do it:

Cory Doctorow: Writing in the Age of Distraction

Writing in the Age of Distraction

Locus Magazine

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Part 001

After a long hiatus, I'm back at my podcast, and to kick it off, I'm reading my 2005 novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, "A miraculous story of secrets, lies, magic and Internet connectivity." It's going to take a while -- this is a looong book -- and I'm really looking forward to it. I haven't re-read this book since it was published, and it's been enough time that it's like reading something someone else wrote, which is really cool and fun.

Here's the Publishers' Weekly summary:

"It's only natural that Alan, the broadminded hero of Doctorow's fresh, unconventional SF novel, is willing to help everybody he meets. After all, he's the product of a mixed marriage (his father is a mountain and his mother is a washing machine), so he knows how much being an outcast can hurt. Alan tries desperately to behave like a human being'or at least like his idealized version of one. He joins a cyber-anarchist's plot to spread a free wireless Internet through Toronto at the same time he agrees to protect his youngest brothers (members of a set of Russian nesting dolls) from their dead brother who's now resurrected and bent on revenge."

MP3 Link

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