WayWORD Festival 2025
1–5 October, Aberdeen
The programme for WayWORD 2025, the University of Aberdeen’s cross-arts literary festival, is now online.
#Scottish #literature #writing #creativewriting #WritingCommunity
writing
He will outlast us, churning out his books,
advocate and historian, his prose
earning him Abbotsford with its borrowed gates,
its cheap mementos from the land he made…
—Iain Crichton Smith, “At the Scott Exhibition, Edinburgh Festival”
published in DEER ON THE HIGH HILLS (Carcanet, 2021)
https://www.carcanet.co.uk/9781800170940/deer-on-the-high-hills/
#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #WalterScott #IainCrichtonSmith #writers #writing
Meet the people behind the books
Today I’m introducing new pages for people and other authors on The Online Books Page. The new pages combine and augment information that’s been on author listings and subject pages. They let readers see in one place books both about and by particular people. They also show let readers quickly see who the authors are and learn more about them. And they encourage readers to explore to find related authors and books online and in their local libraries. They draw on information resources created by librarians, Wikipedians, and other people online who care about spreading knowledge freely. I plan to improve on them over time, but I think they’re developed enough now to be useful to readers. Below I’ll briefly explain my intentions for these pages, and I hope to hear from you if you find them useful, or have suggestions for improvement.
Who is this person?
Readers often want to know about more about the people who created the books they’re interested in. If they like an author, they might want to learn more about them and their works– for instance, finding out what Mark Twain did besides creating Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. For less familiar authors, it helps to know what background, expertise, and perspectives the author has to write about a particular subject. For instance, Irving Fisher, a famous economist in the early 20th century, wrote about various subjects, not just ones dealing with economics, but also with health and public policy. One might treat his writings on these various topics in different ways if one knows what areas he was trained in and in what areas he was an interested amateur. (And one might also reassess his predictive abilities even in economics after learning from his biography that he’d famously failed to anticipate the 1929 stock market crash just before it happened.)
The Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Commons communities have created many articles, and uploaded many images, of the authors mentioned in the Online Books collection, and they make them freely reusable. We’re happy to include their content on our pages, with attribution, when it helps readers better understand the people whose works they’re reading. Wikipedia is of course not the last word on any person, but it’s often a useful starting point, and many of its articles include links to more authoritative and in-depth sources. We also link to other useful free references in many cases. For example, our page on W. E. B. Du Bois includes links to articles on Du Bois from the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, BlackPast, and the Archives and Records center at the University of Pennsylvania, each of which describes him from a different perspective. Our goal in including these links on the page is not to exhaustively present all the information we can about an author, but to give readers enough context and links to understand who they are reading or reading about, and to encourage them to find out more.
Find more books and authors
Part of encouraging readers to find out more is to give them ways of exploring books and authors beyond the ones they initially find. Our page on Rachel Carson, for example, includes a number of works she co-wrote as an employee of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, as well as a public domain booklet on her prepared by the US Department of State. But it doesn’t include her most famous works like Silent Spring and the Sea Around Us, which are still under copyright without authorized free online editions, as are many recent biographies and studies of Carson. But you can find many of these books in libraries near you. Links we have on the left of her page will search library catalogs for works about her, and links on the bottom right will search them for work by her, via our Forward to Libraries service.
Readers might also be interested in Carson’s colleagues. The “Associated authors” links on the left side of Carson’s page go to other pages about people that Carson collaborated with who are also represented in our collection, like Bob Hines and Shirley Briggs. Under the “Example of” heading, you can also follow links to other biologists and naturalists, doing similar work to Carson.
Metadata created with care by people, processed with care by code
I didn’t create, and couldn’t have created (let alone maintained), all of the links you see on these pages. They’re the work of many other people. Besides the people who wrote the linked books, collaborated on the linked reference articles, and created the catalog and authority metadata records for the books, there are lots of folks who created the linked data technology and data that I use to automatically pull together these resources on The Online Books Page. I owe a lot to the community that has created and populated Wikidata, which much of what you see on these pages depends on, and to the LD4 library linked data community, which has researched, developed, and discussed much of the technology used. (Some community members have themselves produced services and demonstrations similar to the ones I’ve put on Online Books.) Other crucial parts of my services’ data infrastructure come from the Library of Congress Linked Data Service and the people that create the records that go into that. The international VIAF collaboration has also been both a foundation and inspiration for some of this work.
These days, you might expect a new service like this to use or tout artificial intelligence somehow. I’m happy to say that the service does not use any generative AI to produce what readers see, either directly, or (as far as I’m aware) indirectly. There’s quite a bit of automation and coding behind the scenes, to be sure, but it’s all built by humans, using data produced in the main by humans, who I try to credit and cite appropriately. We don’t include statistically plausible generated text that hasn’t actually been checked for truth, or that appropriates other people’s work without permission or credit. We don’t have to worry about unknown and possibly unprecedented levels of power and water consumption to power our pages, or depend on crawlers for AI training so aggressive that they’re knocking library and other cultural sites offline. (I haven’t yet had to resort to the sorts of measures that some other libraries have taken to defend themselves against aggressive crawling, but I’ve noticed the new breed of crawlers seriously degrading my site’s performance, to the point of making it temporarily unusable, on more than one occasion.) With this and my other services, I aim to develop and use code that serves people (rather than selfishly or unthinkingly exploiting them), and that centers human readers and authors.
Work in progress
I hope readers find the new “people” pages on The Online Books Page useful in discovering and finding out more about books and authors of interest to them. I’ve thought of a number of ways we can potentially extend and build on what we’re providing with these new pages, and you’ll likely see some of them in future revisions of the service. I’ll be rolling the new pages out gradually, and plan to take some time to consider what features improve readers’ experience, and don’t excessively get in their way. The older-style “books by” and “books about” people pages will also continue to be available on the site for a while, though these new integrated views of people may eventually replace them.
If you enjoy the new pages, or have thoughts on how they could be improved, I’d enjoy hearing from you! And as always, I’m also interested in your suggestions for more books and serials — and people! — we can add to the Online Books collection.
WRITERS!
Submissions are invited to NEW WRITING SCOTLAND 44! We want poetry & prose in English, Gaelic, & Scots from writers who are Scottish by residence, birth, or inclination. All successful contributors are paid – deadline 31 Oct!
@writingcommunity
Submit free via Submittable 👇
https://nws.submittable.com/submit
#Scottish #literature #writing #WritingCommunity #IAmWriting #poetry #shortfiction #shortstories #Scots #Scotslanguage #Gaelic #Gaidhlig
Read Write.as is an aggregator of feeds of users of the Write.as @write_as blogging platform. The topics of the posts range from personal diaries and poetry to technology, introspection, society, and more. It's a great resource for discovering independent writers and reading material.
#PSA #Authors #Writing #GenAI #Meta #Anthropic #AnthropicClassAction
Deadline to join the class action against Meta/Anthropic: Friday August 15, 2025.
"Submitting your information here does not make you a member of the Class. But, if you are a member of the class, submitting your information will help us direct formal notice of the class action at the appropriate time."
https://www.lieffcabraser.com/anthropic-author-contact/
Gift link to The Atlantic database search tool:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/search-libgen-data-set/682094/?gift=uvbqc-y7RgcozRTSY7kANHrt8LyDF9nPyN5h5Dmp4rE
Please share widely!
Edited 25d ago
An update from the Society of Authors on licensing deals for AI training rights currently being offered by a couple of big trad publishers.
You will be unsurprised to learn these deals are wholly inadequate on many levels, including the fact the publisher gets far too much of the cash.
By popular request, it's here!
FORBIDDEN QUEERIES, my new Question & Response blog is live!
https://hachyderm.io/@mallory_sinn/115029605920637964
I'll be publishing it under my pseudonym, Mallie Sinn, to keep it separate from my career and make it clear what I offer there is personal opinion and not therapy or counseling. You can read it by following @mallory_sinn or on the blog site itself: https://forbidden-queeries.ghost.io/
I am currently taking open questions from everyone at forbiddenqueeries@gmail.com or in private mentions to @mallory_sinn
If you want to support this effort or get top priority for your own question, please subscribe on the blog itself at https://forbidden-queeries.ghost.io/ or on my patreon for projects under my pseudonym https://patreon.com/MallorySinn
New in The Medium Blog: Our CEO @coachtony shares how our position on #AI has evolved, and asks for your feedback on how #writers can use AI tools to tell human stories.
So excited to see that The Barbellion Prize is returning soon after a hiatus, I’ve missed it! This UK prize shines alight on talented disabled and chronically ill writers and I’ve discovered some great books through it #bookstodon #writing #Publishing #BarbellionPrize #disability #ChronicIllness @bookstodon @disability
https://www.thebarbellionprize.com
100 years of women’s lives & writings workshop
23 Sep, online – free
The National Library of Scotland will discuss literature & archives in the library that are inspired by the lives of women. The examples chosen are from the NLS’s ‘Dear Library’ centenary exhibition.
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/100-years-of-womens-lives-and-writings-workshop-tickets-1003525460667
A while ago, I had the pleasure and privilege of reading One Night Only, a Doctor Who novella featuring Fela Kuti, written by Tade Thompson.
You can now read my spoiler-free review over on the blog.
https://www.julietemckenna.com/one-night-only-a-doctor-who-novella-from-tade-thompson/
Hiya everyone! I'm Noo, an Australian #indiecomics author, artist, and a refugee from #tumblr after they pulled a Deviantart!
I'll primarily be posting my #art and #writing stuff, plus the occasional shitpost.
Glad to be here, big fan of open-source, decentralised stuff, Linux and not having algorithmic content shoved down your gob.
Can't wait to meet some fellow indie comics peeps too!
Edited 1y ago
Time for September’s #WordWeavers questions!
Written by @AlinaLeonova & I, you’ll find the month’s questions pinned to our profiles on the 1st. All are welcome to join in.
Participate with a WIP or an already published book.
As always, play the days you want, skip the others. Please use CW as necessary. Looking forward to seeing your answers & meeting new friends. And a big thanks to those contributing the community questions. (below)
#amwriting #writing #authors
Google informed me that the top page on my website by clicks in their search last month was
„Top 20 Latex Fonts“
https://www.draketo.de/anderes/latex-fonts
I created that page because I wanted to find the right font for a book and figured that I could publish the results.
⇒ always write what you care about. You just can’t know which of your articles will be important to others later on.
Do you see how much the feel of the book changes with the #fonts? Baskervald, Kepler, Iwona.
Edited 6d ago
The trailer for Season 2 of the 5AM StoryTalk Podcast has dropped! I’m ridiculously proud of the guest list I’ve curated for us to try to make sense of the 21st century together – where we’ve been, where we’ve ended up, and where we’re going – all through the lens of art. Find out who’s joining me next and hear about the upgrades coming to this podcast. I'd love to have you as a listener!
#culture #art #writing #screenwriting #film #movies #books #writinglife
THEY’RE HERE! My self-care adult coloring books arrived just now. I haven’t uploaded them to my website store (yet), but if you would like one, send $9.99 USD & your address to me at $mckra1g (CashApp) or @mckra1g (Venmo). Free shipping in the U.S. (add $3.00 for intl addresses).
#art #books #SelfCare #creativity #FediGiftShop #mind #MentalHealth #writing #journal #SelfHelp
Edited 1y ago
The relentless brilliance of Muriel Spark
“I am not here to say that all a career in letters requires is tenacity and a can-do attitude, but rather that knowing the challenges Spark overcame makes me doubly grateful for her.’
Lauren J. Joseph reflects on a quality many writers have to develop – the “sheer bloody-mindedness” Spark had in spades.
https://www.rlf.org.uk/posts/the-relentless-brilliance-of-muriel-spark/
#Scottish #literature #20thcentury #womenwriters #MurielSpark #writing
What if the robot that asks you
“are you a robot?” is only trying
to find its family.
Full of Journaling Prompts and Self-Care Exercises along w/illustrated affirmations awaiting your talented flourish, this coloring book is designed to help you lower your stress, focus your intentions and expand your well-being!
Please email info@mollycantrellkraig.co for bulk orders over 50 copies for special rates.
https://mollycantrellkraig.co/product/self-care-scribbles-coloring-book/
#stressRelief #HR #coloringBooks #books #art #journaling #happiness #affirmations #LifeCoach #focus #FediGiftShop #writing #MentalHealth #manifestation
I have three new writing workshops coming up in June and July! Building on the success of Design-A-Ghost, I'd like to invite you to join me to explore some more familiar characters from #SFF and #horror by reading extracts from classic and contemporary authors together, and then using writing prompts and exercises to create your own unique monsters, aliens, and robots! 👹👽🤖
#Writing #WritingCommunity #WritersOfMastodon #AmWriting #WritingWorkshop
My personal column of essays about life and the world we live in. A bit of everything, I’m afraid. Philosophy, history, science, human behavior, and religion. Sometimes I take the long way around but it’s usually entertaining. Buy a ticket. Take the ride.
Help support the regrowth of personal websites. Consider adding my feed to your aggregator or email subscribe directly from the blog.
In return, I promise not to become a neuro-sparse psychopathic plutocrat.
What are your favorite monthly/weekly challenges?
https://challenges.stefanbohacek.dev
#challenge #challenges #MonthlyChallenge #WeeklyChallenge #ArtChallenge #writing #WritingChallenge #WritingPrompt #coding #CodingChallenge
Edited 1y ago