Friday linky goodness

gamera_spinning has a double-barrel shotgun blast of Star Trek-related amusement on his LJ today. Here we have one hell of a Photoshop job. Fair warning, if you're also a Star Wars fan, you may find yourself going "aaaaaaaah!" ;) Me, I am simultaneously amused and appalled. And kind of grinning, because I can vaguely sort of see that in some mutant alternate crossover universe, what's in that picture might actually happen. I am way, way more appalled by this word of the next Trek flick.

In other news, I must also bring you this kitten pile pic courtesy of cuteoverload.

I've picked up Click Here For Murder by donna_andrews and Pride and Prescience by Carrie Bebris (despite the huge fluffiness of Suspense and Suspensibility, I did actually kind of enjoy it, so I wanted to go back and read the first one). But I'm not reading any new paperbacks till I finish my sweep through lyonesse's book, which I hope to finish up some time this weekend. Once I do that, though, naominovik's Throne of Jade is probably going to shove aside all other contenders. Because it's coming out Very Soon, and after the joyful squee of His Majesty's Dragon (which included a preview chapter for Throne of Jade), I have got to have the next book. :D

(The writer in me wonders if Novik wrote all three of her series' books back to back, since Del Rey is plunking them out very close together... HMD came out at the tail end of March, we're getting ToJ very soon now, and the third one, Black Powder War, is due out at the end of May!)

Lastly, rumor has it I may be working this weekend. Oh joy oh glee! But the good parts of this are that the busses that get me downtown during the week do run on pretty much the same schedule on Saturday, so I can still get down here without having to drive. Also, overtime utterly Fails to Suck. (Though I did also mention to my lead that my weekends are my biggest writing time, so I would prefer to give him either Saturday or Sunday, but not both. We'll see what happens on Saturday and whether Sunday is also required.)

Wednesday evening miles: 2.4
Thursday miles: 3.45
Friday morning miles: 1.6
Miles out of Hobbiton: 897.1
Miles out of Rivendell: 439.1
Miles to Lothlórien: 24.9

Today's lesson: Write your own query letters

Recently I've seen a rash of blog posts from various agents talking about a flood of pretty much identical query letters hitting their agencies. These letters all seem to follow the same template, come across as overly familiar, and completely ignore the golden rule that if an author wants to query an agent, she should damn well read that agent's webpage or do appropriate other research to find out how an agent wishes to receive submissions. I've seen quite a bit of speculation about whether the letters come out of a query-letter-generating script of some sort, or whether someone has set up a "service" that offers to bombard agents all over the place with the same form letter about your novel.

But regardless of how the letters are getting generated, they are getting universally panned as Bad Ideas. Long story short: write your own query letter. It's difficult, it's annoying, but in the long run, it's just wiser.

Kristen Nelson rants about it here, agentobscura here, and the redoubtable miss_snark here.

(x-posted between my journal and scuzzboppers)