The novel tore my heart out in 1992: a contrafactual memoir of L Frank Baum; a desperately poor girl called Dorothy Gael from Manhattan, KS; and a makeup artist on the set of the classic MGM film.

Here's a guide to the charities the Boingers support in our own annual giving. As always, please add the causes and charities you give to in the forums!

The Interstitial Arts Foundation has launched a crowdfunding campaign for its journal Interfictions, devoted to "the weird, the interstitial, and the uncategorizable."

Here's a guide to the charities the Boingers support in our own annual giving. As always, please add the causes and charities you give to in the comments below!

Electronic Frontier Foundation
Could there be a year that's more relevant to the EFF? — Read the rest

The Clarion Writing Workshop at UC San Diego is the oldest science fiction writing workshop in the world, and it's graduated distinguished alumni from Bruce Sterling and Nalo Hokinson to Kathe Koja and Ted Chiang (and me, for the record). I'm on the board of the Clarion Foundation, the charitable 501(c)3 that oversees the workshop and fundraises to keep tuition as low as possible. — Read the rest

I ran into Kelly Link yesterday at San Diego Comic-Con and she was carrying this amazing rubber-chicken purse. It was beautifully painted, beautifully made, and looked almost exactly like she was keeping her stuff in a chicken. With handles. They're $30 and they are, well, wow. — Read the rest

I'm teaching the Clarion Science Fiction Writing Workshop this summer at UCSD La Jolla — it's an amazing writing program (I'm also a graduate), and the early application deadline is coming up:

Applications for the 2013 Clarion Workshop are now open and will remain open until March 1, 2013.

Here's a guide to the charities the Boingers support in our own annual giving. As always, please add the causes and charities you give to in the comments below!

Electronic Frontier Foundation
There's never been a time when EFF's mission was more important: everything we do today involves the Internet; everything we do tomorrow will require it. — Read the rest

I'm delighted to announce that the Humble Ebook Bundle is live! Based on the wildly successful Humble Indie Bundles for distributing video games on a name-your-price basis, the Humble Ebook Bundle is a name-your-price collection of awesome entertainment that also helps you support three great charities. — Read the rest

It's time again for Boing Boing's guide the charities we support in our annual giving. As always, please add the causes and charities you give to in the comments below!

Electronic Frontier Foundation
The EFF's mission has never been more important: as laws like SOPA are rammed through Congress, as bloggers around the world are arrested and tortured with the collusion of American network-surveillance companies, and as the FBI's unconstitutional, warrantless use of surveillance technology like GPS bugs comes to light, EFF is poised to be center-stage in the fight for a free and open world with a free and open Internet. — Read the rest

Hey, Torontonians, Ann Arborites, and New Yorkers!

I'll be giving a free talk at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto called "Can creativity and freedom peacefully co-exist in the Internet age?" on Sept 14 at 7PM, where I'll be reprising my SIGGRAPH talk from August. — Read the rest

Boing Boing's charitable giving guide has become a seasonal tradition of ours, listing the charities we personally support and want to give more attention to. As in previous years, we invite you to add your own favorite charities in the comments section. — Read the rest

I've just started podcasting a new short story, "Clockwork Fagin," which is to be published in Kelly Link and Gavin Grant's anthology of young adult steampunk for Candlewick Press. The story is about a group of children who are put in a home after being caught in the machineries of the information revolution, who kill their cruel master and replace him with a clockwork automaton. — Read the rest

On Tor.com, Jo Walton's stupendous essay on reading science fiction — one of those moments where someone says something that seems to perfectly crystallize something you've been trying to explain for years without much success:

A reviewer wanted to make the zombies in Kelly Link's "Zombie Contingency Plans" (in the collection Magic For Beginners) into metaphors.

Small Beer Press is an astoundingly good independent science fiction press run by Gavin Grant and the brilliant short story writer Kelly Link. Kelly has been in Franciscan Children's Hospital with their newborn, Ursula, having moved in after Ursula's early tenure at Ronald McDonald House following her very premature birth last February (she weighed 1 Lb, 9 oz at birth!). — Read the rest

Once again, I'm delighted to return to a Boing Boing seasonal tradition: a charitable giving guide, a list of charities we personally support and want to give more attention to. And as in previous years, we invite you to add your own favorite charities to the list in the comments section. — Read the rest

Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci's wonderful anthology of nerdy fiction and comics, Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd was a great read: the short fiction ran the gamut from soul-searing angst to high comedy and all the territory in between. Of particular note were Scott Westerfeld's "Definition Chaos" (a story about a gun-toting gamer and his nutsy ex-girlfriend transporting $80,000 by train to Florida to pay for a con's hotel deposit); Garth Nix's "The Quiet Knight" (a disabled LARPer finds his true self in boffer armor); Lisa Yee's "Everyone But You" (a baton-twirling midwesterner reinvents herself in a Hawaiian high school); Kelly Link's "Secret Identity" (the book's top piece; a novella about a girl who travels to New York to hook up with a man she met in an MMORPG, despite the fact that doing so will reveal to him that she has lied about her identity); and Libba Bray's heartbreaking "It's Just a Jump to the Left" (a girl discovers she can't escape her life at Rocky Horror)

Intercut with the stories is a series of charming one-page comics drawn by Hope Larson and Brendan Lee "Scott Pilgrim" O'Malley. — Read the rest

Now here's some cool news: Holly Black and Ellen Kushner have sold another volume of stories in the venerable and beloved Bordertown series. This was a series of linked stories and novels about a world in which the Kingdom of the Fairy returns to Earth, connected by a mystical gateway, and about the goings-on in the Bordertown that sits in between the world of humans and the world of magic, a town where technology and sorcery only work intermittently and runaways, rejects, nutcases and heroes gather. — Read the rest

The 2009 Locus Award winners for best science fiction and related books published in 08, as voted by the general public, have been announced. A good place to start your reading if you want to read some of the best stuff out there. — Read the rest

Kevin Kelly linked to a paper "co-authored by mathematician John Conway, inventor of a cellular automata demonstration known as the Game of Life, [who] argues that you can't explain the spin or decay of particles by randomness, nor are they determined, so free will is the only option left." — Read the rest