>>13338
Looking for Pilo Family Circus as well.
Checked usenet & IRC, but no avial...

maybe anon has it?

>>15743
> only high/middle schoolers ever talked about Harry Potter

Do you find life pleasant under that rock?

a brave new world

>>15773
I've never thought particularly fondly of the third rock off, but I do prefer the break whistle to the lunch bell and its broad scope to the fenced-in yards of a schoolground.

I wish you luck in scamming many individuals out of their money for the printing of your vanity novel. Also, 'gimme' is spelled like so. 'Gimmie' is a golf term.

If you're too clueless to pitch a book to a decent publisher or agent, that probably says a lot about the quality of your book's life advice.

Paying to publish a book you wrote is stupid. Instead, send it to reputable people, and accept that they'll almost certainly reject your book (even if you think its good). If they won't publish it, don't bother going through self or vanity publishing. Its a simple con for desperate amateurs.

>>15770
I believe that pitching non-fiction to agents/publishers lacking the appropriate background (previously published author, PHD from Yale or Harvard, famous, or you know/are the publisher's nephew) would be just as clueless as vanity publishing. This way he at least gets pity cash from friends and relatives.

>>15739
All You Zombies is particularly entertaining; one guy is his own mother, father, daughter, and recruiter for work in the time travel bureau.

>>15738
I DON'T LAUGH AT FARTS I ONLY LAUGH AT FARTS WHEN THOSE FARTS ARE IN DON QUIXOTE

The works of Tom Sharpe - They're farces that find ever more sophisticated ways to be obscene. "Wilt", for instance, features an entire chapter about a gaggle of college lecturers, arguing about what's to be done with a gang of students who fucked a crocodile.

Others include the works of Bill Bryson, and Hunter S. Thompson.

I would recommend The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert A. Heinlein, Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card, and Dune, by Frank Herbert. There seems to be a dearth of SF in this thread thus far.

>>15731
I don't think that's so horrible, considering when it comes to discussion of literature on imageboards, a solid 60% of the discussions is SCI FI SCI FI SCI FI FANTASY FANTASY FANTASY SCI FI

Not saying there's anything wrong with that, I just don't think it's so horrible that there is one thread that goes 8 posts without any science fictions recommendations.

>>15764
Not at all a terrible thing, just something to correct.

>>15755
Worth noting that it's still in beta, or at least it was the last time I checked.
For all intents and purposes it's still openoffice, though is worth using now purely out of principle.

>>15756
I do enjoy LibreOffice. It's a nice overall environment. OpenOffice is nice too. However, I prefer a more streamlined writing utility than a full-featured office suite word processor. I work with simple RTFs mainly, and I've found that I write better in a less clunky processor. Any suggestions?

I use abiword. I'm writing here to recommend that you don't use it. I switched openoffice for abiword because I needed the page number in the header, which OO didn't offer (some years back). Now I have enough abi documents to make upgrading too much work because I would have to change them all to formats that other things can read, and nothing can read the normal abi format.

So what I guess I'm trying to say is: don't use abiword.

I think if you're going to write a short story, you should get a better grip on basic grammar, sentence structure, and the English language in general.

With good writing, the most insipid of premises can be made interesting. So write it, and write it well.

If you want a story, give us a character with a goal, an obstacle, and a hook that makes it interesting.

Why does this character raise the dead? Is it incidental? What sort of resistance is the catholic church putting up? And why is this compelling in any way? We have many stories with "evil christian agencies". What's the original thing that keeps the reader invested?

Here, nevermind I did it for you.

http://archive.org/stream/ceremoniesofrom00fort#page/n7/mode/2up

Reading the first page of that, like, massaged my eyes. That was weird.

I remember spending forever looking for burial customs of the Greeks and Romans. Upon coming across that, I thought my long searching was finally over. I opened it to find that it wasn't about ancient Rome, but rather the Holy Roman Empire. I shed tears on that day.

>>15748
all are relevant to my interests, but the more difficult thing to start is finding good content on the state of the information age, all I do is lurk reddit for this and I don't know what else to do, other than write from experience.

and serial killers in fiction would be another great start, I want to make this book exciting.

For books bout serial killers, "Devil in the White City" is a pretty all right place to start-- it's about murders during the Chicago Expedition at the turn of the century.
Or Zodiac, by Robert Graysmith -- haven't read it, but the movie kicked all sorts of ass.

Annnnnnd as far as social networking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_homicide
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Island_serial_killer

>>15749
If you don't want genuine data found in textbooks (Serial Murder by Holmes was required reading for my friend's criminal justice class, and really all you have to do for decent sources is look up criminal justice curricula, so the only reason you can't find good material is because you aren't looking), then there is an entire "true crime" genre in the non-fiction area. The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers provides magnificent studies on high profile cases. For fiction, I can remember reading No Country for Old Men, Silence of the Lambs, and The Black Dahlia. The first is the only one with true literary merit. The second wasn't bad and might give one an idea or two. The third was godawful.

Reading a book about a serial killer will give you an idea about a serial killer. It won't help you understand serial killers. To do that, you have to do genuine research in the non-fiction section.

Is that a command or a declaration that you have done so?

Over the past decade, there has been a great market push of 'international' bestsellers. All that I've read have been uniformly weak. I'm done with following that trend.

dude pikachu's all jacked up