RIP, Ray Bradbury: A Personal Tribute

Science-fiction legend Ray Bradbury died yesterday, as you no doubt heard. We didn’t post anything here – we were waiting for permission to repost something we saw on FaceBook – as good a tribute to the great Mr. Bradbury as we saw anywhere.

Our sincere thanks to Tom Payne in California for allowing us to share this with our readers.

The Mark Twain Century is Up

Exciting news:

“The creator of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and some of the most frequently misquoted catchphrases in the English language left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century.

That milestone has now been reached, and in November the University of California, Berkeley, where the manuscript is in a vault, will release the first volume of Mark Twain’s autobiography. The eventual trilogy will run to half a million words, and shed new light on the quintessentially American novelist.”

Dave Barry Speaks, We Listen

Every great journey begins with one little joke:

“The other thing is that I write very slowly—painfully slowly—and while yes, I really want it to look spontaneous and random, generally I’ll spend a lot of time just on the first joke, till it seems right, and then I’ll think, OK, what would be a good one to go after that. At that point I’m really not thinking about how it’s going to end or how it’s going to be structured—only about what the next joke will be. And then the next joke after that.”