Author: Marion Deeds

Not this day in history: On September 21, 1947, Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine. King’s father left the family when King was two, and his mother raised him and his older brother by herself. In 1973, while he was teaching at Hamden Academy in Maine, King sold a horror novel about a telekinetic high school girl who was a social outcast. The book was called Carrie. Since then, he has published 54 novels, nearly 200 short stories and six non-fiction works. He’s given us vampires, haunted hotels,  space aliens,

This week’s word for Wednesday is “taradiddle,” meaning a petty lie or a bunch of pretentious nonsense. According to the Oxford Dictionary, it came into use in the late 18th century.

Jay Maynard started a long conversation on Black Gate this week when he brainstormed a new award that would honor “good stories.” The devil, as they say, is in the details. During a heated back-and-forth, Catherynne Valente suddenly conceived of an award that actually celebrates aspects of storytelling. Like the MTV Movie Awards, Valente’s as-yet-unnamed award would not be given for a specific work but a story-telling aspect of that work;

On this date in 1839, Sir John Herschel took the first glass plate photograph. Herschel, a botanist and astronomer, also experimented with photography and is credited with inventing the cyanotype process that is now used in blue-printing. The British say that he also coined the phrase “photography,” but the French dispute that.

Also on this date in 1543, Mary Stuart, who was nine months old, was crowned “Queen of Scots,” in Stirling, Scotland. This was arguably the most successful moment in her career as a queen.

Fellowship:

The University of Oregon Center for the Study of Women in Society is offering the Ursula K LeGuin Fellowship.

Last week, August 26, was Katherine Johnson’s birthday. Johnson was born in 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. She excelled at math from childhood, and eventually found a job with NASA. Johnson’s job was to calculate the routes for the USA’s manned space missions, including 1969’s lunar landing. In the 1950s, in her work at Langley Research Labs (which later became part of NASA), Johnson’s job title was actually “computer.” These short films show Johnson talking about her life in her own words.

Awards:

Really, there’s more? Yes. Locus Magazine devoted a paragraph or two to the Alfie Awards,