Beware the Ides of March. Um, OK.

Wanna hear something kinda creepy? I've been reading this book by Matt Ruff called Fool On The Hill for awhile now and I just finished it this morning. The book is like a pleasant windy dream and I recommend it to anyone who has a taste for fantasy mixing in with the real world. That's not the creepy part. The creepy part is that the final section of the book (Part IV) is called "The Ides of March". Hot dog! Guess what today is?

If you haven't clicked on the link for The Ides of March above, let me briefly explain to you that today, March 15th, was the day when Julius Caeser was assasinated in 44 B.C. Huh, that was pretty brief. Click on a link for more.

Actually, "creepy" was a bad word choice. I should have said "cosmic". I had read Fool before, but forgot that it ended on The Ides of March. As I was reading, I had also forgot that today was the very day that the story came to a climax. Fantasy and reality intertwined yet again. Creepy... I mean, cosmic. Yah!

Hail Caeser! - I somehow managed to get through this whole post without mentioning Shakespeare! Well... until now anyway. Shakespeare's play, Julius Caeser, details the conspiracy and murder of the Roman dictator. Interested? You can read the play here.

Thanks to Gus Kihn, a 7th grade student in Chesterfield, Missouri who sent us the drawing below. In case you can't tell, it says "I love writing. I love the way it lets me peek into new worlds."

Amen, brother.

Starting today, The Slate (a web site devoted to news, the arts, politics, health, sports, food, and pretty much anything they feel like writing about at any given moment) will be host to a new, exciting venture in novel writing. Walter Kirn, author of the 1999 smash hit Thumbsucker, is going to be writing a new novel called The Unbinding, and it will be written exclusively for the web and take place in real time.

According to the article on Slate, The Unbinding is "a dark comedy set in the near future, [it] is a compilation of "found documents"--online diary entries, e-mails, surveillance reports, etc. It will make use of the Internet's unique capacity to respond to events as they happen, linking to documents and other Web sites. In other words, The Unbinding is conceived for the Web, rather than adapted to it."

Sounds like quite an interctive story! As of 10:58 this morning, the beginning of the novel has yet to be posted. Actually, scratch that, they just posted it! To read the first installment of The Unbinding, click here.

The novel will be updated roughly two times a week from now through the month of June.

Happy reading!

Later this month, the editors of Writing will be interviewing the phenomenal fantasy author Ursula K. LeGuin for an upcoming issue.

Have you read The Earthsea Cycle series, Gifts, or any of her other books? Do you have a question for the author about one of her books? Are you curious about her writing influences? Do you wish she could give you a specific piece
of writing advice? 

 Submit your question(s) for her to us by March 19. We'll add the top five questions to our list and mention your name in our September 2006 issue!

PS: Ursula K. LeGuin will be a guest judge for our 2006 Writing contest. Stay tuned for details in April!