The deadline for the 2011 Irreantum writing contests is this evening. I’m curious about what the rest of you are submitting. The Irreantum admins usually release how many total entries in a category, but I’d like to dig in a little deeper (but not in a way that tips your hand on exactly what you [...]

Wm says: and now more entries from the Bedlamites contest — today, two from Terrance V. Mc Arthur.
Entry 1:
“SONG OF THE BEDLAMITES
(tune: Men of Harlech)
Men of Bedlam[1] rise and holler[2]
Roll around in mud and waller[3]
Frighten off the unsought caller
Make them think you’re mad[4]
Men of Bedlam graze on grasses
Horrify the Gentile masses
Caw like crows and bray [...]

I have some more speculative, more specifically Mormon thoughts that follow up to my post about Michael Austin, useful fictions and anxiety.
Let’s assume, and I realize that not everyone is going to agree with all of the following assumptions, but assuming that the LDS worldview is correct and that God created the world as a [...]

In a post on his personal blog last week, Ben Crowder has announced that Mormon Artist will be shut down after the next issue, #16. Mormon Artist began just three years ago as an online magazine covering the arts by and for Mormons. Crowder says that the publication’s goal was to show that “there’s a [...]

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Theric: Let’s start with the history of WWJD? Where did it come from? How did you find it? How did the New Play Project production do?
Davey: WWJD was written by Anna Lewis as her BYU Creative Writing Master’s Thesis. The idea started as a poem (which will be published later this year in Dialogue), and [...]

Last week in a guest post on Dawning of a Brighter Day, Jana Riess suggested that Mormon novelists have a more difficult time getting published than those in the Christian market because Deseret Book dominates the LDS market so much. [I can't resist pointing out that I've argued the same thing here on A Motley [...]

For the complete list of columns in this series, click here.
Back when I was in college, one of the best things I ever did was join Xenobia, an sf&f writing group. It was a great experience. I didn’t do much writing back then, but the process of reading, giving critiques, and listening to other people’s [...]

Back in March I quietly removed the Amazon.com link in the sidebar, and stopped linking books in individual posts to Amazon. I have also reduced the prices on the AMV t-shirts to zero commission (or in the case of the Minerva Red and the esoteric LDS — just the commission for the designers).
I am grateful [...]

Wm says: the Bedlamites contest is over, but the fun continues as we reveal more of the submissions we received — starting with this gem from Laura.
The Ballad of the Bedlamites

by Laura Hilton Craner

The story’s told at family nite near e’ry twenty-fourth of July.
The Miller clan remembers them with ice cream and dried apple [...]

I will cop to a certain amount of pride in my dilettanteism. I will also admit that there might be some fear involved as well. And I will also say that I have been thinking for a while that it’s time to settle on something so when I listened to the very first episode of [...]

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So I certainly hope you celebrated Free Comic Book Day this first Saturday in May by tripping down to your local comic book shop and picking up some free magazines. If so, you may have seen the names of a couple Mormon creators (Orson Scott Card and Ethan Van Sciver — maybe others as well), [...]

Over at AMV’s companion blog Wilderness Interface Zone, our 6 and 1/2 weeks of Spring Poetry Runoff have finished.  The last poems have posted and voting to decide which one wins the 2011 Spring Poetry Runoff’s Most Popular Poem Award runs through Saturday, May 14th.  Participating poets, please come vote, and let your friends and [...]

Over the past few years I’ve come across statements that show a misunderstanding of the basic costs and economics that book publishers and producers face. For example, there are regular complaints about the cost of ebooks in comparison to print books, generally suggesting that publishers have priced ebooks unreasonably high. Other statements imply that traditional [...]

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If you haven’t heard about Duck Beach yet, you should hear about it now. I would like to have you watch a video first, but we’ve been having trouble with embedding them of late. If you want to watch it first, you still can, but how about let’s  interview one of the minds behind this [...]

After 20 years of writing about books written by “BYU faculty, staff, alumni, and members of BYU’s Board of Trustees,” emeritus BYU professor Richard H. Cracroft will stop writing his Book Nook column with the Summer issue of BYU Magazine.
This move ends one of the more consistent and long-term sources of information about Mormon literature, [...]

I enjoyed Michael Austin’s Useful Fictions: Evolution, Anxiety, and the Origins of Literature much more than I thought I would. It’s an excellent introduction to the field of cognitive literary studies, which is a bit trendy right now, and as with all new theories has it’s rabid proponents and frothing detractors, even more so because [...]