🐾 Ipso Facto! Cú Cuthach 🐾 @jmallory - Tumblr Blog

Happy Saint Swithin's Day!

...his only known miracle during his lifetime was the repair of a basket of broken eggs, dropped by a flustered lady of his parish on unexpectedly encountering the Bishop."-historic-UK.com

jmallory

A revisit!

'What? The curtains?!"

jmallory

RIP HD

jmallory

I, for one, will welcome our new Lepi Overlords

Saw this on BLUESKY and thought it was brilliant

#reflecting pool

damienhaaas

FAMOUS AUTHORS

Classic Bookshelf: This site has put classic novels online, from Charles Dickens to Charlotte Bronte.

The Online Books Page: The University of Pennsylvania hosts this book search and database.

Project Gutenberg: This famous site has over 27,000 free books online.

Page by Page Books: Find books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells, as well as speeches from George W. Bush on this site.

Classic Book Library: Genres here include historical fiction, history, science fiction, mystery, romance and children’s literature, but they’re all classics.

Classic Reader: Here you can read Shakespeare, young adult fiction and more.

Read Print: From George Orwell to Alexandre Dumas to George Eliot to Charles Darwin, this online library is stocked with the best classics.

Planet eBook: Download free classic literature titles here, from Dostoevsky to D.H. Lawrence to Joseph Conrad.

The Spectator Project: Montclair State University’s project features full-text, online versions of The Spectator and The Tatler.

Bibliomania: This site has more than 2,000 classic texts, plus study guides and reference books.

Online Library of Literature: Find full and unabridged texts of classic literature, including the Bronte sisters, Mark Twain and more.

Bartleby: Bartleby has much more than just the classics, but its collection of anthologies and other important novels made it famous.

Fiction.us: Fiction.us has a huge selection of novels, including works by Lewis Carroll, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Flaubert, George Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others.

Free Classic Literature: Find British authors like Shakespeare and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, plus other authors like Jules Verne, Mark Twain, and more.

TEXTBOOKS

Textbook Revolution: Find biology, business, engineering, mathematics and world history textbooks here.

Wikibooks: From cookbooks to the computing department, find instructional and educational materials here.

KnowThis Free Online Textbooks: Get directed to stats textbooks and more.

Online Medical Textbooks: Find books about plastic surgery, anatomy and more here.

Online Science and Math Textbooks: Access biochemistry, chemistry, aeronautics, medical manuals and other textbooks here.

MIT Open Courseware Supplemental Resources: Find free videos, textbooks and more on the subjects of mechanical engineering, mathematics, chemistry and more.

Flat World Knowledge: This innovative site has created an open college textbooks platform that will launch in January 2009.

Free Business Textbooks: Find free books to go along with accounting, economics and other business classes.

Light and Matter: Here you can access open source physics textbooks.

eMedicine: This project from WebMD is continuously updated and has articles and references on surgery, pediatrics and more.

MATH AND SCIENCE

FullBooks.com: This site has “thousands of full-text free books,” including a large amount of scientific essays and books.

Free online textbooks, lecture notes, tutorials and videos on mathematics: NYU links to several free resources for math students.

Online Mathematics Texts: Here you can find online textbooks likeElementary Linear Algebra and Complex Variables.

Science and Engineering Books for free download: These books range in topics from nanotechnology to compressible flow.

FreeScience.info: Find over 1800 math, engineering and science books here.

Free Tech Books: Computer programmers and computer science enthusiasts can find helpful books here.

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

byGosh: Find free illustrated children’s books and stories here.

Munseys: Munseys has nearly 2,000 children’s titles, plus books about religion, biographies and more.

International Children’s Digital Library: Find award-winning books and search by categories like age group, make believe books, true books or picture books.

Lookybook: Access children’s picture books here.

PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION

Bored.com: Bored.com has music ebooks, cooking ebooks, and over 150 philosophy titles and over 1,000 religion titles.

Ideology.us: Here you’ll find works by Rene Descartes, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, David Hume and others.

Free Books on Yoga, Religion and Philosophy: Recent uploads to this site include Practical Lessons in Yoga and Philosophy of Dreams.

The Sociology of Religion: Read this book by Max Weber, here.

Religion eBooks: Read books about the Bible, Christian books, and more.

PLAYS

ReadBookOnline.net: Here you can read plays by Chekhov, Thomas Hardy, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe and others.

Plays: Read Pygmalion, Uncle Vanya or The Playboy of the Western World here.

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: MIT has made available all of Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, and histories.

Plays Online: This site catalogs “all the plays [they] know about that are available in full text versions online for free.”

ProPlay: This site has children’s plays, comedies, dramas and musicals.

MODERN FICTION, FANTASY AND ROMANCE

Public Bookshelf: Find romance novels, mysteries and more.

The Internet Book Database of Fiction: This forum features fantasy and graphic novels, anime, J.K. Rowling and more.

Free Online Novels: Here you can find Christian novels, fantasy and graphic novels, adventure books, horror books and more.

Foxglove: This British site has free novels, satire and short stories.

Baen Free Library: Find books by Scott Gier, Keith Laumer and others.

The Road to Romance: This website has books by Patricia Cornwell and other romance novelists.

Get Free Ebooks: This site’s largest collection includes fiction books.

John T. Cullen: Read short stories from John T. Cullen here.

SF and Fantasy Books Online: Books here include Arabian Nights,Aesop’s Fables and more.

Free Novels Online and Free Online Cyber-Books: This list contains mostly fantasy books.

FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Project Laurens Jz Coster: Find Dutch literature here.

ATHENA Textes Francais: Search by author’s name, French books, or books written by other authors but translated into French.

Liber Liber: Download Italian books here. Browse by author, title, or subject.

Biblioteca romaneasca: Find Romanian books on this site.

Bibliolteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes: Look up authors to find a catalog of their available works on this Spanish site.

KEIMENA: This page is entirely in Greek, but if you’re looking for modern Greek literature, this is the place to access books online.

Proyecto Cervantes: Texas A&M’s Proyecto Cervantes has cataloged Cervantes’ work online.

Corpus Scriptorum Latinorum: Access many Latin texts here.

Project Runeberg: Find Scandinavian literature online here.

Italian Women Writers: This site provides information about Italian women authors and features full-text titles too.

Biblioteca Valenciana: Register to use this database of Catalan and Valencian books.

Ketab Farsi: Access literature and publications in Farsi from this site.

Afghanistan Digital Library: Powered by NYU, the Afghanistan Digital Library has works published between 1870 and 1930.

CELT: CELT stands for “the Corpus of Electronic Texts” features important historical literature and documents.

Projekt Gutenberg-DE: This easy-to-use database of German language texts lets you search by genres and author.

HISTORY AND CULTURE

LibriVox: LibriVox has a good selection of historical fiction.

The Perseus Project: Tufts’ Perseus Digital Library features titles from Ancient Rome and Greece, published in English and original languages.

Access Genealogy: Find literature about Native American history, the Scotch-Irish immigration in the 19th and 20th centuries, and more.

Free History Books: This collection features U.S. history books, including works by Paul Jennings, Sarah Morgan Dawson, Josiah Quincy and others.

Most Popular History Books: Free titles include Seven Days and Seven Nights by Alexander Szegedy and Autobiography of a Female Slave by Martha G. Browne.

RARE BOOKS

Questia: Questia has 5,000 books available for free, including rare books and classics.

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT

Books-On-Line: This large collection includes movie scripts, newer works, cookbooks and more.

Chest of Books: This site has a wide range of free books, including gardening and cooking books, home improvement books, craft and hobby books, art books and more.

Free e-Books: Find titles related to beauty and fashion, games, health, drama and more.

2020ok: Categories here include art, graphic design, performing arts, ethnic and national, careers, business and a lot more.

Free Art Books: Find artist books and art books in PDF format here.

Free Web design books: OnlineComputerBooks.com directs you to free web design books.

Free Music Books: Find sheet music, lyrics and books about music here.

Free Fashion Books: Costume and fashion books are linked to the Google Books page.

MYSTERY

MysteryNet: Read free short mystery stories on this site.

TopMystery.com: Read books by Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, GK Chesterton and other mystery writers here.

Mystery Books: Read books by Sue Grafton and others.

POETRY

The Literature Network: This site features forums, a copy of The King James Bible, and over 3,000 short stories and poems.

Poetry: This list includes “The Raven,” “O Captain! My Captain!” and “The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde.”

Poem Hunter: Find free poems, lyrics and quotations on this site.

Famous Poetry Online: Read limericks, love poetry, and poems by Robert Browning, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Lord Byron and others.

Google Poetry: Google Books has a large selection of poetry, fromThe Canterbury Tales to Beowulf to Walt Whitman.

QuotesandPoem.com: Read poems by Maya Angelou, William Blake, Sylvia Plath and more.

CompleteClassics.com: Rudyard Kipling, Allen Ginsberg and Alfred Lord Tennyson are all featured here.

PinkPoem.com: On this site, you can download free poetry ebooks.

MISC

Banned Books: Here you can follow links of banned books to their full text online.

World eBook Library: This monstrous collection includes classics, encyclopedias, children’s books and a lot more.

DailyLit: DailyLit has everything from Moby Dick to the recent phenomenon, Skinny Bitch.

A Celebration of Women Writers: The University of Pennsylvania’s page for women writers includes Newbery winners.

Free Online Novels: These novels are fully online and range from romance to religious fiction to historical fiction.

ManyBooks.net: Download mysteries and other books for your iPhone or eBook reader here.

Authorama: Books here are pulled from Google Books and more. You’ll find history books, novels and more.

Prize-winning books online: Use this directory to connect to full-text copies of Newbery winners, Nobel Prize winners and Pulitzer winners.

science-junkie

… and here is a gift for all of us.

goddess47

So I can find this again! Great list!

clairificusrex

Don’t lose this post

jmallory

I haven't had time to check out all of the links. So far most I have checked do work and it is great.

#cartoon #comic #Cú Cuthach #a day at the beach #fishapods #tiktaalik #ipso facto

#cartoon #comic #bears #bearcon #jeremy allen white #the bear #Cú Cuthach #ipso facto

#cartoon #comic #tumblr crabs #Cú Cuthach #tumblr art #UPS delivery to tumblr #Ipso Facto

dduane

What's a cover letter actually for? I'm not asking for the usual tips and tricks on how to make one; I'm more confused about what people are doing with them on the other end. How long does someone spend with one? What are they using it to determine? Is it preparing them for how to read the story, or is it filling in for parts of it so they can read through it faster? (I mean, yes, I don't want to write them. But I also want to know why someone wants/needs them on the other end. The tips and tricks never seem to convey much of that.)

Okay; let's start with the very basics, then move on to what you're curious about.

What I was taught about this (and I have a memory of my agent nodding with approval when he heard it) was as follows:

All your cover letter needs to do is announce to your intended recipient who you are and what you're enclosing with the letter, with the very VERY briefest description of the contents of the enclosure itself... and then to express the hope that your intended reader at that agency will enjoy it.

Job done. Sign it and send everything off. That is all you need, and all that anybody at the agency end wants to see. Your brief description of what you're submitting will let them know how to move forward from there.

We'll come back to the "what are they getting out of this?" issue momentarily. But let me touch on a couple of small but important details here:

Don't just send a letter to an agency or a publisher. Find the name of the specific person you want to be sending it to. (And one of the pages I'll recommend to you [and everybody else] in a bit begs you to spell their name correctly. You'd think this would be a small thing that everybody would get right, but... no. )

And also: Carefully read the agent's or agency's or publisher's page about what kind of material they're looking for (and what they're not looking for). Sometimes they'll even tell you exactly what they want to see in a cover letter. Ignore such instructions at your peril.

That goes to the heart of the "what's all this for?" question. And the simplest answer is:

It's a test.

The way you handle your cover letter helps the agent determine whether you're likely to be worth the time they may be about to spend dealing with you.

Agents are a very specific type of creative (many of them are also writers: mine certainly is...) and they have the same dread of wasting time that all the rest of us have. The way you handle a cover letter reveals to them some very basic things about you that will affect whether an agent or publisher wants to deal with you any further.

Think of the cover letter's part in this evaluation process as your reaction to being presented with an entry-level sieve featuring pretty wide holes. If you can't make it through those holes, you may well be deemed to not be worth the agent's time. The cover letter is your chance to demonstrate whether you can make it through the initial (and easiest) level of the sieve.

And the most important of the issues your potential agent is "sieving for" may simply be this:

Can you follow instructions / directions?

Publishing is full of situations that have to proceed/unfold in a certain way, or in a certain order, to succeed. Your cover letter—how it looks, how it's addressed, what it contains, what comes with it—will give your potential agent, publisher or editor a vital initial sense of where you fall on the following-directions spectrum. For example:

Have you actually read the agency's or agent's info on what they're looking for? (Because if your cover letter makes it plain that you haven't, or if you've responded as if you haven't, you're already in trouble. This may involve genre-based limitations (don't want SF or mystery, do want romance, don't want a specific kind of fantasy the field's glutted with at the moment, etc etc...). Or it may involve something length-oriented or structural. Is your correspondent asking for, let's say, a specific kind of "partial"—three chapters and an outline used to be typical—but you've sent them a whole novel instead? Uh oh. Not good.

Does the tone or content of your cover letter suggest that you think you're the next [fill in the name of currently-hot writer]? Calmly-expressed self-confidence is one thing: overexcited declarations of your fabulous talent are something else. Come across as any kind of a prima donna, and you may invoke a bout of agentic eyerolling that will deep-six your chances.

So even in so short a thing as the introductory part of a cover letter should be, tone is an issue. And now comes the next layer of the sieve. where the hole you have to sslip through gets significantly smaller.

Does your very, VERY brief description of your enclosure make your letter-reader more interested in reading it, or less?

This is where stuff gets tough, and where even the most experienced of us could well spend hours laboring over a single paragraph. I'm sitting here thinking "How can I concentrate into a single paragraph the necessary information about a single book that will create enough interest, both in the content and in my voice, to make someone want to read it who'd never heard of me before?" ...And the concept unquestionably me break out in a sweat. Because this isn't easy to do... and is still so revealing, even if the writer doesn't pull it off.

With all the above in mind, the answer to the question "How long will they spend with my cover letter?" is, "Only as much time as it takes to work out whether you've passed the test or flunked it."

...So let me play a hand of this game. Here's a cover letter.

That looks straightforward enough, yeah? For something written in about ten minutes, it's not too bad. It accurately sums up the novel in not too many words (84, I think, for that one long paragraph), the tone is quirky but otherwise neutral, and hopefully leaves the reader thinking "Okay, what happens next?"

...It is, however, a definite fail on one minor and one major count.

The minor one is that the author (perhaps obsessing over lamb recipes again...) has neglected to mention her email address or phone number in the cover letter. ALWAYS let your correspondent have email / phone contact info for you in your cover letter document, and on the cover page of the PDF of the work you're submitting. Addresses and contact info do get lost in busy agencies. It lies with you to make sure that doesn't happen to your query, by providing contact info in every appropriate place that you can. The appearance of a letter without this basic necessary info could very well get the query immediately tossed without a second thought: who needs the extra effort involved in tracking down this person's mail info? Honestly.

More to the point, though, when reading the agent''s own info page at their website, you need to make sure that person is actually accepting queries... and Don's page expressly and explicitly says that for the last year, he's "permanently closed to queries except by referral or invitation." So egregious a Failure To Read And/Or Follow Instructions is almost certainly going to get that query tossed. (shrug) Them's the breaks. Hopefully next time this author'll be more careful.

So the best advice about cover letters is: slow down, take your time, don't leave out anything important. And polish that sentence or two of description of your work until it shines... because it will do 90% of that letter's work.

...Now let me add a couple of links to good pages that deal with other points.

"The Perfect Cover Letter" at JaneFriedman.com

The Perfect Covering Letter with Literary Agent Simon Trewin

...In any case: hope this has been some help. :)

jmallory

Some useful info!