Books & Pieces: weekly roundup

World Weaver Press presents our weekly quick roundup of news and factoids, articles and more that struck our fancy, tickled our interest, and had us scratching our heads. For readers, writers, and genre fans of any form.

Wondering what to do with that extra few hundred million you’ve got? Why not use it to go on a lunar vacay? Better act fast — there are only 30 seats available on this Russian spacecraft between 2015 and 2025.

Want to go back to study what you want without the cost and without, you know, college?  Check out this free Coursera SFF college level lit class taught by University of Michigan Professor Eric Rabkin. Best part? You can take this course online! Enrollment ends later this month.

Great milestones were reached in the “official” discovery of the Higgs Boson particle earlier this month, and it only took about 6,000 physicists to do it! (And there was much rejoicing). Of course, io9 does its best to keep us all grounded with their usual, delightful dose of snark.

Game of Thrones fan? Star Wars fan? Why chose when you can have both?

Everyone has a “to read” list, and in the case of World Weaver Press, ours is ever growing. If you’re looking to add to your own, check out io9’s list of Science Fiction novels everyone pretends to have read. However these selections from AbeBook’s Weird Book Room might not be making the list, but it’s worth checking out these titles for a good laugh. Maybe you’ll even find something that sparks your interest: How To Avoid Huge Ships or An Intellectual History of Cannibalism perhaps? Or our favorite book to avoid: Crafting with Cat Hair.

Author and former agent Nathan Bransford questions the pros and cons of stripping your writing down to the bare bones. As important as it is to hold on to your reader’s attention by keeping the plot moving, is it always the best decision to do so at the cost of those extra juicy bits?  Bransford comes down on the issue with a firm stance you might not have seen coming given the article’s set up. Yet a compelling argument can be made either way. Sound off in the comments!

Did you know that 1 in 225 women and 1 in 12 men have some form of color vision deficiency? Quite a window! Find out your own range of color perception with this test. Scores range from 0 (perfect) to 99.

Since our last Books & Pieces, we announced the publication date of Shards of History by Rebecca Roland and unveiled the gorgeous cover art! Eileen Wiedbrauk brought you the latest from her Editor’s Desk and stopped by Enchanted Conversation for a guest post on Bridging Gaps and Weaving Worlds, guest blogger Elizabeth Twist shared with us her insightful opinion on horror as a genre, and Rebecca Roland ruminated on her own blog about world building in fantasy.

We closed to submissions for our upcoming anthology Specter Spectacular, Ghostly Tales. We’re working on the final lineup now and couldn’t be more excited about the quality of submissions we received. Thanks to everyone who submitted for making our decisions so difficult!

Be sure to check back here on Monday, July 16^th for another exciting announcement. We’re internally jumping up and down in anticipation till then!

For more links to interesting articles and genre related cartoons, check out World Weaver Press’s Facebook page, updated daily, or follow our Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest accounts.