Hey, how did it get to be October already?

• Codex Born Cover Reveal  and Thoughts Jim C. Hines reveals the cover for Codex Born, the second book in his Magic Ex Libris series and talks about how the cover artist wasn’t able to find a truly heavy model to represent Lena. Donna and I both reviewed Libriomancer, the first book in the series, here (Donna) and here (Natalie).
• Things I will not do to my characters. Ever. Seanan McGuire talks about a really disturbing email she received from a reader who wanted to know when she was going to have her protagonists raped for character development reasons. Seriously, asshole reader? Seriously? My mind, it boggles.
• We’re All Equal Now, So We Should Shut Up and Go Home “To men fearful of feminism, equality is so tied up in their idea of their own rights to power that to share it can only mean relinquishing some of the things that they feel belong to them.”
• This link is especially for Donna. She knows why. It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers.
• The 2012 Strange Horizons Fund Drive
• Critical Reviewing in the Age of Twitter This was a panel at KidLitCon and it sounds like it was fascinating.
• Wonderful interview with Jo Walton at The Guardian If you haven’t yet read Jo Walton’s books, you should rectify that as soon as possible.
• Behind Every Good Rake… Wonderfully crunchy review of Courtney Milan’s Unclaimed, the second in her Turner series.
• This is why. “A datapoint: Why we keep having the discussion about how men act toward women in science fiction.” Leah Bobet talks about an online interview that  bracketed the questions and her responses with a fictionalized account of torture and assault. (Bobet asks that there be no shitstorm on her behalf. Please respect that.)
• A fantastic interview with Junot Díaz This interview ranges all over the place and is well worth the time to read it.
• SB Sarah reviews the Kindle Paperweightwhite I won’t be getting mine until the end of the month, woeface.
• The Occasional Writer: An Interview with Science Fiction Author Ted Chiang Vandana Singh interviews Ted Chiang. For me, this was the most thought provoking part of the interview:  “I don’t know if I would want to adopt conscious software as a pet. Part of me hopes that we never develop such a thing, because I think doing so would inevitably entail enormous suffering on the part of the software. The amount of cruelty we inflict on biological organisms doesn’t make me optimistic about how we’ll treat artificial ones.”