The Writing Wire for 10/27

All the news that's worth linking to:

• R.I.P. Tony Hillerman.

• The Onion AV Club on the many kinds of vampires on television and in movies.

• The Miami Herald's Between the Covers book blog asks: Should critics be required to read the entire book? Um, yeah...

• The L.A. Times Jacket Copy blog on an unlikely bestseller. And it involves cats.

• Rolling Stone has a sneak peek at Cobain Unseen, a new bio of the late singer.

• PoeWar explains how to build better conflict when writing a novel.

• Advertising Age says what we've all been thinking: Twitter sucks and should die.

• New York Magazine's Vulture blog discusses the trailer to Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino.

• io9 on sci-fi writers' posthumous works.

• And, in what is becoming a strange tradition here at TWW, we close out with some zombie news: PopMatters on the zombie phenomenon, and io9 posts pictures from Pittsburgh's Zombie Fest. Scary.

How does this stuff get published?

Every year, the Bulwer-Lytton Awards recognize horrible first sentences in novels. Over at io9, the sci-fi blog points out that the winner sounds strangely similar to another, painfully bad first sentence. You decide:

Joe Schulman won the Bulwer-Lytton in science fiction for this stinker:

Timothy Hanson, Commander of the 43rd Space Regiment in the 52nd Battalion on board the USAOPAC (United Space Alliance Of Planets Attack Carrier) and second in command to Admiral L. R. Morris of the USAOP Space Command, awoke early for breakfast.

Meanwhile, David Sherman & Dan Cragg's novel Starfist: Wings of Hell, forthcoming from Del Rey in December, begins with this line:

Captain Lew Conorado, the commander of Company L of the infantry battalion of Thirty-fourth Fleet Initial Strike Team, settled into the chair behind the desk in his office and sighed.

I don't know about you guys, but I'd definitely read something titled Starfist: Wings of Hell. How could you not?