Writing Links Worth The Effort



  • Politics, celebrity gossip, business headlines, tech punditry, odd news, and user-generated content.

    These are the chew toys that have made me sad and tired and cynical.

    Each, in its own way, contributes to the imperative that we constantly expand our portfolio of shallow but strongly-held opinions about nearly everything. Then we’re supposed to post something about it. Somewhere.



  •  “Here is the prime condition of success, the great secret. Concentrate your energy, thought and capital exclusively upon the business in which you are engaged. Having begun in one line, resolve to fight it out on that line, to lead in it: adopt every improvement, have the best machinery, and know the most about it. This is the great secret…” Andrew Carnegie


  • No, I write entirely for myself and as I feel at that particular time, because obviously I'm changing the whole time, my moods change, my view of life changes, and so I write, I sit down, and virtually tell myself a story—I write it for myself.



  • What happened to our magnetic north? on the decline of the avant garde

    Phil Sheridan offers a new point of view on the music industry. He rehearses the things the music press has always said about the music industry; that it is tone-def, greedy, payola ridden, crass, manipulative, and exploitative.

    And then he offers this stunning change of heart:


    "we owe the vile and disgusting record industry a lot more than it's popular to admit.  ...  [T]here is a certain value in having a structure in place that more or less served to discover and develop talented music artists."

     

    I guess this was foreseeable.  In an era of plenitude and the long tail, of a music scene with literally hundreds of musical forms and millions of musical producers, the very structure of "music world" has changed.  Where once there were the studios who played bank and gatekeeper (supplying capital in exchange for the right to choose) now we live in a world with millions of acts and tracks.  In this windstorm of creative possibility, the old regime looks a little less draconian.

     

    SOURCE: http://www.cultureby.com/trilogy/2008/08/the-decline-of.html



  • Carol writes both fiction and travel writing.
    SOURCE: http://carolcallicotte.com/



  • it all starts with that one great piece that announces to the world why they should care that you exist. Your first job is to create your calling card. Your second job is to in some way fulfill its promise. I think any smart discussion of how to have a career in the arts has to start there.
     


  • The web presents us with unprecedented abundance. This can lead to interrupt-driven info-snacking, which robs people of the ability to find time to think about just one thing persistently.

    SOURCE: Why Abundance is Good: A Reply to Nick Carr | Britannica Blog



  • Jeremiah Owyang discusses how web tools and social media enable companies to connect with customers.
     


  • It makes no effort to seize the reader's attention. It assumes, rather, that the reader has taken the risk of extending his attention unsolicited, almost as a gift, which the novelist will do his best to repay by the quiet and steady work of elaborating a world and the way that one character sees it.

    The internet is inhospitable to that kind of quietness. If your browser were to happen on such a page, your eyes would likely go blank with impatience. Who is this guy? Why aren't there any links? And, more damningly, Is anyone else reading this? A text on the internet rarely takes for granted your decision to read it or to continue reading it. There is often, instead, a jazzy, hectoring tone.



  • The fact that Hitchcock was able to orchestrate the responses of so many different brain regions, turning them on and off at the same time across all viewers, may provide neuroscientific evidence for his notoriously famous ability to master and manipulate viewers' minds. Hitchcock often liked to tell interviewers that for him 'creation is based on an exact science of audience reactions.'



  • Though I am not always happy with what I write every day, I keep pushing through until I am. I try to see myself as a technician, as a craftsman. The minute you think of yourself as an artist, you’re done. You are absolute toast. You are all those people you swore you would never become. Yes, I believe in magic. Yes, there is a divine spark -- things appear on the screen; I don’t know where the hell they come from. But the moment after the inspiration, the moment after the magic, the miracle, the moment after that, the moment after I take a split second to marvel, I get my sorry ass to work. I get to sweating. The inspiration, like they say, must be followed by the perspiration. The thoughts and ideas may come from the ether, but as soon as they do, the task is clear: To render them into precise and evocative prose. To honor the appearance of blessed magic with heroic effort. I can not imagine how people wrote with quill pens. I have rarely ever scratched out a perfect sentence the first time. To me, writing is rewriting. Each sentence is slowly and carefully constructed and deconstructed, visited and revisited -- cursor left, cursor right, home, end, insert, delete, backspace erase (my favorite key, often the first to wear out on my keyboard, that or the letter e). Likewise each paragraph, each section, each chapter -- until the sound and the feel and the imagery and the pacing and the logic is just right. Then I go over everything one more time, just to be sure. Later I’ll print it out and edit with a pen. Key in the changes; one more read.



  • Today, I try to take to heart something Ezra Pound once wrote, "Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree." The utmost possible degree is pretty ambitious. I am exceedingly impatient and my teeth start to sweat when working out questions of "meaning," but it's true: You shouldn't waste a lot of time peppering your narrative with poignant imagery if it doesn't mean something.



  • Here lies a gold mine of author interviews via Esquire: http://www.esquire.com/sitemap/section_630_misc


  • The way to be interesting is to be interested. You’ve got to find what’s interesting in everything, you’ve got to be good at noticing things, you’ve got to be good at listening. If you find people (and things) interesting, they’ll find you interesting.

    Interesting people are good at sharing. You can’t be interested in someone who won’t tell you anything. Being good at sharing is not the same as talking and talking and talking. It means you share your ideas, you let people play with them and you’re good at talking about them without having to talk about yourself.

    SOURCE: russell davies: how to be interesting



  • The first of my questions on the topic was lengthy and detailed: “Donald,” I asked, “when you receive a manuscript or query that impresses you, when you’re seriously considering taking someone on as client, do you google them? If you do, and they have a blog, a myspace, a website, if they already demonstrate the ability and willingness to self-promote, if they already have that publicity machinery in place by the time they query, does that make a potential client more appealing? Does any of that factor into your decision making process?”

    Donald sat patiently listening, taking it all in, and when I was done, he said, “I don’t give a rat’s ASS about ANY of that!”


  • I never correct anything and I never go back to what I have written, except to the foot of the last page to see where I have got to. If you once look back, you are lost. How could you have written this drivel? How could you have used "terrible" six times on one page? And so forth. If you interrupt the writing of fast narrative with too much introspection and self-criticism, you will be lucky if you write 500 words a day and you will be disgusted with them into the bargain. By following my formula, you write 2,000 words a day and you aren't disgusted with them until the book is finished, which will be in about six weeks.

    I don't even pause from writing to choose the right word or to verify spelling or a fact. All this can be done when your book is finished.


  • But, failing a hideaway such as I possess, I can recommend hotel bedrooms as far removed from your usual "life" as possible. Your anonymity in these drab surroundings and your lack of friends and distractions will create a vacuum which should force you into a writing mood and, if your pocket is shallow, into a mood which will also make you write fast and with application. I do it all on the typewriter, using six fingers. The act of typing is far less exhausting than the act of writing, and you end up with a more or less clean manuscript The next essential is to keep strictly to a routine.


    I write for about three hours in the morning - from about 9:30 till 12:30and I do another hour's work between six and seven in the evening. At the end of this I reward myself by numbering the pages and putting them away in a spring-back folder. The whole of this four hours of daily work is devoted to writing narrative.


  • Having assimilated all this encouraging advice, your heart will nevertheless quail at the physical effort involved in writing even a thriller. I warmly sympathise with you. I too, am lazy My heart sinks when I contemplate the two or three hundred virgin sheets of foolscap I have to besmirch with more or less well chosen words in order to produce a 60,000 word book.

    One of the essentials is to create a vacuum in my life which can only be satisfactorily filled by some form of creative work - whether it be writing, painting, sculpting, composing or just building a boat - I was about to get married - a prospect which filled me with terror and mental fidget. To give my hands something to do, and as an antibody to my qualms about the marriage state after 43 years as a bachelor, I decided one day to damned well sit down and write a book.

    The therapy was successful. And while I still do a certain amount of writing in the midst of my London Life, it is on my annual visits to Jamaica that all my books have been written.


  •  He still writes as he always has, from 9 to 6, on an unlined yellow pad, then typing up a scene when he likes it. He never has an outline. He thinks of, say, "two guys in a room, talking," usually about some criminal endeavor, and lets them "audition" for leading roles. He shapes them by intense research -- in 1978, he hung out with the Detroit police's homicide squad, an experience that shaped the rest of his writing -- and then lets them wander deeper into trouble. If any passage sounds like "writing," he rewrites it. This nets two to four pages a day. The next morning, he'll read over those pages and "add cigarettes and drinks and things like that" and press forward.

    SOURCE: A Blast of Bullets - washingtonpost.com



  •  "I'm doing exactly what I want to do. There is no better situation. I sit and look out the window when I'm writing away; I look out, and I don't believe it. I'm sitting here all by myself, doing this story, getting all excited about it and getting paid for it -- a lot of money. I'm not bending to a certain commercial way to fit a commercial need. I can't do that. I have to do it my way, and thank God, it's salable."

    SOURCE: A Blast of Bullets - washingtonpost.com



  • I remember when computers were, for me at least, exclusively for work. I might occasionally dial up a server to get mail or ftp files, but most of the time I was offline. All I could do was write and program. Now I feel as if someone snuck a television onto my desk. Terribly addictive things are just a click away. Run into an obstacle in what you're working on? Hmm, I wonder what's new online. Better check.


  • You can’t fake passion. You can fake the orgasm itself, but not the juice behind the orgasm

    If you love something, feel it deep, you know that sense, the feeling that it is either there or not there. You feel it in yourself, you feel it when you are appreciating it in someone else.

    It cannot be faked or pretended.

    But that doesn’t mean you have to be feeling it in the moment to be able to make others feel it.

    The ability to evoke a passionate response starts with having that passion yourself, yes, I believe that, but it doesn’t require that you always be in the throws when you’re at work.

    This is where discipline comes in.

    Consistent and constant practice of your trade or art, whatever it is that you are passionate about, can help you to develop the ability to execute at a high level.

    SOURCE: Pulpnoir.com » Passion for $100



  • 2008 Podcast Schedule

    The following is a preliminary schedule of the events we plan to record and podcast. We will begin to publish these podcast episodes at the rate of one per day after the show is over.

    THURSDAY

    Crowdsourcing: How the Power of the Crowd will Drive the Future of Publishing
    RIP DRM: how Publishers Should Adapt to New Digital Channels
    Scaling the new Economies: In Search of Book Publishing’s 2.0 Business Model
    The Website Traffic Wake-Up Call: Amplifying your Competitive Online
    Teaching Some Old Publishing Dogs Some New Digital Tricks



  • 2008 Podcast Schedule

    The following is a preliminary schedule of the events we plan to record and podcast. We will begin to publish these podcast episodes at the rate of one per day after the show is over.

    THURSDAY

    Crowdsourcing: How the Power of the Crowd will Drive the Future of Publishing
    RIP DRM: how Publishers Should Adapt to New Digital Channels
    Scaling the new Economies: In Search of Book Publishing’s 2.0 Business Model
    The Website Traffic Wake-Up Call: Amplifying your Competitive Online
    Teaching Some Old Publishing Dogs Some New Digital Tricks

    SOURCE: BookExpoCast » 2008 Podcast Schedule



  • 2008 Podcast Schedule

    The following is a preliminary schedule of the events we plan to record and podcast. We will begin to publish these podcast episodes at the rate of one per day after the show is over.

    THURSDAY

    Crowdsourcing: How the Power of the Crowd will Drive the Future of Publishing
    RIP DRM: how Publishers Should Adapt to New Digital Channels
    Scaling the new Economies: In Search of Book Publishing’s 2.0 Business Model
    The Website Traffic Wake-Up Call: Amplifying your Competitive Online
    Teaching Some Old Publishing Dogs Some New Digital Tricks



Not As Fresh, Still Relevant

  • “How to ask for a book review I made a post a while back on how not to talk to book reviewers. Now here’s one on how you should. (I’ve written about this before, but it never hurts to repeat.) 1. Know who the reviewer is. If you don’t know who you’re asking for a review, then why are you writing to them?”

    - SOURCE: Crime Fiction Dossier: How to ask for a book review


  • “The first step in clearing your head is to realize how far you are from a neutral observer. When I left high school I was, I thought, a complete skeptic. I’d realized high school was crap. I thought I was ready to question everything I knew. But among the many other things I was ignorant of was how much debris there already was in my head. It’s not enough to consider your mind a blank slate. You have to consciously erase it.”

    - SOURCE: Lies We Tell Kids


  • “I don’t blog or Facebook. If I want to write, I’d rather do it to some kind of definable end.”

    - SOURCE: The Web Habits of Highly Effective People - Online Only - Welcome to the magazine of new writing


  • “Two years after telling the world he was finished with writing, Gabriel Garcia Márquez has rediscovered his muse. The Nobel prizewinner is giving the final touches to “a novel of love”, according to a friend.”

    - Magic triumphs over realism for Garcia Márquez | News | guardian.co.uk Books


  • “BT: Did you find the act of writing cathartic? JK: Well, I think I will eventually. It wasn’t at the time, it was just hard and very painful. It’s not the way I usually write. I write long hours, but I’m really slow and I suffer writer’s block. I work on a single sentence sometimes for two or three days. I didn’t have that luxury this time, but that was good. I couldn’t fuck around with it too much, it was just ‘get it down and get it down fast.’ I had 80 or 90 days of writing and there were about 88,000 words in the book, so there was sort of like this quota. I knew I had to do about a thousand words a day, and I was a basket case by the end.”

    - SOURCE: Bold Type: Interview with Jon Krakauer


  • “I had a big notebook that I wrote in every morning and night in the mess tent, recording what I observed. And I had these little reporter’s notebooks I took up the mountain, and every time I stopped to rest or take drink of water, as a matter of discipline I’d take it out of my breast pocket and write. I had one of those space pens that writes well below zero, and they work. I sort of take notes the way photographers take photos. You just sort of scattershot, record everything, because you never know what’s going to prove invaluable when you get back down. And I don’t worry about how the story’s going and try to fit it in, I try to just record it, because if you’re prejudiced and you’re looking for a certain quote or something, you’re going to miss the stuff that’s going to prove to be important.”

    - SOURCE: Bold Type: Interview with Jon Krakauer


  • “The writing is dangerous because we ask the writer to go to the sore place and investigate what makes it sore. We ask “What bewilders you?” What astonishes you” “What would you write to an audience that was about to die?” It is really a wonderful process that calls bullshit on a lot of writing you read nowadays. If you go to a place inside you where you have fear, and if you acknowledge that fear and continue to investigate the fear—that willingness to dwell in what Keats called “the negative capability”—(the chaos where you do not know)—by dwelling in uncharted personal territory, and continuing your investigation, you will make cosmos out of chaos. That journey—making cosmos out of chaos, will be palpable in your sentences.”

    - SOURCE: Tom Spanbauer | The Cult
     


  • “I’ve never been “blocked” in large part because I’ve never called it that, and have never allowed my brain to get hung up on that idea. You just don’t want to make the whole thing into a fucking test. Don’t have an adversarial relationship with your own creativity.”

    - SOURCE: Steve Erickson | The Cult [JJ: Again, if it isn’t fun, then why do it? Easy to say, hard to remember.]


  • “Even when we started Google, we thought, “Oh, we might fail,” and we almost didn’t do it. The reason we started is that Stanford said, “You guys can come back and finish your Ph.D.s if you don’t succeed.” Probably that one decision caused Google to be created. It’s not clear we would have done it otherwise. We had all this internal risk we had just invented. It’s not that we were going to starve or not get jobs or not have a good life or whatever, but you have this fear of failing and of doing something new, which is very natural. In order to do stuff that matters, you need to overcome that.”

    - SOURCE: Larry Page on how to change the world - Apr. 30, 2008 [JJ: This has a lot of application beyond merely entrepreneurism…]


  • 50 Awesome Open Source Resources for Online Writers


  • “a checklist Wozniak wrote a few years ago describing how to become a genius. His advice was straightforward yet strangely terrible: You must clarify your goals, gain knowledge through spaced repetition, preserve health, work steadily, minimize stress, refuse interruption, and never resist sleep when tired. This should lead to radically improved intelligence and creativity. The only cost: turning your back on every convention of social life.”

    - SOURCE: Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm [JJ: Cool article for people who like to learn.]


  • “So to review, here’s what I’m including in my definition of “professional”: [1] Presentation, a.k.a. “Giving a shit” [2] Accuracy [3] Consistency [4] Accountability [5] Peer standards.”

    - SOURCE: johnaugust.com » Professional Writing and the Rise of the Amateur [JJ: It’s worth reading the whole aricle.]


  • “The problem seemed obvious to me - the dialogue was about love, the scene was about falling in love, and the purpose of the scene was to show them falling in love. Too much love! That SCENE is one the nose - obvious, plain, too straightforward. Buy The Video! If you’re looking for a good example of how to write a scene like this check out some of the Princess Leia and Han Solo scenes from THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. The scenes that show them fall in love are chase scenes, action scenes, and fight scenes. The first scene with the couple is all about Han leaving, but Leia wants him to stay because he’s a good pilot. When Han suggests maybe she has a crush on him, she insists there isn’t an ounce of attraction between them, and calls him “scruffy”. At no time does either say they are in love - but we can read between the lines. You want a Han & Leia love scene? Here’s a great example: They have taken the Millennium Falcon inside an asteroid cave to avoid enemy ships… and the cave begins to move! Leia is knocked against Han, who holds her steady as everything shakes. When the shaking is over she demands that he let go of her and they go back to their bickering… but for a moment, there, they were depending on each other. The first time they kiss? The scene is about repairing the Millennium Falcon! Han and Leia are working on this ship, she hurts her hand, he starts massaging it, she tells him to let go because her hands are dirty, he says his hands are dirty, too… and they kiss. No mention of love or attraction - all the dialogue is about dirty hands! There isn’t a single scene in the film that is ABOUT them being in love - the love story happens in action scenes. Not a single On The Nose scene!”

    - SOURCE: Screenwriting Tip Of The Day by William C. Martell - On The Nose Scenes [JJ: Timely advice given the nightmarishly long dialogue scene I’m working on right now.]


  • “I just like writing dialogue. Many writers, myself included, often suffer from the malady of feeling like they didn’t explain enough, and so write stuff that the reader has already figured out. We’re not secure enough to know that it’s gotten across. At this time, I really try to will myself to pare down, pare down, pare down, and trust that a lot more is getting communicated through less than I ever allowed myself to believe before. Sometimes I think the older writers get, the more they streamline. It’s a little bit like when you get older and you look around the house and say, “I don’t need all this junk.” You start tossing things away, in life and in art. Because I like dialogue, it’s sort of helped me streamline. Before my last novel, Samaritan, the other books were a lot more descriptively dense. I’m just trying to convince myself that I don’t need it: “I got it. This exchange took care of that. It’s redundant now.””

    - SOURCE: Barnes & Noble.com - Interview: Richard Price and Lush Life [JJ: Someday I hope to be a smart and talented as Richard Price.]


  • “Part of the jam I was in as a novelist was that I kept going back to my life for material. And if today is Wednesday, and I was up to Tuesday, what’s going to happen today, because I’ve got to have another book out. I felt like a cannibal eating his own foot. Once I became a hired pen out there, for the first time in my life I was forced to leave my own autobiography to research my characters’ lives. I learned that talent travels and that if you have enough imagination and empathy, you can write about anybody. Brevity is the soul of salesmanship out there. You’re in and out of a studio meeting — as fast as a knock-knock joke. Never talk for 20 minutes when you can say it all in 10, because the more details you give, the more there’s a chance they’re going to hear something they might not like. “High concept” means low concept. “High concept” means something that is so simple-minded you can tell the whole story in one sentence.”

    - SOURCE: FILM; Richard Price On the Addictions Of Hollywood - New York Times [JJ: Seems to me, screenwriting is a lot like golf. If you’re not already hooked, don’t start thinking it’ll be fun. It will be fun like crack is fun.]


  • “In the case of an entrepreneur, “just enough” is about control. Staying small(ish), staying private, supplying your own capital, all these mean calling your own shots. Venture capitalists and Wall Street can drive someone else crazy. The just enough entrepreneur can take his or her own chances. When it comes time to choose between interesting and profitable, you can go with interesting. Just enough in this case is about control.”

    - SOURCE: This Blog Sits at the: Just-enough, a new trend in the works (or, why Paul Allen’s Octopus is really an Albatross) [JJ: I wonder if J.K. Rowling knows what ‘enough’ is?]


  • “I understand how promo trends drive the herd. We’ve seen hundreds of authors start blogs, create MySpace and FaceBook pages, produce book videos, do podcasts, not because they wanted to, but only because it seemed to be working for another author. If you’re going to try something, don’t do it because everyone else is. Do what you’re comfortable with, what inspires you, and what makes you happy. Use the advantages you have, and be the writer you want to be, not the writer you think you have to be.”

    - SOURCE: Paperback Writer: Dissing the Advantages [JJ: Good advice. Really. Good. Advice.]


  • “The Sonnet: Sonnet Instructions on How to Write a Sonnet in Sonnet Form”

    - SOURCE: The Sonnet Sonnet - Associated Content [JJ: good stuff!]


  • “[Scott Adams] …I use the techniques I learned in hypnosis school in my comics all the time; a lot of things you learn in hypnosis are close to marketing and advertising in the general way you influence anybody about anything. For example, the reason my characters don’t have last names, and the boss doesn’t even have a first name, and you don’t know name of the company Dilbert works for, or the town he works in, or the model of automobile he drives, or even his ethnicity really, is a hypnosis technique. People can more readily read themselves into a situation if you leave out the details.”

    - SOURCE: Mindjet User Newsletter [JJ: Interesting. And yet, “good writing” is suppossedly all about details. Maybe detail is best left to the setting on non-POV characters?]


  • “MJ: How do you manage to be so productive? With so much of your life dedicated to your work (restaurant, comic strip, website/blog and more)? SA: I don’t get that much sleep, so I usually start work at five or six in the morning and I get a lot of work done early in the day before people can start bugging you. But beyond that I have a high tolerance for imperfection which I believe informs all of my work. My secret is when you do something about 80 percent right and that’s not enough for it to work completely, then you probably shouldn’t have been doing that in the first place.”

    - SOURCE: Mindjet User Newsletter [JJ: I could learn from this. I am such a perfectionist when it comes to prose, even though I’m so far from perfection it’s humorous.]


  • April 17 “ At Barnes & Noble, for example, joining the “Discover Great New Writers” program, which assures that a book appears face out in the front of all 358 superstores for two or three months and gets a review in a special brochure, costs publishers $1,500 a title, according to the chain’s 1996 promotions guide and publishing executives. To have a book featured for one month on a cardboard floor display in front, called a dump, a publisher pays $10,000. At the company’s mall stores — B. Dalton, Doubleday and Scribner’s — end-of-aisle, or endcap, displays cost $3,000 a title for one month; a two-month spot in “New Arrivals” costs $2,500, according to the documents. And at Borders, publishers pay $15,000 to advertise a book with a 30 percent discount in a 1996 pre-Christmas issue of USA Today. This provides top-tier listing in ads and front-of-store display for the month. SOURCE: In Bookstore Chains, Display Space Is for Sale - New York Times [JJ: Far more bang for your promotional buck than touring I would bet.]
  • April 13 “ The needs of being a cartoonist, and the needs of being a “Web 2.0 marketing guy” are very different. Though it wasn’t an overnight decision, recently I decided to re-adjust my life to something that was more conducive to being the former, as opposed to be the latter. Was this a wise move? We’ll see. What is a Web 2.0 marketing guy, anyway? Somebody who gets paid to have “Ever-Fragmenting Conversations about Ever-Fragmenting Conversations.” Compared to tarring roofs in Texas in summer, it’s not a bad job, but… Whatever. But one hundred years from now, I’ll be dead, and this website will be gone. Nobody will be talking about Web 2.0 anymore. But a wee voice tells me some of the cartoons will be still floating around, maybe online, maybe in books, maybe one or two of the originals will be hanging in private collections. And God Willing, some of the jokes will still be funny. SOURCE: gapingvoid: “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards”: cartooning in texas [JJ: Precisely! Now, substitute ‘writer’ for ‘cartoonist’ and you see why I’m spending less time online. Possible blog post expanding on this—if I’m not too busy writing…]
  • April 12 “ When I started to write this book and I was writing and writing every day, then when that darkness came, I was ready to enter it. It took time before that, to reach that stage. You can’t do that by starting to write today and then tomorrow entering that kind of world. You have to endure and labor every day. You have to have the ability to concentrate. I think that’s the most important ingredient to the writer. For that I was training every day. Physical power is essential. Many authors don’t respect that. [Laughs] They drink too much and smoke too much. I don’t criticize them, but to me, strength is critical. People don’t believe that I’m a writer because I’m jogging and swimming every day. SOURCE: Salon | The Salon Interview: Haruki Murakami, page 3
  • April 6 “ Here, we’re going to look at one of the most difficult, rewarding, frustrating, time-consuming, breakthrough-inducing things you can do. Specifically, fleshing out your writing by treating it as an alternate reality—and building things that help make it real. I’m talking about producing alternate reality sites and artifacts. SOURCE: Jason Stoddard » Blog Archive » New New Marketing for SF Creatives: Making It Real
  • + “ Scott Sigler and Seth Harwood have spent the past few years writing novels, disseminating them over the Internet as serialized podcasts and amassing audiences so considerable that top-shelf agents and publishers are now eager to represent the authors. SOURCE: Take my book. It’s free. / Giving away books as podcasts is new way to promote sales [JJ: Way to go Scott & Seth!]
  • April 4 “ I think what lifts story beyond the average, is attention to the moment of clarity…that divine moment that the hero recognizes that the hero’s been transformed. SOURCE: Writer Unboxed » Blog Archive » Interview: A Conversation with Blake Snyder, Part 3 [JJ: This is an amazingly insightful discussion of craft and structure. The Force is strong here.]
  • April 2 “ The great all spent a single long period away from their desks every day to give their minds time to recover and regain its creative poise. Beethoven started work at daybreak, but wrapped up by two or three in the afternoon which left him a good 14 hours away from work. Victor Hugo wrote in the mornings and took afternoons off entirely. Churchill would do nothing work-related between noon and around 11 at night. SOURCE: 10 Ways History’s Finest Kept Their Focus at Work | LifeDev
  • + “ Wal-Mart’s health care plan lets the retail giant recoup the cost of its expenses if an employee collects damages in a lawsuit. And Wal-Mart set out to do just that after Shank and her husband, Jim, won $1 million after suing the trucking company involved in the wreck. After legal fees, the couple received $417,000. Wal-Mart sued the Shanks to recoup $470,000 it paid for her medical care. However, a court ruled that the company could only recoup about $275,000 — the amount that was left in a trust fund for her care. SOURCE: BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » What PR won’t fix [JJ: Want to know what’s wrong with America? Look no further. A *single* Wal-Mart super center takes in $275K a *day* just from groceries.]
  • April 1 “ Most people are not that interesting. There, I said it. Overall, the culture of self-promotion embedded in most social media applications bothers me. I know that listening to “life between blogs post and emails” is supposed to bring me closer to my Twitter friends, but I don’t want to hear about their minutiae any more than I want to report on my own. The time you spend away from people is what allows you to be interesting to each other again. SOURCE: I’m Over Twitter (Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic) [JJ: Sad. But so true. Will I keep using Twitter though? Probably (not that most other twitter users would consider my use of it all that representative).]
  • March 21 “ I suppose you were windsurfing. I’ve never seen anyone windsurf with a porch umbrella for a sail, boldly charging across the bay like a cross between Admiral Nelson and Mary Poppins. I was amazed — you didn’t just sail downwind, I swear I saw you tacking. You, sir, are my hero. SOURCE: best of craigslist : To the guy sailing across Mission Bay with a porch umbrella [JJ: Oh good. I wasn’t hallucinating the other day from the zyrtec + double esspresso + codeine cough syrup + ritalin + ibuprofen coctail I took for my sinus headache. There really *was* a dude sailing across Mission Bay with nothing more than a surfboard and an umbrella.]
  • + “ Blogs – I probably shouldn’t be saying this to you, JT, but sometimes I wonder if all the time and energy spent on writing a blog might not be better spent on…well, you know what I’m going to say. SOURCE: Murderati [JJ: sound familiar?]
  • March 20 “ And I know some publishers tell authors advertising doesn’t work except everyone who says that spends serious money advertising their lead titles. The party line that advertising doesn’t work is code for we don’t have it in the budget for your book. SOURCE: Buzz, Balls & Hype : The BookTrailer Question Redux
  • March 19 “ The Grand Index of Writing Advice. SOURCE: SFReader.com Science Fiction & Fanatasy Author Page: David Walton [JJ: Well, I don’t about “grand,” but it’s worth looking at.]
  • March 17 “ In my experience, few things are impossible if you’re willing to exert an extraordinary, almost fucked up amount of effort to make your dreams come true. True genius goes by the name of obsession. SOURCE: Achieving the Impossible [JJ: And ‘balance’ is overrated, too. Want balance? Be obsessed about two things.]
  • + “ This is controversial, but here goes: I think if you’re remarkable, amazing or just plain spectacular, you probably shouldn’t have a resume at all. Not just for my little internship, but in general. Great people shouldn’t have a resume. SOURCE: Seth’s Blog: Why bother having a resume? [JJ: Cool. I don’t have a resume. I am spectacular.] Next »
  • March 13 “ Basically, they’d live somewhere cheap, quiet and relatively conducive to getting a lot of writing done. The Florida Keys and Cuba in Hemingway’s case, the South of France in Greene’s. They’d get up early each morning, then write diligently till noon. Then they’d head for their local café, drink gallons of booze for hours on end, and stagger home late at night. Then they’d do the same thing the next day. And the next. And the next. For years on end. Women came and went, friends came and went, children came and went, money and fame came and went, but the daily writing-booze combo remained the great constant. SOURCE: gapingvoid: “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards”: the quiet life of a writer yak yak yak [JJ: the booze I’m not sure is a great idea, but the simplicity of a morning-to-noon writing routine really meshes with worldview.]
  • March 12 “ The reason most people fail instead of succeed is that they trade what they want most for what they want at the moment. Source: Cheezy Technique - Amazing Results - Precision Nutrition [JJ: this advice applies equally well to your writing!]
  • March 11 “ From my general observations of various folks, they get there by a) being smart, b) having original things to say that people find useful, c) and saying them well, d) accruing an archive of original things said and said well, e) having great charisma, f) being visible and active in the areas where you’ve got experience and can contribute to the conversation, g) a lot of time spent maintaining presence and the blogging and being up to date with affairs in the area of your experience, h) being human, i) being known in a number of areas, j) cat blogging. It all kind of snowballs after a while. SOURCE: Whatever » The Problem With 1,000 True Fans
  • + “ White Trash People love nothing more than getting sauced off of cheap hooch and passing out drunk on the couch strategically placed in their yard. This is why they love boxed wine. Boxed wine saves White Trash People so much time. Because boxed wine tastes like grape juice, it allows White Trash People to fill their baby’s bottle with White Zinfandel. This means that they must stop in only one aisle at the grocery store, saving time which can later be spent watching NASCAR. SOURCE: Stuff White Trash People Like [JJ: this only gets funnier the more you read. Awesome site.]
  • March 10 “ Information consumes attention. In a digital world, you then have the potential for infinite minutiae and interruption. Consuming and organizing the excess deluge of data is not a scalable or sustainable model, so we look instead at the only viable option: strategic elimination. How do you check e-mail once per day or once per week? How do you reverse the self-defeating impulse to “stay informed” and instead catch up when action requires it vs. keeping up? Selective ignorance is one of the few common traits among the top performers I’ve interviewed. Learn to single-task and accept that — ironically — limiting your options is often the best method for improving your results and outcomes. SOURCE: Uncommon Lifestyles and the Truth About the 4-Hour Workweek: An Interview with Tim Ferriss @ Get Rich Slowly
  • + “ It’s very simple. If you try and fix all of your weaknesses, you will be — at best — mediocre at most things you’re inherently poor at. This is inborn talent or weakness. Progress is incremental when you attempt to fix all the chinks in the armor. Focus on leveraging and amplifying your strengths, which allows you to multiply your results. Fix any fatal weaknesses to extent that they prevent you from reaching your goals, but perfection isn’t the path to your objectives; finding ways to cater to your strengths is. SOURCE: Uncommon Lifestyles and the Truth About the 4-Hour Workweek: An Interview with Tim Ferriss @ Get Rich Slowly
  • March 6 Digital Entertainment Survey 2008 Full Report (PDF) [JJ: if you’re a writer or a reader at all interested in the future of reading, or e-books and podiobooks in particular, this is a MUST read. It’s long, but you can skip to page 138 for the dirt on e-books, and page 205 for podcasting stats. I should probably do a post on this…]
  • March 5 “ The fundamentals for selling any book are essentially the same. Here is the secret: talk about your book as often as you can, with as many people as you can, for as long as you can, wherever you can, even if you don’t sell a single copy when you do. Oh, and there is a follow up: REPEAT—REPEAT—REPEAT. SOURCE: A Publisher’s Perspective: The Right Way to Build a Book to Success [JJ: sorta sad, but true in an attention economy. The only alternative is to enlist someone’s help to hold the bullhorn.]
  • March 3 “ Literature fans looking for something beyond Oprah Winfrey’s book club are discovering a new kind of club on the Internet — Web sites that offer audio versions of books, voiced by fans instead of professional voice actors. Like many other Web-based phenomena, the popularity of the amateur audiobooks has led to an odd type of fame for some of the people behind those voices. SOURCE: NPR: Amateur Audio Books Catch Fire on the Web [JJ: But will the podiobook ever go mainstream? Time will tell.]
  • February 29 “ I took yesterday off. I’ve found that I need one day on the weekend to rest my mind so I can sit down on Monday eager to work rather than dreading it. I used to work seven days a week to help me stay in the book. But I was burning out, so I tried to force myself to take the whole two days off. That drove me crazy, and hurt the momentum of the current book. I can take a day off and come back to the current project without loosing ground, but two days is too much. I loose track, and it can take me two or even five days to get back to the rhythm I had before the break. This little peculiarity of mine when I’m working on a book is one of the reasons that touring is so difficult for me. It doesn’t just break my rhythm, it destroys it. SOURCE:LKH Blog: Writing, orchids, music [Jeremy: Laurell K. Hamilton is a workaholic.]
  • February 12 “ From my study of the network economy I see roughly eight categories of intangible value that we buy when we pay for something that could be free. In a real sense, these are eight things that are better than free. Eight uncopyable values. I call them “generatives.” A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. A generative thing can not be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced. It is generated uniquely, in place, over time. In the digital arena, generative qualities add value to free copies, and therefore are something that can be sold. Kevin Kelly — The Technium
  • February 11 “ Rushkoff’s idea is that the main point of content is to offer people the opportunity to socialize. And it’s that socializing, or socialization, that’s the real point; it’s the contact that’s important, not the content in and of itself. He summed up his point by saying that “Content is an excuse for people to interact.” I think both ideas, that it’s either “context” or “contact” that is king — instead of content — are really interesting and, in their own ways, revolutionary Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age » Regicide is Painless: Killing the idea that content is king [You know what? Fuck you people. The main point of OLD MAN AND THE SEA wasn’t to provide to provide the opportunity for a circle jerk. The point was and is the work itself. And I *like* the web.]
  • + “ I’ve been offering free fiction to read on the internet since I launched the e-serial Naomi back in 1999, and then every year after for awhile, I offered up a free novel to subscribers to my newsletter. This coincided with a jump in my writing career. In fact, it can easily be shown I’ve had a better, stronger, more successful career only after I started giving away entire novels for free on the internet, and short stories, too. Vampires - Fantasy - Horror - Suspense - The Official Website at DouglasClegg.com
  • February 9 “ In a consumer’s perfect world I should be able to get my cake and eat it too. I should be able to buy a license that gets me the book in print form and makes a digital copy available to me for downloading onto my device of choice. In other words, I want to buy a book and have the ebook too. (Or buy the ebook and get the print book too.) And guess what, I want to pay one price. Do I Believe In Ebooks?:Part One : OUPblog
  • February 8 “ Schnittman recognizes the situational convenience of reading ebooks, but notes “I have not purchased a single book on my Kindle that I have in print nor have I purchased a single print book that I read on my Kindle.” Wouldn’t it be neat, he muses, if you could buy access to an electronic copy of a book along with a print edition? But then, he recognizes, “I will be vilified as devaluing the ebook by those seeking to establish profit margins and equally vilified by those who want free or extremely inexpensive ebooks as they will be horrified that they would have to spend on print to get to ebooks.” He promises more on that subject in the near future… mediabistro.com: GalleyCat
  • February 7 “ The Internet is changing the economics of creative work - or, to put it more broadly, the economics of culture - and it’s doing it in a way that may well restrict rather than expand our choices. Wikipedia might be a pale shadow of the Britannica, but because it’s created by amateurs rather than professionals, it’s free. And free trumps quality all the time. So what happens to those poor saps who write encyclopedias for a living? They wither and die. The same thing happens when blogs and other free on-line content go up against old-fashioned newspapers and magazines. Of course the mainstream media sees the blogosphere as a competitor. It is a competitor. And, given the economics of the competition, it may well turn out to be a superior competitor. The layoffs we’ve recently seen at major newspapers may just be the beginning, and those layoffs should be cause not for self-satisfied snickering but for despair. Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can’t imagine anything more frightening. Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: The amorality of Web 2.0
  • January 31 “ A survey conducted in August 2007 by Ipsos Public Affairs for The Associated Press found that 27 percent of Americans had not read a book in the previous year. Not as bad as Mr. Jobs’s figure, but dismaying to be sure. Happily, however, the same share — 27 percent — read 15 or more books. In fact, when we exclude Americans who had not read a single book in that year, the average number of books read was 20, raised by the 8 percent who read 51 books or more. In other words, a sizable minority does not read, but the overall distribution is balanced somewhat by those who read a lot. Freed From the Page, but a Book Nonetheless - New York Times [So true. A sizable minority of folks in the South don’t watch stock car racing, either…]
  • January 30 “ Be as Descriptive as Possible, Then Perfect the Story When you are describing something to someone, you want to paint a picture. Talk about everything, even things that don’t have anything to do with the story. What time of day was it? What did it smell like? Each time you tell that joke add something to it, then start taking the fat off, trimming it ‘til it seems like one beam of light. When people see me do my show they feel like I’m just talking to them but it’s from me doing it night after night after night, it’s like exercising a muscle. Charlie Murphy’s Ultimate Guide To Storytelling | Player Watch | SOHH.com / [This would seem to favor the multiple-rough-draft approach.]
  • + “ This is I think the signature of our postmodernism, that conviction that we will not submit to the tyranny of dichotomous categories, that we will not submit to choosing between art and commerce, that we want both. The post modern self is a voracious creature. We want everything on offer. Now. Ours is a time of expansionary individualism. This Blog Sits at the: An open letter to Doug Liman
  • January 29 “ These findings suggest that instant judgments by the ignorant (nobody even recognised Warren Buffett) are more accurate than assessments made by well-informed professionals. It looks as if knowing a chief executive disrupts the ability to judge his performance. Physiognomy and success | Face value | Economist.com [Holy. Shit.]
  • January 27 “ The truth is that the novel is the great virtuoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules thrown around it. And the novelistic character is the very Houdini of that exceptionalism. There is no such thing as “a novelistic character”. There are just thousands of different kinds of people, some round, some flat, some deep, some caricatures, some realistically evoked, some brushed in with the lightest of strokes. A life of their own | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books
  • January 26 “ While the author has one particular thing they want to write, the reader is usually willing to read anything interesting or relevant to their interests. Though each piece of written material is unique, the universe of possible choices for any given reader is so vast that uniqueness is not a rare quality. Thus any barrier to a particular piece of content (even, as the usability people will tell you, making it one click further away) will deflect at least some potential readers. Shirky: Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content
  • January 25 “ We are of the other America or the America that has been left behind in the postindustrial age. We don’t live in L.A. or go to their parties; we don’t do what we do to try to triumph in the world of television entertainment by having a bona fide hit, and meeting the pretty people and getting the best table at the Ivy. Shit, the last time George and I went to the Ivy on a road trip, we waited forty-five minutes for a table and then were announced as “The Pelican party.” We don’t belong there and we don’t need the kind of money or the level of zeitgeist required to belong there. We hang out in the Baltimores of the world, writing what we want to write about and never keeping one eye on whether or not it could sell as much as a drama that had, say, more white faces, more women with big tits, and more stuff that blows up or squirts blood real good. The Believer - Interview with David Simon [is it possible to be cooler than David Simon? No. No it’s not.]
  • + “ But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason. In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak. Because so much of television is about providing catharsis and redemption and the triumph of character, a drama in which postmodern institutions trump individuality and morality and justice seems different in some ways, I think. It also explains why we get good reviews but less of an audience than other storytelling. The Believer - Interview with David Simon
  • January 18 “ With writing and art, mistakes tend to make the product more interesting. The major difference between a machine-made rug and a handmade one is that the regularity of the machine-made rug makes it uninteresting. Errors give the viewer something to hold onto. When you make a mistake in a painting, if—instead of trying to correct the mistake—you incorporate it into what you are doing and go forward, you are working mindfully. And when we ask viewers to choose between this kind of art and ‘flawless’ works, people say they prefer the mindfully created pieces. The Science of Happiness (January-February 2007)
  • + “ We can laugh from either joy or happiness,” Vaillant said. “We weep only from grief or joy.” Happiness displaces pain, but joy embraces it: “Without the pain of farewell, there is no joy of reunion,” he asserted. “Without the pain of captivity, we don’t experience the joy of freedom. The Science of Happiness (January-February 2007)
  • + “ You’re just not aware of the body of knowledge you have, because it’s built up in you by stealth. One of the most important moments in my learning about what the academics call pedagogy (only I don’t because I can’t pronounce it and it sounds silly) was when after twenty years of taking photographs quite seriously I did my first ever course. Suddenly I was offered a vocabulary, a structure for my intuitive knowledge: ways of thinking about what I’d always done. This Itch of Writing: Demandingly ‘wrong’-headed
  • + “ TG: It takes a lot of craft and talent to avoid info dumps! Especially when you’re working in a genre that requires you to convey large amounts of technical information. I’ve learned to emphasize information that’s interesting or has emotional content. Which means my details are gross and chilling, or that have direct impact on my characters. For instance, in GRAVITY, I had to explain Boyle’s law, which is the relationship between pressure and volume. So I couched it in terms of what goes wrong when Boyle’s law works against you and you have a decompression accident. I described boiling blood and popping lungs and all the gruesome details of a death in space. I suspect that made Boyle’s Law a lot more interesting! Writer Unboxed » Blog Archive » AUTHOR INTERVIEW: Tess Gerritsen, part one
  • January 16 “ What I call the Martini Method is named after an anecdote I once read about the novelist Anthony Burgess (of Clockwork Orange fame). Burgess was a very productive writer, which is attributed to a system where he would force himself to write a 1000 words a day, 365 days a year. When he had completed his word count, he would relax with a dry martini, and enjoy the rest of the day with an easy conscience, and normally in bar. Academic Productivity » How to complete your PhD (or any large project): Hard and soft deadlines, and the Martini Method
  • January 15 “ …Success isn’t determined by how hard I can exclude you from scraping your data - but how effectively and efficiently I can help you share/use/reuse/hack/etc it. Let me try and put it more simple. Data is inherently valueless in the edgeconomy, because it’s infinitely replicable. Any structure seeking to limit access to data will simply be too radically inefficient for the market to bear in the medium-long run. So a massconomy strategy of “owning” a massive stock of data is destined to crash and burn. Bubblegeneration Strategy Lab
  • January 10 “ …publicists can’t guarantee anything — reviews, interviews, radio, tv, etc. So it’s a lot of money for a crapshoot — unless like M.J. [Rose] said you have some big meaty hook that would have media people salivate to get you in their magazine/on their tv show. Crime Fiction Dossier: Discussion on marketing/publicity, part 4 [Allison Brennan is the source of the quote]
  • + “ What do you think someone would write about in the press when it comes to your book? Other than, “this authors wrote this good book.” What’s the news? What’s the story? Crime Fiction Dossier: Discussion on marketing/publicity, part 2 [M.J. Rose is the source of the quote]
  • + “ Never do a video as the only effort. Never do a website as an only effort. They are both static — meaning no one sees them unless they go looking for them. The bulk of your money and effort have to be on outreach, not in-reach. Videos and websites are both in-reach. Crime Fiction Dossier: Discussion on marketing/publicity, part 1 [M.J. Rose was the source of the quote]
  • January 7 “ When you can distribute something digitally, for free, it will spread (if it’s good). Seth’s Blog: Music lessons
  • January 6 “ Not only is this the height of arrogance — ‘Shut up about your life and everything important to you so that I can Make Art!’ — it’s also major bad news for artists. Locus Online Features: Cory Doctorow: Artist Rights
  • January 3 “ Should fiction and nonfiction writers apply the same time management strategies? K: Yes. My extensive interviews with 104 professional writers in all genres revealed that the effective time management strategies that successful writers have in common, no matter what they write, are: setting a writing schedule, adhering to that writing schedule under all circumstances barring illness and true emergencies, creating deadlines for getting the various stages of their projects completed, using some type of “quota” system to ensure that they complete their work consistently— for instance, writing a certain number of words or pages at each writing session, making a plan ahead of time for dealing with distractions The Urban Muse
  • + “ What advice and/or warnings would you give to someone who is considering going into writing? You need not wonder if you are a writer or not. Writing will come and get you. Writing will touch you with its black finger and you’ll carry its curse like the bells the lepers in Medieval Europe wore around their necks so that they might never again enjoy the warm touch of human contact. Then it will be years or decades or a whole lifetime of hard labor filled with constant rejection and sometimes open ridicule from your closest friends, your parents, partners will leave you for richer partners, a girl will say to you, “I don’t want to live on faculty row,” and in a fight another girl will say, “You’re not a real writer,” and then all the morons you grew up with will be millionaires and you’ll finally have a short story accepted in a literary journal that will then immediately go out of business. Meanwhile, The Da Vinci Code will sell 40 million copies. But it’s waiting there, the paper, the pen. It’s a puzzle you have to finish. You’ll spend a whole day thinking about the word ‘stone’. You’ll rewrite the sentence you want that word to inhabit for a week. Something will come into you as you hunch over that paper, you’re hand will move in the light under your lamp, the world will be asleep, a sentence will glitter on that paper, it will have the word ‘stone’ in it three times, and when you read it again, you know nobody will ever notice but you. Because a story is happening now and the words have disappeared. You’ll feel the presence of someone behind you, you’ll turn and look. Nobody will be there. Then you’ll turn to the paper again to find the next line. Is this act good or bad? Does it even make you happy? You’ll never know. You’re a watchmaker, a tinker, a freak in his attic, myopic as a mole. Your life will be this one thing. And one day, they might even want what you’re making. Travel Writers: Tony D ‘Souza [Best. Quote. On The Writing Life. Ever. Period. Goodnight.]
  • January 2 “ Contacts are easy. I know lots of people who have set out to make contacts — and they did it. Takes about three or four weeks, tops, of concerted effort to make a contact in the film industry. Contacts are easy. Writing a great script — that’s hard. WORDPLAY/Columns/19. You, the Expert [Written for screenwriters, but I think this applies to novelists as well.]
  • + “ I’m primarily interested in sci-fi, fantasy, magical realism, or fairy tales, and usually about timeless subjects as life, death, good, evil, ethics, free will, and existence. You know, light stuff like that. writing « What Bill Thinks
  • December 29 “ * Manage psychic distance until it feels perfect * Use sleight-of-hand when you can, and when you can’t, just say it * In exposition, be swift, bold, and fearless * In exposition, be shameless and have some irrelevant fun TOMORROWVILLE: Psychic Distance, Exposition, and Information—Part I of (Who Knows?) [this is the beginning of the best series of blog posts on writing craft I’ve ever read — highly recommended]
  • + “ One point I would add is that while a scene (especially a chapter opening) may start wide, in a narrative voice rather than a clear POV, once the writing gets locked in to an intimate level, it is trickier to retreat up to the dispassionate narrative voice again. (Though it can be done.) Zooming in is more forgiving than pulling back. TOMORROWVILLE: Psychic Distance, Exposition, and Information, Part II
  • + “ Tip 2. Use sleight-of-hand when you can Big jumps in psychic distance are often confusing, and therefore risky. But sometimes these shortcuts work. TOMORROWVILLE: Psychic Distance, Exposition, and Information, Part III
  • + “ There’s a pernicious theory stalking the land that anything expository in fiction is a kind of failing—everything ought to be implied, or woven into drama or dialogue, else it runs the risk of being an example of the dreaded (gasp) infodump. And expository prose is by definition telling rather than showing, and “show, don’t tell” is the cardinal rule of our times. Well, screw that. TOMORROWVILLE: Psychic Distance, Exposition, and Information, Part IV
  • + “ The advantage of this plethora of I’m-telling-you-this-for-no-damn-reason factoids or descriptions is that you can easily toss in relevant facts, or thematic concerns, and even segue into dramatization, without being too obvious. Some of the things you list are just color, some are camouflage, some are vital, and some are sneaky ways of steering you to what comes next. The irony is that this is easiest to do when the bulk of the exposition is least relevant to the story. And if you’re a haphazard writer like me (who finds his story by stumbling through it), if your subconscious tosses up some odd fact or image, it’s often a good idea to oblige by sticking it into the story. Once it’s on the page, the subconscious will often proceed to do something elaborate with it down the road. TOMORROWVILLE: Psychic Distance, Exposition, and Information, Part V
  • + “ I’m not sure who comes up with writing rules and passes them on, but a lot of writers end up like the narrator of Dylan’s Maggie’s Farm, with a headful of ideas…that have driven them insane. In the current rules, exposition is recognized as, like certain bodily functions, regrettably necessary; but one is expected to be discreet about it, dribbling in little bits of information here and there, misdirecting the reader so that they don’t notice the unpleasant smell of the fact you just dropped. TOMORROWVILLE: Psychic Distance, etc, Part VI: The First Annual Exposition Exposition
  • December 29 “ Do honest, upright, certifiably heterosexual two-fisted storytellers do this sort of thing? Sure. And no one is more in-your-face about it than Crichton. His stories almost invariably require huge volumes of information to be conveyed, but he is ever-conscious of pacing, and there just isn’t enough time to stuff it all into the mouths of the characters. So when he needs you to know something about quantum physics theories, he just lays it out: TOMORROWVILLE: Psychic Distance, etc, Part VII: The First Annual Exposition Exposition, continued
  • + “ It would take twenty pages of flashback to “show” what she manages in about a page; and, since it is in first person, the exposition illuminates character at the same time. TOMORROWVILLE: And, Just for Fun…Expostion Part VIII (and final)
  • December 28 “ Aside from what I do around here, which is infrequent and clumsy at best, I’d say that I’m pretty much through with self-promotion. And look — lightning didn’t strike me as I typed that. Incredible. In 2008, I’d like to be the writer who just writes books. If my novels go on to be bestsellers, great. If they don’t, that’s the way it goes. Maybe the self-promotion advocates are right, and you have to get out there and pimp yourself or you won’t get anywhere in this business. But if I ever get “there” I’d like it to be on the strength of the work, not how often or loudly I clamored for everyone to buy it. Paperback Writer: Not in 2008 [this sounds more practical all the time, and yet…]
  • + “ When you’ve decided what your major goals are, make a commitment to them. This consists of two parts: what you are going to do as a result of the commitment, and what you are going to stop doing as a result of the commitment. Of the two, the second is the more important and the one most frequently neglected. Get Everything Done - Blog - Top 10 Tips for Keeping Your Life Moving [Put another way: there’s always enough time to do anything. There’s never enough time to do everything.]
  • December 25 PW's Best Books of the Year - 11/5/2007 - Publishers Weekly
  • + “ INSTEAD OF CUTTING skin from a patient’s leg to close up a wound, surgeons can now grab a sheet of living, lab-grown skin from the fridge and start suturing. This year, Intercytex carried out the first successful artificial skin implants using its ICX-SKN patches. The trick is a little weird, but ingenious: Patches grow from cells plucked from discarded neonatal foreskin. PopSci’s Best of What’s New 2007 [If Chuck Palahniuk hasn’t already used this in a short story, you can thank me later.]
  • December 22 “ Writers who create something rare — a story with great, original characters that movie stars will cut their price to play — have a real value,” says Mandate production chief Nathan Kahane. “But that value doesn’t get unlocked in the studio system. If writers are willing to share our risk, then we’re willing to give them a lot of control and share in the profits too. Come on, writers, script your futures - Los Angeles Times
  • December 21 “ I Will Abandon My Comfort Zone. The only difference between routine and rut is spelling. As a writer, you are part artist and part businessman. Great artists take chances. Successful businessmen take chances. This means doing things you’re afraid of, and things you hate, and things you’ve never tried before. If, in 2008, you don’t fail at something, you weren’t trying hard enough. A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing: New Year’s Resolutions Part Fantastic advice. Read Konrath’s blog even if you don’t read his books (which are very funny in a gruesome, Carl-Hiassen-on-Jack-Daniels kind of way).
  • December 20 “ What’s your story? Why will people talk about you, and what will they say? If you don’t have those answers yet, getting them is the most important business task you face. Why I Won’t be Buying Seth Godin’s Meatball Sundae | Copyblogger
  • December 19 No Sound In Firefox Flash Player Fix. This Works When Nothing Else Will.
  • December 18 AppleInsider | In-depth review: can Amazon's Kindle light a fire under eBooks?
  • + “ A gadget like the Kindle is outdated in a year or so. If you cannot move the content you payed for to another device then buying that content was a pretty bad investment. Kindle hack lets you read DRMed Mobipocket—and meanwhile a ‘Kindle swindle’ tag campaign is starting up | TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home This is the *only* thing keeping me from buying a Kindle right now… I think the device is outstanding, but what happens when it becomes obsolete? Are all your Kindle books toast at that point? That’s one advantage regular paper books have over any DRM-based e-reading device.
  • + Ask 37signals: 10 ways to "get ink" - (37signals) This is a really great article about promoting your self and your work. Not specifically for authors, but authors will get a lot out of this advice…
  • December 16 “ What’s the easiest way to drive sales for your book on Amazon? Easy: maximize the content on your product page and optimize your chances of coming up in search results via Amazon’s internal search engine. Big Bad Book Blog » Blog Archive » Have You Optimized Your Amazon Page?
  • December 11 “ People start writing literary fiction as they tumble through writing programs at Sarah Lawrence or Bennington or Iowa because that’s what they’re expected to write and they want to impress their professors and fellow students; people start writing science fiction, on the other hand, roughly ten seconds after they set down The Star Beast or Ender’s Game or Snow Crash because they get done with the book and think, holy crap, I want to do that. The Zombie Robert Heinlein Rises From the Grave Yet Again to Annoy the Politically Correct
  • December 8 “ The absolutely essential exercise that everyone should do, with every novel, is to toss the manuscript pages in the air and collect them again in random order. (The pages must be randomized or this won’t work.) Next, go through the manuscript page-by-page and on each page find one way to add tension. Now, that sounds easy enough but most people are quickly stymied. That is because they do not truly understand what tension means. In dialogue, it means disagreement. In action, it means not physical business but the inner anxiety of the point-of-view character. In exposition, it means ideas in conflict and emotions at war. Study your favorite novelists. If they make you read every word, even while turning pages rapidly, it is because they are deploying tension in a thousand ways to keep you constantly wondering what’s going to happen. Tension all the time is the secret of best selling fiction, regardless of style, genre or category. If it sells big, it’s got tension on every page. Writer Unboxed » Blog Archive » INTERVIEW: Donald Maass, Part 2
  • December 6 “ Best of all, yWriter is free. Features: Organise your novel using a ‘project’. Add chapters to the project. Add scenes, characters, items and locations. Display the word count for every file in the project, along with a total. Saves a log file every day, showing words per file and the total. (Tracks your progress) Saves automatic backups at user-specified intervals. Allows multiple scenes within chapters Viewpoint character, goal, conflict and outcome fields for each scene. Multiple characters per scene. Storyboard view, a visual layout of your work. Re-order scenes within chapters. Drag and drop of chapters, scenes, characters, items and locations. Automatic chapter renumbering. yWriter4 - word processor for authors
  • + “ Index to the Learn Writing with Uncle Jim Thread I have taken it upon myself to do an index of the posts in the Writing with Uncle Jim Thread. It would serve as a quick reference where the Undiluted thread gives the posts in their entirety. I hope this is helpful. ~Dawn Index to the Learn Writing with Uncle Jim Thread - Absolute Write Water Cooler
  • December 4 “ * Manage psychic distance until it feels perfect * Use sleight-of-hand when you can, and when you can’t, just say it * In exposition, be swift, bold, and fearless * In exposition, be shameless and have some irrelevant fun TOMORROWVILLE: Psychic Distance, Exposition, and Information—Part I of (Who Knows?)
  • + San Diego Writers Conference I’ll be speaking here: Web Strategies for Writers: Branding, Blogging & Beyond. You should go!

When you’ve decided what your major goals are, make a commitment to them. This consists of two parts: what you are going to do as a result of the commitment, and what you are going to stop doing as a result of the commitment. Of the two, the second is the more important and the one most frequently neglected.    From: Get Everything Done - Blog - Top 10 Tips for Keeping Your Life Moving

[Put another way: there’s always enough time to do anything. There’s never enough time to do everything.] 

From: PW's Best Books of the Year - 11/5/2007 - Publishers Weekly

INSTEAD OF CUTTING skin from a patient’s leg to close up a wound, surgeons can now grab a sheet of living, lab-grown skin from the fridge and start suturing. This year, Intercytex carried out the first successful artificial skin implants using its ICX-SKN patches. The trick is a little weird, but ingenious: Patches grow from cells plucked from discarded neonatal foreskin.    From: PopSci’s Best of What’s New 2007

[If Chuck Palahniuk hasn’t already used this in a short story, you can thank me later.]

“Writers who create something rare — a story with great, original characters that movie stars will cut their price to play — have a real value,” says Mandate production chief Nathan Kahane. “But that value doesn’t get unlocked in the studio system. If writers are willing to share our risk, then we’re willing to give them a lot of control and share in the profits too.”    From: Come on, writers, script your futures - Los Angeles Times   

I Will Abandon My Comfort Zone. The only difference between routine and rut is spelling. As a writer, you are part artist and part businessman. Great artists take chances. Successful businessmen take chances. This means doing things you’re afraid of, and things you hate, and things you’ve never tried before. If, in 2008, you don’t fail at something, you weren’t trying hard enough.    From: A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing: New Year’s Resolutions Part 

Fantastic advice. Read Konrath’s blog even if you don’t read his books (which are very funny in a gruesome, Carl-Hiassen-on-Jack-Daniels kind of way).

What’s your story? Why will people talk about you, and what will they say? If you don’t have those answers yet, getting them is the most important business task you face.    From: Why I Won’t be Buying Seth Godin’s Meatball Sundae | Copyblogger   

From: No Sound In Firefox Flash Player Fix. This Works When Nothing Else Will.

From: AppleInsider | In-depth review: can Amazon's Kindle light a fire under eBooks?

A gadget like the Kindle is outdated in a year or so. If you cannot move the content you payed for to another device then buying that content was a pretty bad investment.    From: Kindle hack lets you read DRMed Mobipocket—and meanwhile a ‘Kindle swindle’ tag campaign is starting up | TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

This is the *only* thing keeping me from buying a Kindle right now… I think the device is outstanding, but what happens when it becomes obsolete? Are all your Kindle books toast at that point? That’s one advantage regular paper books have over any DRM-based e-reading device. 

From: Ask 37signals: 10 ways to "get ink" - (37signals) This is a really great article about promoting your self and your work. Not specifically for authors, but authors will get a lot out of this advice…   

What’s the easiest way to drive sales for your book on Amazon? Easy: maximize the content on your product page and optimize your chances of coming up in search results via Amazon’s internal search engine.    From: Big Bad Book Blog » Blog Archive » Have You Optimized Your Amazon Page?   

People start writing literary fiction as they tumble through writing programs at Sarah Lawrence or Bennington or Iowa because that’s what they’re expected to write and they want to impress their professors and fellow students; people start writing science fiction, on the other hand, roughly ten seconds after they set down The Star Beast or Ender’s Game or Snow Crash because they get done with the book and think, holy crap, I want to do that.    From: The Zombie Robert Heinlein Rises From the Grave Yet Again to Annoy the Politically Correct   

The absolutely essential exercise that everyone should do, with every novel, is to toss the manuscript pages in the air and collect them again in random order. (The pages must be randomized or this won’t work.) Next, go through the manuscript page-by-page and on each page find one way to add tension. Now, that sounds easy enough but most people are quickly stymied. That is because they do not truly understand what tension means. In dialogue, it means disagreement. In action, it means not physical business but the inner anxiety of the point-of-view character. In exposition, it means ideas in conflict and emotions at war. Study your favorite novelists. If they make you read every word, even while turning pages rapidly, it is because they are deploying tension in a thousand ways to keep you constantly wondering what’s going to happen. Tension all the time is the secret of best selling fiction, regardless of style, genre or category. If it sells big, it’s got tension on every page.    From: Writer Unboxed » Blog Archive » INTERVIEW: Donald Maass, Part 2   

Best of all, yWriter is free. Features: Organise your novel using a ‘project’. Add chapters to the project. Add scenes, characters, items and locations. Display the word count for every file in the project, along with a total. Saves a log file every day, showing words per file and the total. (Tracks your progress) Saves automatic backups at user-specified intervals. Allows multiple scenes within chapters Viewpoint character, goal, conflict and outcome fields for each scene. Multiple characters per scene. Storyboard view, a visual layout of your work. Re-order scenes within chapters. Drag and drop of chapters, scenes, characters, items and locations. Automatic chapter renumbering.    From: yWriter4 - word processor for authors   

Index to the Learn Writing with Uncle Jim Thread I have taken it upon myself to do an index of the posts in the Writing with Uncle Jim Thread. It would serve as a quick reference where the Undiluted thread gives the posts in their entirety. I hope this is helpful. ~Dawn    From: Index to the Learn Writing with Uncle Jim Thread - Absolute Write Water Cooler   

When you can distribute something digitally, for free, it will spread (if it’s good).    From: Seth’s Blog: Music lessons   

Not only is this the height of arrogance — ‘Shut up about your life and everything important to you so that I can Make Art!’ — it’s also major bad news for artists.    From: Locus Online Features: Cory Doctorow: Artist Rights   

Should fiction and nonfiction writers apply the same time management strategies? K: Yes. My extensive interviews with 104 professional writers in all genres revealed that the effective time management strategies that successful writers have in common, no matter what they write, are: setting a writing schedule, adhering to that writing schedule under all circumstances barring illness and true emergencies, creating deadlines for getting the various stages of their projects completed, using some type of “quota” system to ensure that they complete their work consistently— for instance, writing a certain number of words or pages at each writing session, making a plan ahead of time for dealing with distractions    From: The Urban Muse   

What advice and/or warnings would you give to someone who is considering going into writing? You need not wonder if you are a writer or not. Writing will come and get you. Writing will touch you with its black finger and you’ll carry its curse like the bells the lepers in Medieval Europe wore around their necks so that they might never again enjoy the warm touch of human contact. Then it will be years or decades or a whole lifetime of hard labor filled with constant rejection and sometimes open ridicule from your closest friends, your parents, partners will leave you for richer partners, a girl will say to you, “I don’t want to live on faculty row,” and in a fight another girl will say, “You’re not a real writer,” and then all the morons you grew up with will be millionaires and you’ll finally have a short story accepted in a literary journal that will then immediately go out of business. Meanwhile, The Da Vinci Code will sell 40 million copies. But it’s waiting there, the paper, the pen. It’s a puzzle you have to finish. You’ll spend a whole day thinking about the word ‘stone’. You’ll rewrite the sentence you want that word to inhabit for a week. Something will come into you as you hunch over that paper, you’re hand will move in the light under your lamp, the world will be asleep, a sentence will glitter on that paper, it will have the word ‘stone’ in it three times, and when you read it again, you know nobody will ever notice but you. Because a story is happening now and the words have disappeared. You’ll feel the presence of someone behind you, you’ll turn and look. Nobody will be there. Then you’ll turn to the paper again to find the next line. Is this act good or bad? Does it even make you happy? You’ll never know. You’re a watchmaker, a tinker, a freak in his attic, myopic as a mole. Your life will be this one thing. And one day, they might even want what you’re making.    From: Travel Writers: Tony D ‘Souza

[Best. Quote. On The Writing Life. Ever. Period. Goodnight.]

Contacts are easy. I know lots of people who have set out to make contacts — and they did it. Takes about three or four weeks, tops, of concerted effort to make a contact in the film industry. Contacts are easy. Writing a great script — that’s hard.    From: WORDPLAY/Columns/19. You, the Expert

[Written for screenwriters, but I think this applies to novelists as well.]

I’m primarily interested in sci-fi, fantasy, magical realism, or fairy tales, and usually about timeless subjects as life, death, good, evil, ethics, free will, and existence. You know, light stuff like that.    From: writing « What Bill Thinks    

* Manage psychic distance until it feels perfect * Use sleight-of-hand when you can, and when you can’t, just say it * In exposition, be swift, bold, and fearless * In exposition, be shameless and have some irrelevant fun    From: TOMORROWVILLE: Psychic Distance, Exposition, and Information—Part I of (Who Knows?)

[this is the beginning of the best series of blog posts on writing craft I’ve ever read — highly recommended]

One point I would add is that while a scene (especially a chapter opening) may start wide, in a narrative voice rather than a clear POV, once the writing gets locked in to an intimate level, it is trickier to retreat up to the dispassionate narrative voice again. (Though it can be done.) Zooming in is more forgiving than pulling back.    From: TOMORROWVILLE: Psychic Distance, Exposition, and Information, Part II   

Tip 2. Use sleight-of-hand when you can Big jumps in psychic distance are often confusing, and therefore risky. But sometimes these shortcuts work.    From: TOMORROWVILLE: Psychic Distance, Exposition, and Information, Part III   

There’s a pernicious theory stalking the land that anything expository in fiction is a kind of failing—everything ought to be implied, or woven into drama or dialogue, else it runs the risk of being an example of the dreaded (gasp) infodump. And expository prose is by definition telling rather than showing, and “show, don’t tell” is the cardinal rule of our times. Well, screw that.    From: TOMORROWVILLE: Psychic Distance, Exposition, and Information, Part IV   

The advantage of this plethora of I’m-telling-you-this-for-no-damn-reason factoids or descriptions is that you can easily toss in relevant facts, or thematic concerns, and even segue into dramatization, without being too obvious. Some of the things you list are just color, some are camouflage, some are vital, and some are sneaky ways of steering you to what comes next. The irony is that this is easiest to do when the bulk of the exposition is least relevant to the story. And if you’re a haphazard writer like me (who finds his story by stumbling through it), if your subconscious tosses up some odd fact or image, it’s often a good idea to oblige by sticking it into the story. Once it’s on the page, the subconscious will often proceed to do something elaborate with it down the road.    From: TOMORROWVILLE: Psychic Distance, Exposition, and Information, Part V   

I’m not sure who comes up with writing rules and passes them on, but a lot of writers end up like the narrator of Dylan’s Maggie’s Farm, with a headful of ideas…that have driven them insane. In the current rules, exposition is recognized as, like certain bodily functions, regrettably necessary; but one is expected to be discreet about it, dribbling in little bits of information here and there, misdirecting the reader so that they don’t notice the unpleasant smell of the fact you just dropped.    From: TOMORROWVILLE: Psychic Distance, etc, Part VI: The First Annual Exposition Exposition   

Do honest, upright, certifiably heterosexual two-fisted storytellers do this sort of thing? Sure. And no one is more in-your-face about it than Crichton. His stories almost invariably require huge volumes of information to be conveyed, but he is ever-conscious of pacing, and there just isn’t enough time to stuff it all into the mouths of the characters. So when he needs you to know something about quantum physics theories, he just lays it out:    From: TOMORROWVILLE: Psychic Distance, etc, Part VII: The First Annual Exposition Exposition, continued   

It would take twenty pages of flashback to “show” what she manages in about a page; and, since it is in first person, the exposition illuminates character at the same time.    From: TOMORROWVILLE: And, Just for Fun…Expostion Part VIII (and final)   

Aside from what I do around here, which is infrequent and clumsy at best, I’d say that I’m pretty much through with self-promotion. And look — lightning didn’t strike me as I typed that. Incredible. In 2008, I’d like to be the writer who just writes books. If my novels go on to be bestsellers, great. If they don’t, that’s the way it goes. Maybe the self-promotion advocates are right, and you have to get out there and pimp yourself or you won’t get anywhere in this business. But if I ever get “there” I’d like it to be on the strength of the work, not how often or loudly I clamored for everyone to buy it.    From: Paperback Writer: Not in 2008

[this sounds more practical all the time, and yet…] 

Older Writing Links Still Worth The Effort

110+ Resources For Creative Minds
"Tips, tutorials, exercises and inspiration from the fields of visual art, writing, photography, blogging, design and invention."

A Big List of Sites That Teach You How To Do Stuff
"...there are a large number of very helpful sites that teach you how to do things."

The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos
If someone sees our first video and is so intrigued that they want to watch more, why would we make them wait until we post the next one? We give them everything up front. If a user wants to watch all five of our videos right now, there’s a much better

Write Articles, Not Blog Postings (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
"You should also focus on material that lower-ranked content contributors can't easily create in their spare time. Both of these needs are met when you produce in-depth content."

AgentQuery :: Find the Agent Who Will Find You a Publisher
the internet's largest and most current database of literary agents

The Rejecter: 2006-10-08
Dear Rejecter, What do you look for in a query letter? What causes you to request an ms?

Bruce Sterling. The Wonderful Power of Storytelling
"And when it comes to studying art, well, study it, but study it to your own purposes. If you're obsessively weird enough to be a good weird artist, you generally face a basic problem. The basic problem with weird art is not the height of the ceiling abov

The Cult - ChuckPalahniuk.net
"Before you sit down to write a scene, mull it over in your mind and know the purpose of that scene. What earlier set-ups will this scene pay off? What will it set up for later scenes? How will this scene further your plot? As you work, drive, exercise, h

Anton Chekhov on Writing
"It is time for writers to admit that nothing in this world makes sense. Only fools and charlatans think they know and understand everything. The stupider they are, the wider they conceive their horizons to be."

So You Want to Be a Writer
"When Balzac had a new work in view, he first spent weeks in studying from real life for it, haunting the streets of Paris by day and night, note-book in hand."

A Handbook of Rhetorical Devices
"This book contains definitions and examples of more than sixty traditional rhetorical devices, all of which can still be useful today to improve the effectiveness, clarity, and enjoyment of your writing."

The Taxonomy of Logical Fallacies
Interesting fallacies.

Data Visualization: Modern Approaches | Graphics | Smashing Magazine
Way f-ing cool.

Grumpy Old Bookman: Really short reviews (I hope)
"...either David Isaak has written before, or else he's been practising."

Denis Johnson Interview
"I had started working on the novel. I'd met a woman and I got married, but the money ran out right away. She came home and said, "There's no money." And I said, "I know. I'm sorry." She told me I had to get a job. I hadn't had a job for seven months, and

The Elegant Variation
"Better to write ten minutes a day six days a week than to write for an hour on a Saturday. That's because if you're writing every day, then you're living with your characters and you'll carry them with you as you go about your business." ..."Fiction is a

Tess Gerritsen’s Blog » What I’ve learned from two decades in the business
"Bitterness gets you nowhere. What you need to do is roll up your sleeves and write the next book. And the next."

Podiobooker » Blog Archive » 7th Son: Coming from St. Martin’s Press in 2009
"These novels are often read and recorded by the author, and are promoted online in podcasts and web blogs."

The Elegant Variation: "Show, Don't Tell: The Great Lie of Writing Workshops
"But more important, novels can describe internal psychological states, whereas movies can only suggest them through dialogue and gesture. To put it most succinctly, fiction can give us thought: it can tell."

if:book: publishing after publishers
"The idea that you must have a blog, a trailer, a presence on multiple social networking sites, etc. etc. is filling the internet and bookstores with a din of commercialization that is, frankly, tiresome."

Buzz, Balls & Hype : First Madonna and Radiohead; Next, James Patterson PART 1
You should probably read this if you're a writer.

Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age » 4. Writers in a Digital Future
Interesting, if somewhat depressing points.

Completorrent | Search all torrents on the web!

ZIPskinny - Get the Skinny on that ZIP (demographics by ZIP Code)
Very useful site for demographics research.

Word Wise: 10 Things to Remember
"Know when to use 'that' and when to use 'which': Imagine 'by the way' following every 'which...' Remember, “commas, which cut out the fat, go with which, never with that!”

Seeking a Vision of Truth, Guided by a Higher Power - New York Times - James Lee Burke
"But I also had to learn that the gift or obsession or neurosis that compelled me to write was one that required a discipline that did not allow exceptions, at least not if I wanted to be successful."

Interview: VS Naipaul | By genre | Guardian Unlimited Books
"'My wish is to fix a scene with a very bright picture and to move along like that,' he says of his method, 'very bright pictures. People can never remember long descriptions. Just one or two images. But you have to choose them very carefully."

The End of Authorship - New York Times
"Have not writers, since the onset of the Gutenberg revolution, imagined that they already were, in their written and printed texts, giving an "access to the creator" more pointed, more shapely, more loaded with aesthetic and informational value than an u

Q&A with Paul Auster
"That's why each time I write a book it's as if I've never written anything before, because having written previous novels doesn't help you write this particular novel. And as you write the book, what you're actually doing is teaching yourself how to writ

The Dilbert Blog: Basic Instructions, Part 2
[from a commenter]: "This is the way it works: You become famous for giving the people what they want. When they like your stuff so much that it doesn't matter what you do, then you can start giving them what you want. It doesn't work the other way around

Techdirt: A Response To Scott Adams: I'll Trade You Your Underpants Analogy For A Truckload Of Vegetables
"The fact that Adams was unable to sell more books by giving away free downloads just means he (or his publisher) failed to use the free promotion properly to entice people to buy the actual book and failed to make the book valuable as a separate purchase

Turning Novel Ideas Into Inhabitable Worlds - washingtonpost.com
"How can a novelist fully imagine 'this creature . . . who is nothing like us, who addresses our most primitive hatreds, fears and anxieties' -- and by doing so, escape 'the confines of his self?'"

Word Wise: Well, That's That
"Don’t use 'that' when a dependent clause immediately follows a form of the verb 'to say,' as in 'Wilhelmina said she was going to run Mode magazine.'" [other great tips as well]

Novel Journey: Dean Koontz ~ Interviewed
"I work 10- and 11-hour days because in long sessions I fall away more completely into story and characters than I would in, say, a six-hour day. On good days, I might wind up with five or six pages of finished work; on bad days, a third of a page...And t

::Acquired Taste
"Choosing a narrative voice which supports the protagonist’s character is essential"

The Art of Letting Bad Things Happen
"Time without attention is worthless, so value attention over time."

Give me hope, give me some 'late achiever' stories! | Ask MetaFilter
"Raymond Chandler published his first novel when he was 50. Charles Bronson didn't start acting until he was 30, and didn't make Death Wish until he was 53. Hunter S. Thompson didn't start writing for Rolling Stone until his 40s."

Tess Gerritsen’s Blog » Authors: Your book tour tip of the day
Let’s say you find some books with 7# on 8/30/07 and others with 5# on 9/15/07. This is really good news. It means that two separate shipments came in, and the store got a total of 12.

Shoestring Marketing for the One-Man Band | Beneath the Cover
1. Time and Money are Interchangeable

9 Tips to Throw Off the Chains of Consumerism | zen habits
"Anytime results dominate over process, it becomes easy to get trapped." [Not strictly about