The other day, I linked to Aaron Brazell, a punchy web consultant and writer over at Technosailor. He's been focused on blog elitism lately, and responded to me and a few other writers in a recent post: "Using the word "elite" seems to send people into nervous convulsions, as I expected it would. See, people can't handle the idea that they are elitist. But they are. I am. Anyone who owns a website, whether a blog or otherwise, plays the elitist game."
Tom Kealey has an alternative to that cut-throat model. Instead of obsessing over Technorati ratings, this Stanford University creative writing professor has built a support community for fledgling writers. He shares his soapbox with countless other writers, irregardless of their web popularity.
For that reason, I picked him for my deceptively simple feature: Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing.
Jason Boog:
Who are your favorite writers with an Internet footprint? Why do you like their sites?
Tom Kealey:
Stephen Elliott is one of my best friends, and he’s got a very smart website at StephenElliott.com. He’ll post fiction and nonfiction work there, but more importantly the site works as a blog, featuring and promoting Steve’s creative and political work. For example, today he’s got a link up about LitPAC, which is a new Political Action Committee he’s starting.
He also has a link today to an article of his from the Village Voice about John Edwards. One of the advantages of this type-site is that you can keep archived work alive, and help keep your books in print. Steve has a mini-review of a new book by Peter Orner, and he’s got political commentary about day-to-day happenings in Washington.
He gets thousands of hits a day. Why? Because he’s a good writer, because he’s tapping into both the literary and political communities (and the sex communities too), and, perhaps most importantly, because he’s constantly updating it with interesting work. There’s a real joy in the writing there. You can see how enthusiastic he is about literature and about progressive politics.
And, lucky for us, he’s got a great set of links to other writer’s sites. About a hundred of them.
Laila Lalami, over at Moorish Girl, does a nice job of tapping into Internet users. The site covers the latest literature news, her own and other’s reviews, and while this is not the reason she maintains the site: it also provides important exposure for her new book. It’s not easy running a blog.
Actually, scratch that. It is easy to run a blog. But it’s not easy to run a good one and keep up with it over the years. Laila has done that, and she’s reaping some rewards for it.
But when I think of writing and the Internet, I think of Cory Doctorow first. Most people know him as one of the members of the Boing Boing crowd. He seems to have a great sense of what’s going on in the LitNet World.
Today he’s got a post about the BLOOKER Prize, which is the first annual lit prize for books published online. I think anyone looking to find out more about writing on the Internet should start with an exploration of BoingBoing and Cory’s personal site: Craphound.com.
Boing Boing has five or six years of archived posts, though unfortunately they’re not by subject.
Want more? Tune in Friday for the exciting conclusion of Five Easy Questions for Tom Kealey...
» Five Easy Questions, Tom Kealey, Part Three from ThePublishingSpot
The other day, I linked to Aaron Brazell, a punchy web consultant and writer over at Technosailor. He's been focused on blog elitism lately, and responded to me and a few other writers in a recent post: "Using the word... [Read More]
Tracked on: April 5, 2006 12:54 PM | Permalink to Trackback