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Dec22
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First of all, I've been slacking this week. Between holiday shopping and the day job and freelance stuff and this blog, my brain has been too crowded. I miss having our daily three-post connection, and I hope to see you in the new year. Secondly, enjoy my Best of 2006 Music List, it's the closest thing I could get you to a holiday present. I hope you can enjoy a little vacation time with your family, like me. Finally, let me introduce you to Deborah Ng, the mastermind behind Freelance Writing Jobs, a warehouse of web and print scribbling work, just for you. The holiday season hasn't slowed her down. Just check out her list of jobs!
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Dec21
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Every holiday season I make a compilation CD for my friends and family, collecting the songs that inspired me the previous year. This year, thanks to you lovely people, my circle of friends has expanded into the Internets. For that reason,...
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Dec19
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Do you feel like you're running out of time to publish your masterpiece? Sarah Weinman has generated tons of comments by suggesting that all mystery writers (an in turn, all writers) are facing a new deadline. According to Weinman, publishers have...
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The blogger and writer Bud Bilanich just tagged me with a blogged chain letter. This is the first web meme I've ever joined. I'm pretty excited. The Internet--especially the content part of it--relies on smart writers exchanging evocative questions and...
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Dec18
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If this doesn't exist for writers, we need to create it. I just read about a ground-breaking new art and social networking site created by the Saatchi Gallery for fledgling artists. It's called Stuart. Three million different people visit every...
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Chris Eaton wrote a whole book about a writer who dedicates his life to the all-consuming, painstaking, and unprofitable task of re-building a church tower out of words. Without the support of a good editor, your writing career will feel just...
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Dec14
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I don't spend too much time thinking or writing about the over-arching, uber-problems facing publishing. I'm here to find advice for all the fledgling writers at the beginning of their careers. But Ed Champion (fresh off a quality podcasted interview...
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In the old days, somebody writing stories or rock songs about "apocalyptic daydreams of six-legged robotic horses," would toil in obscurity.Thanks to the lo-fi magic of MySpace, Chris Eaton can keep his novel The Grammar Architect and his music from...
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Dec13
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When I was a younger writer, I dreamed of swaying in a hammock in between palm trees while writing books. Now I'm all grown up, and I spend my precious lunch hour doing mind-numbing line edits on my novel. The writing...
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My favorite part about this job is finding new books along the way. Every week, I get a new list of books composed by one of my favorite writers. You can't beat that. Today, novelist and songwriter Chris Eaton shares his...
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Dec12
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Do you have a reading community? Want to build one for free? According to a Reuters' story (by way of Journerdism), Wikipedia's for-profit organization will be giving away software and publishing space to community-minded groups. Writers, take note. This technology...
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"Eaton's endearingly off-note vocals career heavenward as he hits those la-da-da-da's between the choruses, rushing to a moment of honest indie transcendence ... The song unravels over several more minutes from there, as the horns dash out a morse-code melody,...
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Dec11
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Nobody ever says, "I became a writer for the money, I practice law as a hobby." Still, every year a very, very, very select few writers hit the publishing jackpot. I'm not trying to be one of those writers....
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As our weeklong interview with novelist/band leader Chris Eaton continues, I'd like to point out one of our rock-music-loving readers, Robin Slick. I discovered her blog last week, as she's a friend of Susan Henderson, a novelist and newly minted graduate...
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"Neil, who could think of little else, threw himself into his work, rebuilding the fantastic church tower word by word ... He decided one should never describe a tower unless one could make it the only one of its kind...
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Dec 8
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"As Rick James' "Superfreak" played, I imagined I was Tessie Hutchinson from "The Lottery," and I'd just drawn the lottery ticket ordering my death. I threw the ticket on the ground and then I did this big dance in front...
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I've got a big holiday present for all the mystery novelists in the audience... Our favorite mystery writer and blogger Sarah Weinman just linked to an unbelievably cool interview with FOUR (I'm not kidding, FOUR!) mystery publishers. Medieval crime...
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Could you fit in my suitcase? I hope so, because you're coming with me. Early next year I'm taking a trip to Guatemala, my favorite country in Central America. I lived there for two wonderful years, and I'm going...
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Dec 7
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Smith Magazine just grabbed the six-word story ball and ran with it, throwing in a brand-new iPod to encourage the trend. As I said before, these little writing exercises are perfect for chopping through boredom and writer's block. Now you can...
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Welcome to the penultimate installment of my interview with Pushcart-nominated author, Susan Henderson. Over at her website LitPark, she wrote explained the secret of her success: "LitPark is only as good as the people who play here." Today, her father-in-law comes...
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Dec 6
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"I didn't expect to be so scared of aging. At the grocery store, where Christie Brinkley looks 23 on a magazine cover, just as she did when I was a girl, I overspend our budget by adding expensive creams to...
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Do you ever think about literary mash-ups? Charles Strauss just published The Jennifer Morgue, a book that combined the horror of H.P. Lovecraft with the James Bond spy mythos. Think about the possibilities! I think we spend so much...
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Dec 5
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"For all of you writers, artists, photographers, and people captured by a certain place on the map, would you tell me about the setting that keeps cropping up in your work?" Recently, Susan Henderson asked her readers to answer that...
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Last night I spent fifteen minutes of perfectly good writing time trying to think of a word to describe bad Chinese food. I ended up going with "gooey." But I'm not the first writer to get hung up on finding...
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Dec 4
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"Sometimes in my room I imagined myself fighting other kids, and felt I had something powerful to unleash that would surprise them, given my size. This did not turn out to be the case, and when Tyra socked me in...
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I am obsessed with obsession. I write about the most obsessive writing communities on the web. I read the most obsessive writers. I fill my iPod with music by obsessive musicians. If newspapers had an Obsession Section, I would be...
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I don't know if you noticed, but last week snuck by, snowed by a post-holiday weekend daze. I just wanted to collect the best posts, just in case you missed them... Novelist Sarah Hall stopped by to discuss researching...
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Dec 1
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Over the course of her career, Sarah Hall has written two novels: the Coney Island drama, The Electric Michaelangelo and the naturalistic Haweswater. She's been our special guest this week, sharing writerly wisdom and research tips. You can meet her...
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NewAssignment.net just launched this week, a laboratory combining citizen journalists with a functioning news bureau. Earlier this year, the news giant Reuters hooked up with a band of citizen journalism upstarts--donating $100,000 to Jay Rosen's striking experiment, NewAssignment.net. Eventually, the group...
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If it wasn't for my buddy Steve, I'd probably never have anything exciting to talk about. Luckily for both of us, Steve exists and we have something exciting to talk about today. Steve just published a fabulous essay about the Instant...
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