Devoted to publishing, publishers and to those who craft the written word

Nice will get you laughed at in the blogosphere. Nice won't score you a tell-all book deal. Nice gets a bad rap.

Nevertheless, I dig nice writers. People like Bruno Schulz or Susan Henderson get passed over because they have such quiet, kind writing voices. This week, in honor of Susan Henderson's fabulous book deal, it is Nice Week at her website.

Go check it out, it will cheer you up. Don't forget to answer her question, "say something nice about the person who posted right before you."

Here's my answer: Mark Bastable has the simplest, most readable Myspace page, more soothing than the hundreds of obnoxious, noisy pages that gum up my browser. Via his excellent page, I discovered his nice short story at Amarillo Bay--a stylish piece in love with the virtual worlds and twisty syntax of the Internet. Most of all, I like how he fixated on the phrase containing "nudist balloonists." That says a lot about a person.