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

Where in the world is your book? A string of geographical posts about fictional settings surfaced in my reader today. (Thanks, SF Signal!)

To start things off, Google blogged about how they are slowly "geomapping the world's literary information," and creating a Google map of famous settings from literature.

Then Elegant Variation blogs about the joys of "reading books in the cities where they are set." I did this in New York and Guatemala, and this literary tourism always inspired me. If I had more money, I would spend my life visiting these literary locations.

Dig it:  "I've only done it twice. The second book-and-city combination was Joanna Scott's Arrogance in Vienna. The first was George Eliot's Middlemarch in Rome."

Speaking of money, over at Morning News, Courtney Lichterman has a heartbreaking tale of freelance dental woes. As both a struggling writer and root canal patient, I was riveted by this familiar problem:

"My departure from my last job was a mental health emergency. The job was supposed to be a temporary thing; it had nothing to do with who I was, but it paid the bills until I could find something else ... [soon] the thrill of being “not there” eclipsed the stress of finding temporary work. And then a sequence of little ailments appeared: a recurring headache became a series of debilitating migraines, a bad back from years of slumping in front of a computer; a slight pain in an upper tooth."

Publishing Spotted collects the best of what's around on writing blogs on any given day. Feel free to send tips and suggestions to your fearless editor: jason [at] thepublishingspot.com.