Naked, Drunk, and Writing: writing essays and memoirs for love and money by Adair Lara. [an Amazon click]

Adair Lara was talking about her new book this past Wednesday at Book Passage, Corte Madera. (She also teaches classes there on occasion.)

I mentioned her appearance on Facebook (although I didn't drive across the bridge to see her) and added

Adair Lara wrote a column for the Chronicle ... until she didn't. I liked the column. Miss her.

A sample of her column work.

Fun thing about Amazon is that you can (often) poke into a book and see how it begins. On the first page of Lara's new book, I read

If I even think about writing, I find myself in the pantry eating cereal straight from the box. Writing is a scary, vulnerable, and in a way conceited act, one that says the words you set down are worth a stranger's time to read, and that this is a worthy use of your own time.

I may take Lara's book to Camp to read, even if I'm not intending to write a memoir any time soon. ...

Labels: books, commentary, people, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:32 AM|| |

Questions for Deborah Treisman, The New Yorker's Fiction Editor [15 Dec 2008]


For the past five years or so, anywhere from a fifth to a quarter of the stories published in the magazine have been by writers who hadn't previously published fiction in The New Yorker. Some had been published elsewhere already; some hadn't.

Labels: writing, writing-market

   posted by Sal Towse at  2:45 PM|| |

AnnaQ is a month and four days older than I am, another water dragon. The 18 May 2009 issue of Newsweek Magazine contains her resignation from her gig writing LAST WORD, which she's had for the last nine years.

THE LAST WORD - Anna Quindlen (18 May 2009 issue of Newsweek)

This page, this place, is an invaluable opportunity to shed some light. But if I had any lingering doubts about giving it up after almost nine years, they were quelled by those binders on my desk, full of exemplary work by reporters young enough to be my children. Flipping through their pages, reading such essential and beautifully rendered accounts of life in America and around the world, I felt certain of the future of the news business in some form or another. But between the lines I read another message, delivered without rancor or contempt, the same one I once heard from my own son: It's our turn. Step aside. And now I will.



Boy, am I feeling like a dinosaur.

Labels: news, writers, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  5:32 PM|| |

Dickensurl.com

Convert your URL to a Dickensian quote.

Mine?

Under an accumulation of staggerers, no man can be considered a free agent. No man knocks himself down; if his destiny knocks him down, his destiny must pick him up again.

From The Old Curiosity Shop

Above quote has been attributed to
http://www.towse.com/blogger/blog.htm

[via Bella Stander's twitterfeed]

Labels: app, URL, writers, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  9:41 AM|| |

This Is Your Wake-up Call: 12 Steps to Better Book Publishing

[...]

The underlying problem facing the industry is twofold: there are too many books, and too many of them are derivative of each other. You've heard of Gresham's Law—the idea that bad money drives out good. Our industry has long suffered from Grisham's Law, where opportunistic authors and publishers try to imitate John Grisham and other category leaders with books modeled on someone else's commercial success. That strategy might make sense if there were great demand for these imitators, but in today's overcrowded, competitive marketplace, this kind of thinking is dangerous, because it devalues the environment into which we present our work.

[...]

[link via Dystel & Goderich Management blog]

Labels: book promotion, books, publishers, writers, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  1:34 PM|| |

I found a good home for my softcover edition of The ALICE B. TOKLAS COOKBOOK. I have an older, hardcover, first edition that I intend to keep but, really, there aren't many differences 'twixt these two.

One difference, the newer edition has a foreword by MFK Fisher.

One other crucial difference, for those of us who spent our young adult years in the sixties and seventies, this edition contains the recipe that (for legal reasons) the publisher could not include in the first edition. Yes, the recipe for Haschich Fudge -- no, not brownies ... fudge, even though the talk was always of Alice B. Toklas brownies.

The Haschich Fudge recipe is not a Toklas original, but rather came to Toklas from painter and film-maker Brion Gysin, according to the notes.

-------------
Haschich Fudge (which anyone could whip up on a rainy day)

This is the food of Paradise -- of Baudelaire's Artificial Paradises: it might provide an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies' Bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the DAR. In Morocco it is thought to be good for warding off the common cold in damp winter weather and is, indeed, more effective if taken with large quantities of mint tea. Euphoria and brilliant storms of laughter; ecstatic reveries and extensions of one's personality on several simultaneous planes are to be complacently expected. Almost anything Saint Theresa did, you can do better if you can bear to be ravished by 'un évanouissement reveillé.'

Take 1 teaspoon of black peppercorns, 1 whole nutmeg, 4 average sticks of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon of coriander. These should be pulverised in a mortar. About a handful each of stoned dates, dried figs, shelled almonds and peanuts: chop these and mix them together. A bunch of canibus sativa [sic] can be pulverised. This along with the spices should be dusted over the mixed fruit and nuts, kneaded together. About a cup of sugar dissolved in a big pat of butter. Rolled into a cake and cut into pieces or made into balls about the size of a walnut, it should be eaten with care. Two pieces are quite sufficient.

Obtaining the canibus may present certain difficulties, but the variety known as canibus sativa grows as a common weed, often unrecognised, everywhere in Europe, Asia and parts of Africa; besides being cultivated as a crop for the manufacture of rope. In the Americas, while often discouraged, its cousin, called canibus indica, has been observed even in city window boxes. It should be picked and dried as soon as it has gone to seed and while the plant is still green.
-------------

Now that I've saved the recipe (although for what reason I don't know), I can pass the copy of the later edition on to someone who will give it a good home.

Labels: books, food, history, recipes, writers, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  2:46 PM|| |

Hallie Ephron asked if I could guest on Jungle Red and introduce Internet Resources for Writers to people who might not know about it.

The gig consists of Hallie's interview with me (already in the can) and me checking in and sticking around during the day answering any questions that might come up.

Today's the BIG DAY!

Should be fun.

Labels: internet resources for writers, life, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:13 AM|| |

 

No, actually. That's Ripley, Borderlands Books' hairless cat.

Ripley sat in my lap purring and snoozing during Sawyer's talk and was reluctant to leave it when the presentation was over.

We hied off to Foreign Cinema afterwards for a late dinner, Sawyer having signed my copy of WAKE before the event kicked off.

Check out the book and the other seventeen books and zillions of short fiction items Sawyer has written.

The pilot for a FLASH FORWARD series is up for consideration in the next few days. Good luck to Sawyer on that.

After dinner at Foreign Cinema it was home again home again via the #14 Mission and the #30 Stockton, and a quarter mile walk up Telegraph Hill and home. The transit connections, though, were perfect. Maybe a four minute wait for the #14 and another four minute wait for the #30. Can't get much better than that. Thanks, Muni.

Labels: books, bookstores, photographs, writers, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:41 PM|| |

IN MEMORIAM Air Devil [PDF]

Found this just now. Eagle Call. Spring 2006.
Published by and for Civil Air Patrol - California Wing, of which my dad was a member for over forty years.

My dad's article about his 10K' sky dive to celebrate his eightieth birthday.

His original title was probably I JUMPED FROM A PERFECTLY GOOD AIRPLANE. All we know is that the editor changed the title before press time, when he found out that Dad had died.

Labels: family, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:57 AM|| |

Letter from Joseph Conrad to his agent, J.B. Pinker

Hotel Continental
place de la Comedie
Montpellier
21st Febr '06

My dear Pinker.

    I send you the first 13 pp of Verloc partly that you should see what the story is going to be like and partly as evidence that the Capri fatality is not likely to overcome me this year. After all, considering that we have been just a week here and that it takes some time to feel settled I haven't done so badly. There is a good bit more MS actually written but I can't part with it yet. I've also worked at the text of the M of the Sea. That and the balance of Verloc you'll get in the course of a week. Meantime I hope you won't think I am stretching the point unduly if I ask you to send me £20 on the day you receive this -- which I imagine will be Friday -- either in English notes or by draft on the Credit Lyonnais who have a house here -- whichever is less trouble.
    Don't imagine that the story'll be unduly long. It may be longer than the Brute but not very much so. What has delayed me was just trying to put a short turn into it. I think I've got it. I haven't done anything to Chance of course. I imagine it would go easiest at the Pent. But that or some other MS you are sure to have from here. I feel well and have a few ideas.

Yours always
Conrad.

PS Would you have the extreme kindness to buy for me and send out by parcel post a fountain pen of good repute -- even if it has to cost 10/6. I am doing much of my writing in the gardens of Peyron under a sunny wall and the horrible stylo I've got with me is a nuisance.


===========

n.b. Verloc became The Secret Agent

Labels: paperpensandglue, writers, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  12:49 PM|| |

Fear the rainbow! / A storm is gathering. Are you afraid, Christian? Are you afraid *enough*?

The best part? It's only been just over three months. These adorable hyenas can't possibly sustain such a silly froth; in terms of extreme vitriol, there is nowhere left to go. Really, how do you top calling Obama a Satan Hitler Mussolini Lenin Iran-loving dictator hell-bent on taking away our guns and destroying capitalism as he forces everyone to drive a pink Prius to the Commie Hut to pick up our gay Chinese babies?

Labels: commentary, government, morford, news, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  12:22 PM|| |

Los Angeles Times Staff: Fake News Story 'Embarrassing and Demoralizing' - Peter Kafka

Newspapers are losing money. What to do? What to do? What to do?

Think outside the box. Revisit the dominant paradigm. Make people pay for online content. Make people pay for premium content. Make people pay more for subscriptions. Only put premium content in paper version. Cut the newsroom staff. Stop home delivery. Stop the presses and go 100% online.

Sell ad space on Page One?

The LATimes ad was clearly marked as such. It was below the fold. I =do= have some understanding about the uproar from staff, but ...

How will papers survive as papers? Would you rather the LATimes fold than sell clearly marked ad space on Page One?

Any ideas for our friends in the daily paper business?

According to the article: UPDATE: I'm told publisher Eddy Hartenstein is supposed to be addressing the staff this afternoon.

Labels: advertising, news, web2.0, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  3:10 PM|| |

New blog from Crawford Kilian: Write Your Nonfiction Book ... Online!

The blog is new (only three posts so far) but I'm expecting some interesting content. Currently online, the book proposal.

Blog also includes links, links, links to blogs, links to online magazines, links to a collection of Kilian blogs, links to Web writing resources, more.

Labels: book promotion, books, nonfiction, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  2:31 PM|| |

Query Shark

How an agent =really= feels. Query critiques for the strong-at-heart.

e.g. Please don't ever put I look forward to hearing from you soon in a query letter. It sets my teeth on edge. Other agents may not have quite the ..ah...toothy! reaction that I do, but why risk they do. Be safe. Don't say it.

Hosted by Janet (Jet) Reid at FinePrint Literary.

Her voice may sound familiar to you.

Shhh.

Labels: agents, books, writers, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:49 AM|| |

Lost in Fiction - WSJ.com: Alexander McCall Smith on the intense personal relationships readers form with characters and the ways that complicates the lives of authors.

[...]

It can be very inhibiting for an author if he or she knows that what happens in fiction is going to be taken so seriously. I write serial novels in newspapers and have learned the hard way that people will readily attribute the views expressed by characters to their authors. In one of my "Scotland Street" novels a character called Bruce, a rather narcissistic young man, made disparaging remarks about his hometown. Although these were not the views I hold about that particular town, I was roundly taken to task, with the local member of the Scottish Parliament suggesting that I should be forced to apologize to the offended citizens. I pointed out that these were the views of a fictional character, who was just the type to make such remarks. That did not help.

In another novel, I had Isabel Dalhousie give up breastfeeding rather too quickly for the liking of the leader of a pro-breastfeeding organization. Again I was told that I should make a public apology to those who believed in persisting with breastfeeding. That sort of thing is quite alarming, and it is such people who need to be told, politely but firmly, that it is just a story.

[...]

Labels: writers, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:04 AM|| |

TV interview on ABC News 10's Sacramento and Co.

Simon talks about dyslexia and his writing and the back doors you learn to use to do what you want to do when the dyslexia is holding you back. Simon, for those who don't know him, writes thrillers (as Simon Wood) and horror (as Simon Janus) and (under yet another pseudonym, Simon Oaks) has a nonfiction book out last month, WILL MARRY FOR FOOD SEX AND LAUNDRY.

Simon's Web site

Labels: books, mystery, video, writers, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  5:41 PM|| |

Christopher G. Moore was at Left Coast Crime 2009.
Christopher Moore was not.

The book dealer who brought Christopher Moore's books to sell to conference attendees didn't know the difference, or thought that conference attendees didn't. No excuse, really. The list of conference attendees included a hot link to Christopher G. Moore's Web site where 'tis obvious he writes a very different tale than Christopher not-G Moore.

Imagine your surprise if you'd purchased a Christopher Moore book from the book dealer and, having reached the head of the "have Christopher Moore sign your book" line, you discovered the Christopher Moore (Christopher G. Moore) in front of you looked nothing like the author photo on the (Christopher Moore) book you had in hand.

Here's the basic difference 'twixt the two:

"Think Dashiell Hammett in Bangkok." —San Francisco Chronicle (Christopher G. Moore)

"Moore's storytelling style is reminiscent of Vonnegut and Douglas Adams." — Philadelphia Inquirer (Christopher Moore)

Now you know ...

Buy either. Buy both. Different reads. Very different reads. Both worth reading.

Labels: books, writers, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:59 AM|| |

Was surfing and found a San Francisco history site, with some interesting snippets that could evolve into a story ...

[22 Dec 1857] A dreadful murder and suicide took place at the Red House, near the Race Course. The proprietor, SYLVESTER MURPHY, aged 27, a native of PITTSBURG, PA; murdered a servant named MARY ANN MCGLYNN, aged 23, by shooting her in the head and then cutting her throat; afterwards he took his own life by inflicting with a small knife, eight stabs upon his left breast and also by cutting his own throat. The whole affair is wrapped in mystery.

Labels: history, San Francisco, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  2:49 PM|| |

Feb 10th.

The Ceremony was very imposing, and fine and simple, and I think ought to make an everlasting impression on everyone who promises at the altar to keep what he or she promises. Dearest Albert repeated everything very distinctly. I felts so happy when the ring was put on, and by Albert. As soon as the Service was over, the procession returned as it came, with the exception that my beloved Albert led me out. The applause was very great, in the Colour Court as we came through: Lord Melbourne, good man was very much affected during the Ceremony and at the applause. We all returned to the Throne-room, where the Signing of the Register took place: it was first signed by the Archbishop, then by Albert and me, and all the Royal Family, and by: The Lord Chancellor, the Lord President, the Lord Privy Seal, the Duke of Norfolk (as Earl Marshal), the Archbishop of York, and Lord Melbourne. We then went into the Closet, and the Royal Family waited with me there till the ladies had got into their carriages. I gave all the Train-bearers as a brooch a small eagle of turquoies. I then returned to Buckingham Palace alone with Albert: they cheered us really most warmly and heartily; the crowd was immense; and the Hall at Buckingham Palace was full of people; they cheered us again and again. The great Drawing-room and Throne-room were full of people of rank, and numbers of children were there. Lord Melbourne and Lord Clarendon, who had arrived, stood at the door of the Throne-room as we came in. I went and sat on the sofa in my dressing-room with Albert; and we talked together there from 10 m to 2 till 20m. p. 2.

Queen Victoria, 1840
Etching illustrations of the wedding and the procession accompany the entry.

And thus ends the entry for 10 February.

Just received a pkg in the mail from Auntie K who sent a book bought at the Friends of the Library book sale called THE PAST TIMES BOOK OF DIARIES, which works you through each day of the year with an entry from someone's past diary. One hundred diarists. Four hundred years. Eye witness accounts of history (see 10 Feb) and private entries.

Famous folk (QVic, Katherine Mansfield, Beatrix Potter, Samuel Pepys) and some less famous (to me) folk (Ralph Josselin, Francis Kilvert, F.E. Witts), who may be well-known names to those with more depth than I can claim.

That's what the Goog is for.

Ralph Josselin "was the vicar of Earls Colne in Essex from 1641 until his death in 1683. He is celebrated for his remarkable diary rivalling that of Samuel Pepys which records intimate details of everyday farming life, family and kinship in a small, isolated rural community." [Wikipedia]

Francis Kilvert "is best known as the author of voluminous diaries describing rural life. After his death from peritonitis, his diaries were edited and censored, possibly by his widow." [Wikipedia]

F.E. Witts, author of The diary of a Cotswold parson : Reverend F.E. Witts, 1783-1854. [WorldCat] [no Wikipedia entry. Shocking! I know!]

Thanks, Auntie K!

Labels: history, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  2:10 PM|| |

On August 12, 1982, I took a 10 x 7 1/8 inch National Blank Book Company composition book from the supply closet of my then employer, Vignelli Associates. From that moment, I have never been without one. I always have one at my desk. I take one with me to every meeting. I am now in the middle of Notebook #85. It's in front of me right now. Together, these well-worn books create a history of my working life that spans three decades.

I tend to be obsessive-compulsive, and I am very picky about the notebooks. No fancy Moleskines for me, just standard-issue office supply composition books.

I use them in order. Tibor Kalman once asked me why I didn't have a different notebook for every project. I have to admit, this would be more useful. But I don't. I fill each one up and then move to the next one, the projects all jumbled together. Starting with the third one, every one of them is numbered. Except for two at the very beginning that used gridded paper, they have blank, unlined pages. I hate gridded paper (but not as much as lined paper.) There have been times when it's been really difficult to get unlined composition books, which I gather are oddly unpopular. One time I found a supplier who would only sell them in bulk and I bought a whole boxful. I thought these would last the rest of my life, but I gave a lot away, which I regret. Now they're gone.

... continues

His nibs gives me grief because I'm enamored with blank notebooks. I'll be in a bookstore or stationery store and go missing and he'll find me looking at the stacks of blank notebooks of various sorts. When we moved from the bucolic village to the fair ville I gave loads of the simple composition books that Bierut describes away to an outfit that stocks supplies for teachers. My stash is growing again because there is something about blank books that calls to me.

I've started an exercise similar to (although not as arty as) Michael Bierut's. I wish I'd started decades ago. I'm on my second book and continuing forward.

My notebook of choice these days fits into my back pocket and goes on walks with me and sits beside me as I read. I also have a composition book that captures to-do lists and other bits and pieces I want to hang on to.

My inspiration for starting the exercise was a guy named Paul Madonna, who fills notebooks with his sketches and drawings and notes. He has a passel of them on the shelf in his studio (not 85 yet) and flips back in them when he's looking for information or inspiration. His conscientiousness about maintaining the notebooks and adding content struck me as a "good" thing.

Notebooks are a "good" thing.


DesignObserver - an interesting read
Paul Madonna's site

Labels: design, life, paperpensandglue, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  6:27 PM|| |

Malcolm Gladwell on spaghetti sauce

The videos at ted.com are pretty cool.

We saw Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and -- most recently -- Outliers and also staff writer for The New Yorker) last night at the City Arts & Lectures series at Herbst Theatre ("in conversation" with Kevin Berger, Salon) with tickets my brother gave his nibs for Christmas.

What a funny, bright guy Gladwell is. Sharp. Verbal. Quick.

I really don't care if you think he dumbs down science or puts his own spin on things. I think he'd be a great guy to hang out with at a coffee shop and discuss the world and what he was working on.

I'll be looking for his writing in The New Yorker even more than I was before.

Bits from last night.

KB: You start Outliers talking about hockey players (and why successful professional hockey players are usually born in January, February, and March). Why?

MG: Well, because I'm Canadian.

Jeb Bush quote about the struggles he had to reach where he is today, which MG characterized as an "heroic struggle against advantage."

MG talked about the Beatles and how they became the best band evah. He mentioned that most people don't consider the fact that for years before they came to America and were discovered, they'd been the house band at a Hamburg strip club where they played eight hours a day for six days a week. Live. On stage. They were playing live (and getting better and better) for thousands of hours before they "made it."

"We have chosen to overlook the extraordinary discipline they devoted to their vocation."

We say, oh, they're talented. Or oh, they're lucky. They were neither. They played over a thousand live gigs before they "made it."

The talk was very interesting. Interesting enough that I'm Googling (Hi, Sergey! Hi, Larry!) as I speak. How many other videos are there out there of Gladwell doing his schtick.

He closed with a discussion of his mother, a brown Jamaican (as he called her), mixed race, and the advantages she had, and her parents, and her parents parents going back that made her what she is today.

His point is that just because you live here and are successful and don't worry where your next meal is coming from or where the fresh water is or the fuel you need to cook ... this all isn't due to the fact you worked so hard and sacrificed and were lucky but is more due to the fact that you were born into circumstances that put you where you are today.

Don't forget that.

Don't forget that those in less fortunate circumstances weren't born to your parents.

Or, as Phil Ochs would say

Labels: books, people, San Francisco, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  7:26 PM|| |

The Richest Gift - Travelers' Tales

Great tale. More great tales on the Travelers' Tales site.

[via a James O'Reilly tweet]

Labels: goodworks, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  6:34 PM|| |

[you have an ad clickthrough before salon.com feeds you the content]

Stephen King's God trip

On the 30th anniversary of "The Stand," the novelist confesses what haunts him about religion and today's politics.

By John Marks

Oct. 23, 2008 | In 1927, a little-known writer of horror stories named H.P. Lovecraft tried to put into words the secret of his diabolical craft. "The one test of the really weird is simply this," Lovecraft wrote in the introduction to "Supernatural Horror in Literature," "whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes or entities on the known universe's utmost rim."

That's a mouthful, and yet I swear, two decades or so ago, I had the very experience that Lovecraft describes while on an overnight bus trip from Dallas to a Christian youth camp in northern Minnesota. Most of the other teen campers flirted or gossiped or joked around. Some endured the long hours by reading Scripture, and in their own way, may have been grappling with "the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities." I was mesmerized by a less prescriptive but equally god-smitten work: Stephen King's epic of apocalypse, "The Stand."

This year, the novel "The Stand" turns 30, and far from fading into the dustbin of bygone bestsellers, King's great tale of plague seems more prescient than ever.

[more]

Labels: books, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  5:34 PM|| |

Esquire's 70 Greatest Sentences

Well, these sorts of things are always, "Why did they choose that?" "Why didn't they choose that?"

Sample sentences from the list:

Also, I shouldn't have to say this, but do not, under any circumstances, put Pop Rocks in your ass. --Stacey Grenrock Woods, Sex column, 2003

It showed a crowd of freaks bending over a dying fat man on a dark and lonely road, looking at a tattoo on his back which illustrated a crowd of freaks bending over a dying fat man on a . . . --Ray Bradbury, "The Illustrated Man," 1950

Many of the great sentences deal with sex, erections, and/or war.

Hm.


[via Grapes2.0]

Labels: culture, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  5:11 PM|| |

26th Annual Delacorte Press Contest, for a First Young Adult Novel
Deadline: 31Dec2008

The prize of a book contract (on the publisher's standard form) covering world rights for a hardcover and a paperback edition, including an advance and royalties, will be awarded annually to encourage the writing of contemporary young adult fiction. The award consists of $1,500 in cash and a $7,500 advance against royalties.

All federal, state, and local taxes, if any, are the winner's sole responsibility. Prizes are not transferrable and cannot be assigned. NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN.

ELIGIBILITY
1. The contest is open to U.S. and Canadian writers who have not previously published a young adult novel. Employees of Random House, Inc. and its subsidiaries and affiliates, and members of their families and households are not eligible.

2. Foreign-language manuscripts and translations are not eligible.

3. Manuscripts submitted to a previous Delacorte Press contest are not eligible.

Suitable for readers ages 12 to 18.
100-224 typewritten pages. Double-spaced.

Labels: contest, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:27 AM|| |

'Jurassic Park' author, 'ER' creator Crichton dies - CNN.com

RIP, Michael Crichton.

Crichton drove me nuts some times. His skepticism of global climate change and global warning encourage the nutcases.

STATE OF FEAR (2005) was lecturing and personal lobbying at its worse. The science wasn't true and Crichton based his story on "information" that wasn't.

Jeff Masters, chief meteorologist and co-founder of wunderground.com* reviewed the book and the science. Read it and see why my teeth grind when I think of that book.

That said, Crichton entertained me over the years. His tales were gripping. He was a smart guy who knew a lot and knew how to weave what he had into intriguing, page-turning books. He helped pay his way through college writing novels, medical thrillers. In 1969, Crichton won an Edgar for A CASE OF NEED, written under the pseudonym Jeffrey Hudson, probably because of its subject matter: abortion. (We're talking 1968 here.)

ANDROMEDA STRAIN, JURASSIC PARK and ER are fitting legacies.

RIP.




*(Weather Underground, a weather service of which our uphill neighbor, not William Ayers, is president of the BoD.)

Labels: books, environmentalism, people, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  5:10 PM|| |

Best Travel Writing - Love Story–Gold Winner: Los Muertos

Lovely story and timely with its Día de los Muertos theme.


[via a link from James O'Reilly's twitterfeed]

Labels: life, people, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  5:07 PM|| |

Etsy :: Oven Mitts

The perfect gift for your literary friends ... with a warped sense of humor.

Labels: culture, shopshopshop, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  6:20 PM|| |

Chris Buckley on Rush Limbaugh at the Daily Beast.

Hoo boy.

[...]

As these words were going out over the Excellence in Broadcasting network, my father's corpse was still warm. It was a day of passions, I know, and things get said in the heat of passion. But reading these words, in the cooler air of October—not that this October has been devoid of passion—well, as me old mater might say, I found them a bit…de trop.

That's French for "a bit much," and I'm putting it that way by way of stipulating that I am a card-carrying member of the Eastern seaboard, proletarian-despising media elite. My idea of roughage is arugula. I have not to date tasted moose meat and hope never to, unless it is served to me at La Grenouille, by Charles Masson, personally and under glass. As for politics, we elites have always inclined toward the black candidate who grew up with a single mother on food stamps, as opposed to the third-generation Annapolis cadet.

I am having these pensées (more French, learned at an elite New England boarding school) about el Rushbo because a few days ago, following my J'accuse! (okay, okay, I'll cut it out)—following my "I'm voting for Barack" teachable moment in this space, I received, amidst other howls of outrage and a pink slip from NR, formal notification that I had arrived, career-wise. It took the form of a headline:

LIMBAUGH MOCKS BUCKLEY OVER OBAMA.

[...]

Well, you can mock Christopher Buckley, but reap your whirlwind, sir.

Labels: people, politics, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  5:50 PM|| |

NCTE Inbox Blog: Tips on a Good Blog Entry

# Choose an attention-getting and accurate title.
Like a newspaper headline, a good blog title draws readers in. It’s your chance to convince a reader to take a look at what you’ve written. But no bait-and-switch! Make sure that your title reflects the content of the entry.

# State your opinion clearly.
Take a stand and make it clear. Your blog isn’t the place for meandering. If your opinion isn’t appropriate for the general public, choose a different subject. If you wouldn't stand up in front of your colleagues and share your opinion, don’t post it on your blog.

# Back things up with specific stories and examples.
Once you state your opinion, explain it. Share stories or examples that show why you hold your opinion. The advice we give students applies: Show. Don’t Tell!

and seven more.

NCTE: National Council of Teachers of English

via a Lester Smith tweet.

Labels: blog, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:16 AM|| |

This time to Baltimore and Bouchercon.

Have to be at the airport by 5A, which means up by 4A in order to get some espresso in my system.

Walked down the hill tonight for a gathering to talk about our neighborhood community center, Tel-Hi. Our friend Donna is the development director. She spends her days raising money for the center. Another friend, Gail, is on the board and spoke tonight and sent e-mails to people she knew on the invite list, saying you must come, will I see you there.

Met some nice people. Bumped into some old friends. The hosts had a Dali on their wall, a portrait of the wife at age maybe eight twelve with her mother. A definite Dali, but no melting watches or weirdnesses. Wonderful place filled with interesting stuff.

Wonderful place. Genuine people. Good cause.

We -- well, I -- missed the debate. We walked down the hill and over to the gathering and I could hear Obama's voice coming out of open windows as neighbors watched the debate we'd jettisoned in order to support a good cause. I'm sure I'll be able to pick up on what happened at the debate some time between now and when the next debate happens.

See you 'round some time after I get back. I get back late Monday. Give me at least Tuesday to veg out on the couch and restore my social equilibrium.

His nibs will be home for Fleet Week and the Blue Angels, but I'll miss all that. C'est la vie.

Baltimore here I come.

Labels: life, mystery, San Francisco, travel, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  9:09 PM|| |

A toast to the late crime writer Jim Crumley - Eddie Muller in today's Chron

Labels: books, mystery, news, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  3:14 PM|| |

The Last Tour by Wm. Finnegan. A New Yorker essay on brothers Travis and Willard Twiggs. Their lives. Their deaths.

Sad, sad, sad.

"I just don't get that. I'm having a real hard time with it. I can't believe he would leave me, can't believe he would leave us, leave our girls."

She took more deep breaths. "But he really left us a long time ago. He tried to come back. But he couldn't. That was not my husband out there."

Labels: history, people, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  6:55 PM|| |

Ephron doesn't have as rosy a take on Hillary's speech last night as I do:

[...]

"My favorite part of Hillary Clinton's speech last night was when she admonished her followers not to put their affection for her over the issues. When she reminded them that what's at stake is far more crucial than their loyalty to her. When she reproved them for thinking for even a moment that her historic thrilling campaign was more important than the real campaign to defeat the Republicans.

"Where any of her followers could have gotten the idea doesn't seem to have crossed her mind. The fish stinks from the head down. The Clintons' narcissism (and yes, I know, it's an overused term but if there was ever a moment for it in our national life, this is it) perfumed every bit of Hillary's campaign, and it leaked down to her contributors and followers. "Were you in it for me" was her funniest line of the night."

[...]

Read the entire column.

Labels: election2008, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  12:13 PM|| |

FORA.tv - Videos Covering Today's Top Social, Political, and Tech Issues

FORA.tv is advertising for unpaid interns on CraigsList.

Toddled off to see what's up with that. I'd seen a stack of FORA.tv lit over at the Commonwealth Club offices on Saturday.

Long Now talks. Aspen Institute talks. Commonwealth Club talks. ...

Here's a Roger Rosenblatt interview with Amy Tan at the Chautauqua Institution on July 10, 2008. The interview is broken out in sections. If you only want to hear Tan speak on "Writer's Memory" you can click straight to the spot.

E.L. Doctorow on the Problematic Nature of Writing Novels

The indexing is superb. You can select one of the broad subject ranges and then one of the sub-sections. You can search for subjects. You can find all videos from the Hoover Institution.

Brilliant stuff.

Labels: culture, media, politics, video, web2.0, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  1:09 PM|| |

Here is my "find out something new every day" for today courtesy of a post Dangerous Bill (Penrose) made to misc.writing.

Read the Wikipedia entry about California license plate 2GAT123.

(I knew about 555-0100 to 555-0199, but this license plate biz is news to me and news to his nibs as well.)

Labels: factoid, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  5:41 PM|| |

Orwell's Diaries

The Orwell Prize, Britain's pre-eminent prize for political writing, is publishing George Orwell's diaries as a blog. From 9th August 2008, Orwell's domestic and political diaries (from 9th August 1938 until October 1942) will be posted in real-time, exactly 70 years after the entries were written.

Orwell's 'domestic' diaries begin on 9th August 1938/2008; his 'political' diaries (which are further categorised as 'Morocco', 'Pre-war' and 'Wartime') begin on 7th September 1938/2008.

The diaries are exactly as Orwell wrote them. Where there are original spelling errors, they are indicated by a ° following the offending word.

[via Laughing Squid]

Labels: blog, people, webstuff, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  6:23 PM|| |

The Strothman Agency (of which I've written before) dropped a line to say

"The Strothman Agency is moving. As of July 28th, we will be located at 6 Beacon Street, Suite 810, Boston, MA 02108. This will also be our new mailing address."

Labels: writing, writing-market

   posted by Sal Towse at  5:39 PM|| |

Corpus of American English

Brilliant app.

The Corpus of American English (not to be confused with the American National Corpus) is the first large corpus of contemporary American English. It is freely available online, and it is related to other large corpora that we have created.

The corpus contains more than 360 million words of text, including 20 million words each year from 1990-2007, and it is equally divided among spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic texts (more information). The corpus will also be updated at least twice each year from this point on, and will therefore serve as a unique record of linguistic changes in American English.

The interface allows you to search for exact words or phrases, wildcards, lemmas, part of speech, or any combinations of these. You can search for surrounding words (collocates) within a ten-word window (e.g. all nouns somewhere near chain, all adjectives near woman, or all verbs near key).

The corpus also allows you to easily limit searches by frequency and compare the frequency of words, phrases, and grammatical constructions, in at least two main ways:

* By genre: comparisons between spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic, or even between sub-genres (or domains), such as movie scripts, sports magazines, newspaper editorial, or scientific journals
* Over time: compare different years from 1990 to the present time

You can also easily carry out semantically-based queries of the corpus. For example, you can contrast and compare the collocates of two related words (little/small, democrats/republicans, men/women), to determine the difference in meaning or use between these words. You can find the frequency and distribution of synonyms for nearly 60,000 words and also compare their frequency in different registers, and also use these word lists as part of other queries. Finally, you can easily create your own lists of semantically-related words, and then use them directly as part of the query.

Labels: app, resource, wordstuff, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  5:26 PM|| |

Hillsdale College - William F. Buckley: "This website contains the complete writings of William F. Buckley, Jr. Transcripts from his long-running TV show, Firing Line are available at the Hoover Institution."

Labels: history, journalism, people, resource, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  6:46 PM|| |

MOLESKINE -- DETOUR: SPECIAL EXHIBITION OF ARTISTS' MOLESKINE NOTEBOOKS

Intriguing what folks have done with their Moleskine notebooks.

Eric Hoffer used Boorum & Pease Memo Books, 4 1/2 x 7 1/4, 98 pages. There are 131 notebooks in the archives, dating from 1949-1977. Hoffer used his notebooks as places to stash his thoughts, which he would later retrieve and craft into his published writings. In all, the Hoover Institute, which holds the Hoffer archives, has seventy-five feet of Hoffer work.

Paul Madonna uses yet another type of small notebook, sketchbook. Neither Moleskine nor B&P, I don't think.

I am an obsessive note-taker, carrying a book on me at all times. I have a theory that we have only so much space available in our brains to remember thoughts. A small percentage of ideas are realized, and if we waste energy holding onto what may later turn out to be a trite idea, we may have missed or forgotten the one of gold. he says.

He revisits his notebooks frequently looking for ideas for his work. In his studio, he has a shelf holding all his notebooks since he began his journey. All his drawings ... he can go back and find something he drew three years ago and remember the angle of a gable or the detail on a portico. Or he can go back to when he first started drawing faces and see how he's changed. He can find snippets of conversation he's overheard or ideas of something to draw. I look at his notebooks and think, wow. This guy is really focussed on what he does. This guy has an archive of thoughts and sketches that will feed his muse for a long long time to come.

I always intend to keep a notebook that captures it all. I have a few Moleskine notebooks that I've bought (because I like blank, bound books) and which the younger nib has given me (accompanied by "Write, Mom!" sorts of notes). I usually wind up, though, with scatterings and scraps of paper with dates and notes and words I need to look up, meanings known but not really, allusions known but not really, quotes that appeal. ... The scraps of paper are often the tab end of a full-page ad on non-magazine stock. Know what I mean? You tear out the ad and there, at the back end of the magazine, is a strip of paper stock about 3" wide and the height of the magazine.

I sorted and stacked Monday for the FirstMonday meeting at my place that night. I wound up with a large envelope (picked out of the daily mail, 'natch) filled with these scraps of paper. (And that's just the bits and pieces lying around uncaged.) Later I'll re-copy them onto blank notebook pages but ... where's the retrieval mechanism except for thumbing through old notebooks?

When world famous author Sal dies, there will be some archive of what made her tick besides the unreachable archives of what she wrote on a computer and posted to the Web lo' these many years past. There will be dozens of half-used notebooks where Sal started thinking about keeping track of her thoughts and where she was and where she thought she was going and then ...

Do you use a notebook to stash and store anything? Pictures? Notes? Thoughts? Do you draw in your notebook? Have a grid that you adhere to? Add color. Write lies?

Labels: life, people, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  9:13 AM|| |

Anna Quindlen's Commencement Speech: Mount Holyoke College, 23 May 1999

[...]

Most commencement speeches suggest you take up something or other: the challenge of the future, a vision of the twenty-first century. Instead I'd like you to give up. Give up the backpack. Give up the nonsensical and punishing quest for perfection that dogs too many of us through too much of our lives. It is a quest that causes us to doubt and denigrate ourselves, our true selves, our quirks and foibles and great leaps into the unknown, and that is bad enough.

But this is worse: that someday, sometime, you will be somewhere, maybe on a day like today--a berm overlooking a pond in Vermont, the lip of the Grand Canyon at sunset. Maybe something bad will have happened: you will have lost someone you loved, or failed at something you wanted to succeed at very much.

And sitting there, you will fall into the center of yourself. You will look for that core to sustain you. If you have been perfect all your life, and have managed to meet all the expectations of your family, your friends, your community, your society, chances are excellent that there will be a black hole where your core ought to be.

Don't take that chance. Begin to say no to the Greek chorus that thinks it knows the parameters of a happy life when all it knows is the homogenization of human experience. Listen to that small voice from inside you, that tells you to go another way. George Eliot wrote, "It is never too late to be what you might have been." It is never too early, either. And it will make all the difference in the world. Take it from someone who has left the backpack full of bricks far behind. Every day feels light as a feather.

Labels: life, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  2:01 PM|| |

Carnival of the Criminal Minds

A rotating editorship collecting the best of the best crime fiction blogging.

Labels: blog, books, mystery, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  4:16 PM|| |

http://www.internet-resources.com/writers/

Hit counter stands at 999439. When it rolls over to zeroes, I plan to swop it for a different counter.

Mercy me. A million hits. Who woulda thunk back when that this day would come to pass?

Labels: stats, URL, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  12:54 PM|| |

A Rebellion and an Awkward Embrace
By PEGGY NOONAN
February 1, 2008 / Wall Street Journal

In the most exciting and confounding election cycle of my lifetime, Rudy Giuliani, the Prince of the City, is out because he was about to lose New York, John Edwards is out, the Clintons are fighting for their historical reputations, and the stalwart conservative New York Post has come out strong and stinging for Barack Obama. If you had asked me in December if I would write that sentence in February, I would have said: Um, no.

Noonan's column continues ...

Labels: news, people, politics, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  7:00 PM|| |

The top 12 'Top 10' lists of 2007

Brilliant set of links from Mark Morford.

Labels: San Francisco, webstuff, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  3:14 PM|| |

The World Question Center -- 2008:
WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?

So far, 165 contributors, including Alan Alda, John Baez, Greg Benford, Aubrey de Grey, Ricahrd Dawkins, Ray Kurzweil, J Craig Venter ...

Interesting ...

e.g. Stewart Brand


[...]

The message finally got through. Good old stuff sucks. Sticking with the fine old whatevers is like wearing 100% cotton in the mountains; it's just stupid.

Give me 100% not-cotton clothing, genetically modified food (from a farmers' market, preferably), this-year's laptop, cutting-edge dentistry and drugs.

The Precautionary Principle tells me I should worry about everything new because it might have hidden dangers. The handwringers should worry more about the old stuff. It's mostly crap.

(New stuff is mostly crap too, of course. But the best new stuff is invariably better than the best old stuff.)

[via Mark Morford]

Labels: life, people, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  2:54 PM|| |

Word out in today's SFChronicle that Sara Zarr -- whom I met many many moons ago at a WTQ gathering of misc.writers, back when she lived in this fair city, before she moved to Utah -- is a finalist for the National Book Award for The Story of a Girl in the Young People's Literature division.

Yippee! Yahoo! for Sara!!!!!

Sara's Web presence: The Stories of a Girl

Sara is published. Sara is a finalist for a National Book Award.

Sara no longer engages with folks on misc.writing.

Hmmm. Is there a connection?

(A slight one, perhaps. Her success is primarily due to ... Sara is talented, and determined, and focussed and ...)

Yay, hooray for Sara!

Labels: blog, books, URL, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:04 AM|| |

A request from DebbieRO, my former Inkspot.com boss lady, on her Inkygirl blog.

If you have a link to Inkspot.com, PLEASE DELETE IT.
Pass the word.

A plea to anyone linking to Inkspot.com

Labels: URL, webstuff, wordstuff, writing, writing-market

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:42 PM|| |

Coach Stops Runaway Horse by Biting Ear

Labels: news, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  2:33 PM|| |

Asha's back. Her blog pics today are of Tonopah, Nevada.

Tonopah. Check it out! It's not just an alliterative town name found in an old Lowell George song.

And I've been from Tucson to Tucumcari
Tehachapi to Tonopah
Driven every kind of rig that's ever been made
Driven the backroads so I wouldn't get weighed
And if you give me weed, whites and wine
And you show me a sign
And I'll be willin' to be movin' *

(* as sung not only by Little Feat but also by Ronstadt and others)

Asha noted that the Grand Old Lady of Tonopah, the Mizpah Hotel, is For Sale! [PDF]

Sounds perfect for a writers' retreat, doesn't it? Out in the middle of nowhere, halfway between Las Vegas and Reno. Two bars. (for those convivial evenings) Two restaurants. (soze you don't have to go far to find eats). No gaming license. (fewer distractions for you)

Gutted and rebuilt in 1976.

56 rooms, including 6 parlor suites, all with private baths and thermostatically controlled heating and air conditioning. Fine Brussels carpeting was laid throughout, new stained glass windows were hand-crafted for the first floor and the finest of wall paper was hung on all of the walls. The exterior was given a face lift and park benches and iron lighting fixtures installed along the sidewalk. The old bowling alley and other buildings were also incorporated into the expansion.

On the National Registry of Historic Places. Resident ghosts! Wyatt Earp tended bar here! Dempsey worked as a bouncer!

Take a look at Asha's Tonopah photos and travelogue.

ONLY $1.5m for the Mizpah Hotel! Perfect writers' retreat, I think.

What'd'ya think?

Labels: real estate, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:29 AM|| |

2007 is the silver anniversary of the contest.

Jim Gleeson, Madison, WI, is the grand prize winner this year with

Gerald began--but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them "permanently" meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash--to pee.

Additional prize winners here: 2007 Results

re the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

[...]

Conscripted numerous times to be a judge in writing contests that were, in effect, bad writing contests but with prolix, overlong, and generally lengthy submissions, he [Professor Scott Rice] struck upon the idea of holding a competition that would be honest and -- best of all -- invite brief entries. Furthermore, it had the ancillary advantage of one day allowing him to write about himself in the third person.

By campus standards, the first year of the BLFC was a resounding success, attracting three entries. The following year, giddy with the prospect of even further acclaim, Rice went public with the contest and, with the boost of a sterling press release by Public Information Officer Richard Staley, attracted national and international attention. Staley's press release drew immediate front-page coverage in cultural centers like Boston, Houston, and Miami. By the time the BLFC concluded with live announcement of the winner, Gail Cane, on CBS Morning News (since defunct through no fault of the BLFC), it had drawn coverage from Time, Smithsonian, People Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Manchester Guardian, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Australian Radio, and the BBC. Most important, over 10,000 wretched writers had tried their hands at outdoing Bulwer's immortal opener, with the best entries soon appearing in the first of a series published by Penguin Books, It Was a Dark and Stormy Night (1984).

Since 1983 the BLFC has continued to draw acclaim and opprobrium. Thousands continue to enter yearly ...

[via Bob Sloan at misc.writing]

Labels: contest, wordstuff, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:02 AM|| |

Interview with Elizabeth George in the June 2007 WRITER Magazine. [Caution: PDF!]

[snippet]

You talk a great deal about the craft of writing. What do you mean?

It's important for beginning writers to learn the craft, the basics, of writing. You can't teach somebody to be a creative artist, to have talent or passion, but you can teach somebody craft. Whether they can apply it in an artistic fashion, well, that's in the hands of the gods. But they can certainly learn what the craft of writing is.

Labels: books, people, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  6:36 PM|| |

Spinning is the blog of Susan Marie Rose Maciog Gibb.

Who?

Interesting look into the life of a reader, someone self-defined as "Learning life through Writing, Reading, Traditional Archery, Nature and Harvest, Computer Hardware, and watching people."

The Web is a wonder these days, providing loads of opportunity to watch people act, roleplay (perhaps), wig out, gracefully sail through upsetting circumstances, overreact, underreact. ...

Find someone on a newsgroup, in a blog, posting comments in reaction to an article. Imagine that person as a character in the story you're writing. What you see on the Web gives you the barebones, the skeleton of the character. It's up to you to flesh out the motivations, insecurities, craziness, saneness and make the character your own.

There's been discussion here and elsewhere about whether (or not) dooce is a blog worth reading. I think so. Talk about finding someone who gives you loads of opportunity to peer into their lives!

"but she whines and whines and I'm tired of her whining about her boring life," some say. Well. I'm tired of bombast and vicious rants, which is why I stopped reading certain blogs. I don't read dooce daily. I do pop in every month or so to get a flavor of the personality. She would make such a good character in a story I haven't quite cooked up yet.

What a brave new world this is, where no matter what sort of person we are or wish we were, we can read about others like or unlike us (and others can read our ramblings and dish with friends about how witless we can be and so on ad infinitum).

Labels: blog, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  6:00 PM|| |

Interesting read in the Bostonia that came in the mail last week re Parker's donation of his archives to the Boston University Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, his writing methods, his PhD thesis ("The Violent Hero, Wilderness Heritage, and Urban Reality: A Study of the Private Eye in the Novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald") and more.

The article got me poking around on the Web and I came across his blog and an interview by Eric Berlin (3.2005) which included this bit of advice:

EB: Thank you. Classic question to any author: any advice to aspiring writers out there who are looking to become novelists?

RBP: Write it, send it in. There isn't anything else to do. Somebody asked me at a signing the other day if I have any tips for a first-time writer and I said, "Yeah, try and write good." There isn't anything I can tell them - there are no tips.

There are very successful writers who don't write anything the way I do. John Updike, who I know, and who is a nice guy and a great writer, does not write in any way the way I do. So you can't say, "You better write like me!" I mean, you can write like Updike, that will work..

If you need tips, it's almost too late for you. If you can't fix it, you can't send it to me and have me fix it. You write it, you send it in, and if somebody at a publishing house thinks they can make a profit by publishing it, they will. And if they think they can't, they won't. And I can't make them do it, your Uncle Harry can't make them do it.

I suppose Michael Jackson or somebody can write a bad book and somebody will publish it at the moment. His life story would be swell. But other than that kind of celebrity hogwash, actual writing...

[At this point, we're interrupted by Mr. Parker's PR rep. We're told that that we have five more minutes, and we're asked how everything is going. Mr. Parker deadpans, "We're doing my favorite thing. I'm talking about myself."]

So no, I don't have any advice. There are still publishers who will read unsolicited manuscripts. They'll read them all, but they may read five pages in and say, "Ooh..." And I think that works. I think that if you have a manuscript, I can read one page, or maybe half a page, and know whether you have any talent or not. But the odds are long, most people don't have it. And you're competing with a lot of other submissions, but some of them are written in crayon. I mean, some are so apparently tripe that you read one sentence and throw it out.

There are also agents listed in the Literary Marketplace. I got published without an agent. You need an agent to get read at some houses, which require agent's submission - they're listed in one of those books, Writer's Marketplace or Literary Marketplace. But they can't get you published if you can't get published yourself, except that they can get you read places where you might not get read otherwise. And they've done the initial screening: if they take you on, the publisher will give you more attention. The publisher saves the trouble of bothering the initial editor.

It's been so long since I've been a beginning writer that I don't really know what it's like anymore. I don't know what the market is like. I don't know whether it would really be better to find an agent or just get published and then get an agent. If you get published, you can get an agent easy enough. And you need one: an agent is very valuable.

But the one thing you have to do is to write it. With non-fiction, you may be able to get a deal on a sample chapter and an outline, but with fiction, it's made on the writing. Non-fiction can be the idea, the story, or whatever. Fiction is in the execution. Write it, and send it to somebody who can publish it. Not me!

Labels: blog, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  6:09 PM|| |

Labeled "THE GREATEST OBITUARY EVER" by Poor Mojo Newswire

Count Gottfried von Bismarck, who was found dead on Monday aged 44, was a louche German aristocrat with a multi-faceted history as a pleasure-seeking heroin addict, hell-raising alcoholic, flamboyant waster and a reckless and extravagant host of homosexual orgies.

The great-great-grandson of Prince Otto, Germany's Iron Chancellor and architect of the modern German state, the young von Bismarck showed early promise as a brilliant scholar, but led an exotic life of gilded aimlessness that attracted the attention of the gossip columns from the moment he arrived in Oxford in 1983 and hosted a dinner at which the severed heads of two pigs were placed at either end of the table.

When not clad in the lederhosen of his homeland, he cultivated an air of sophisticated complexity by appearing in women's clothes, set off by lipstick and fishnet stockings. This aura of dangerous "glamour" charmed a large circle of friends and acquaintances drawn from the jeunesse dorée of the age; many of them knew him at Oxford, where he made friends such as Darius Guppy and Viscount Althorp and became an enthusiastic, rubber-clad member of the Piers Gaveston Society and the drink-fuelled Bullingdon and Loders clubs.

Perhaps unsurprisingly he managed only a Third in Politics, Philosophy and Economics.

[... Continues]

Labels: obit, people, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  1:41 PM|| |

For Villaraigosa: Sex, lies and eyes that pry - commentary by Timothy Rutten in the LA Times.

Is this affair a newsworthy tidbit? Is it any business of ours? Is it the business of people who watch Salinas on Telemundo or who live in the city for which Villaraigosa is mayor?

Is it newsworthy only as relates to whether Salinas should've kept covering the news? Had she told her bosses about the relationship? Does it matter whether Salinas and Villaraigosa were "just friends" or lovers? If she told her bosses "just friends" and not "lovers," should that have affected the limits her bosses put on her reportage?

Oh, the questions, the reckless behavior, the conflict-of-interest.

Does it even matter except as a way of selling the news in an industry where the more news sold the better?

My favorite part of Rutten's commentary is his reprise of the late Abe Rosenthal's standard in such cases:

It doesn't matter if a reporter sleeps with elephants, so long as they don't cover the circus.

Labels: California, news, people, politics, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  5:55 PM|| |

Dashiell Hammett's old studio apartment is up for sale.

(That would be me that socketsite.com refers to as their "plugged-in reader.")

307 sq ft. *only* $249K

Labels: books, real estate, San Francisco, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  4:58 PM|| |

Darwin Correspondence Project

Welcome to the Darwin Correspondence Project’s new web site. The main feature of the site is an online database with the complete, searchable, texts of around 5,000 letters written by and to Charles Darwin up to the year 1865. This includes all the surviving letters from the Beagle voyage - online for the first time - and all the letters from the years around the publication of Origin of species in 1859.

Labels: science, URL, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  6:13 PM|| |

Well, looks like she's serious.

Miss Snark, the literary agent, has retired from blogging. She'll keep agenting, she sez, and It wasn't a specific event. The questions were increasingly ones I'd already answered or ones I couldn't answer.

Adieu, Miss Snark. Bon chance. It's been a grand run.

(Miss Snark promises to keep the blog up with all its tasty bits of knowledge for the foreseeable future. ... and, no, she's not writing a book based on the blog.)

Labels: blog, URL, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  5:46 PM|| |

The site for all you'd want to know about The Pulitzer Prizes

• Resources
• Archive of winners (including Full texts, photographs and cartoons [...] for Journalism winners from 1995 - 2006)
• History
• Luncheon Remarks

Labels: journalism, URL, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  4:47 PM|| |

Classic Shorts brings you the texts of classic short stories.

The majority of the stories are old (classic) enough to be out of copyright. How did they get a Tobias Wolff short though? Or GGM?

Sample shorts:

• One of These Days by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield
• The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell
• Hunters in the Snow by Tobias Wolff

[via StumbleUpon]

Labels: URL, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  12:55 PM|| |

I told author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf a while back that at some point I'd get around to telling folks how much I like her "actually writing blog."

LeBoeuf is an inspiration in her willingness to say "I'm screwing around and need to get back to work" and her "read this blog and got these hints" and her "I'm working on XYZ and it is not going well" and, of course, her other writerly-related posts. This blog consists only of writerly-related posts and I like that focus.

Sometimes she posts too little because she's actually writing or off at Viable Paradise or busy doing something else, and then she's back on a semi-regular basis and ... life is good.

I like her snippets.

I like her focus.

I even like her whining.

Labels: blog, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  8:45 AM|| |

I've decided to keep writing markets "stuff" at the writers' resources site from this day forth. The posts were taking up too much real estate.

The resources blog will carry the markets information I've been carrying here. Coolio writer stuff may wind up in both this blog and that. Info on the writers' resources site will be updated to include new markets information and links wigati. The resources blog will probably be updated from its 2002 look some day as well.

From now on writing markets info will live there not here. Those of you who read here for great apps, interesting sites, San Francisco foodie news and life, the universe and prayer flags can continue on uninterrupted. Those who only cared about the markets info will find their focus more focussed at the other blog.

This has been a management postie. We now return you to the normal blog content, sans writing markets information.

Labels: blog, internet resources for writers, URL, writing, writing-market

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:11 AM|| |

Author Terry Ryan, 61, dies in S.F. home

I've been sorting through boxes of books lately. Came across Terry's book just a couple days back. I hadn't realized she was ailing.

Survived by her nine siblings and Pat Holt, her partner of almost a quarter-century. Pat and Terry were married on Valentine's Day weekend, 2004. The state nullified that marriage.

That wrong can never be righted now. Here's to the day things change for those who carry on the good fight.

And here's to Terry, may she be remembered fondly.

Labels: obit, San Francisco, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  4:10 PM|| |

Update your Bloglines or whatever it is you use to track RSS feeds or whatever. Anna Louise Genovese (although still a consulting editor at Tor) has started a freelance editorial service called Aleuromancy and has transferred her blog from anna louise's Journal to Aleuromancy.net.

Go thee thither.

Labels: blog, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  12:11 PM|| |

DRO has posted her updated "Tax Tips and Resources For Freelance Writers" over at InkyGirl.

Here's my annual updated list of useful tax resources for freelance writers. Sadly (for me, anyway, since I live in Canada), most of the info is specific to the U.S., but I did manage to find some info specific to Canada and other countries, listed below in the "international tax info" section partway down this list.

I was unable to find ANY tax-related resources of use to writers outside of North America. Suggestions welcome! [...]

Labels: information, URL, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  12:05 PM|| |

Today in Letters: Letters and Diary Entries from this Day in Literary History.

Today (08 Mar) brings us

Lord Byron: March 8, 1816

A letter to Thomas Moore.

I rejoice in your promotion as Chairman and Charitable Steward, etc., etc. These be dignities which await only the virtuous. But then, recollect you are six and thirty, (I speak this enviously—not of your age, but the "honour—love—obedience—troops of friends," which accompany it,) and I have eight years good to run before I arrive at such hoary perfection; by which time,—if I am at all,—it will probably be in a state of grace or progressing merits.

[...]

Labels: blog, books, history, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  5:04 PM|| |

The Curmudgeon cranks on about Craigslist ads that offer next to nothing (or worse!) as payment for wordsmithing.

Yahoo! sez: The Curmudgeon's chief complaint: would-be content providers that offer wordsmiths no pay. More specific no-nos: ads offering piddling in-kind compensation, ads with dubious payment schemes, ads offering nothing but "exposure," and ads offering no pay for ridiculous assignments.

And the ad-meisters fire back.

Entertaining all around.

[nod to Yahoo! picks]

Labels: URL, webstuff, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:43 PM|| |

Recent Earthquakes - Info for event nc40193932:

A moderate earthquake occurred at 4:19:54 AM (PST) on Monday, February 26, 2007.

The magnitude 5.4 event occurred 52 km (32 miles) W of Ferndale, CA.

The hypocentral depth is 0.4 km (0.2 miles)


Right at the seaward edge of the Cascadia subduction zone.

We'll be having dinner with Susan Hough on Thursday after her author talk at Kepler's down in Menlo Park for her newest book: Richter's Scale: Measure of an Earthquake, Measure of a Man

(In the area? Stop on by! Thursday March 01, 2007 -- 7:30 p.m. at Kepler's in Menlo Park)

(Buy now!)

I'm sure the our dinner conversation talk will turn to local earthquakes and Cascadia and Hayward and San Andreas. It always does.

Labels: book promotion, books, bookstores, life, quakes, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:26 AM|| |

For those set-upon (and blessed) folks who organize writers' conferences, Miss Snark has a most excellent post detailing the care and feeding of guest agents.

Miss Snark's must-haves give a peek into the world of agents.

Next time you're at a conference, take an agent to lunch or buy one a drink, just because. You may never use their services but your karma will be polished.

Labels: blog, book promotion, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:38 PM|| |

News from Internet Resources for Writers:

Checked and updated all links on Business/Submissions.

The page includes subsections:

• Grants, Prizes, & Contests - lists
  
• Markets - market listing resources on the Web
  
• Scams - known scams and how to avoid them
  
• Submitting - information on manuscript formats, queries, writing a synopsis and more.

I also added a separate header for our Miss Snark's blog.

Occurs to me that at some point I need to port all the content over to a CSS-driven revamped site.

sigh

Not today.

Labels: internet resources for writers, URL, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  3:05 PM|| |

Received a note from my SinCNorCal cohort with word that Barbara Seranella died Sunday while awaiting a liver transplant.

Sad news for those who'd known her.

More information at her site.

Life's too short for some. This is, as one of her titles said, an unacceptable death.

Less than three weeks ago, I blogged that her New Year's message showed such spirit.

We all had hoped ...

Labels: mystery, obit, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:04 AM|| |

Christopher Lockhart, Executive Story Editor at ICM has a blog called THE INSIDE PITCH: a Hollywood Executive answers questions from screenwriters.

What applies to screenwriters can also apply to writers.

Take a look-see, if screenwriting or fiction writing be your smack.

Labels: blog, URL, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:05 PM|| |

Ten Rules for Suspense Fiction
Brian Garfield

[Editor's note: In 1994, John Grisham revealed to NEWSWEEK that he credited the following article by Brian Garfield with giving him the tools to create his ground-breaking thriller, THE FIRM , as well as subsequent books. Garfield himself is a noted bestselling novelist, as well as a screenwriter, producer, and nonfiction writer. He won the Edgar Award for HOPSCOTCH, which was made into the prize-winning movie of the same name, starring Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson. For more of this renowned author's credits, please see his bio at the end of this article.]

The English call them thrillers, and in our clumsier way we call them novels of suspense.

They contain elements of mystery, romance and adventure, but they don't fall into restrictive categories. And they're not circumscribed by artificial systems of rules like those that govern the whodunit or the gothic romance.

The field is wide enough to include Alistair MacLean, Allen Drury, Helen Maclnnes, Robert Crichton, Graham Greene, and Donald E. Westlake. (Now there's a parlay.) The market is not limited by the stigmata of genre labels, and therefore the potential for success of a novel in this field is unrestricted: DAY OF THE JACKAL, for instance, was a first novel.

The game's object: To perch the reader on edge --- to keep him flipping pages to find out what's going to happen next.

The game's rules are harder to define; they are few, and these are elastic. The seasoned professional learns the rules mainly in order to know how to break them to good effect.

But such as they are, the rules can be defined as follows.

continues ...

Labels: writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  6:00 PM|| |

Seranella wrote a New Year's op-ed for the LA Times to clue us in on how she's doing since July 2005, when she had two liver transplants, followed by a month-long coma.

I HAVE DEDICATED every shooting star, broken wishbone and blown-out birthday candle to the same thing during the last year: I want my health back.

We want the same for you too, Barbara.

op-ed continues

(Seranella's ninth Munch Mancini murder mystery, DEADMAN'S SWITCH, is due out in April from St. Martins/Minotaur.)

[Thanks for the heads-up on the article, Miss Snark.]

Labels: mystery, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  1:55 PM|| |

Agent Kristin Nelson has a post up on PubRants giving her "year in statistics."

Heading up the list:

20,800 (Estimated number of queries read and responded to in 2006)

54 (Number of full manuscripts requested and read)

8 (Number of new clients taken on this year)

21 (Number of books sold this year—not counting subsidiary rights stuff)

6 (Number of projects currently under submission)

The numbers are daunting, aren't they? But when the nights are long and the wind is howling 'round your door and your spirits are low, remember, the fine words of Wendy Chatley Green:

The odds are against you, but they are less against you if you actually write and submit something.

Or, as Miss Snark says, it doesn't really matter what the acceptance/rejection rate is for a given agent or publisher when you're submitting your work. What matters is your work. She signed a client who had had eighty-one rejection letters before she signed him. It only takes one agent to say yes, Miss Snark reminds us.

Labels: writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  6:02 PM|| |

Ever wonder what it takes to get a cartoon published in the New Yorker? Wonder no more. ...

A post at Drawn! contains links to a three-part series over at the Huffington Post in which Matthew Diffee interviews Bob Mankoff.

There's a very interesting read over at the Huffington Post. New Yorker cartoonist Matthew Diffee has posted a 3-part discussion with Bob Mankoff, the magazine's infamous cartoon editor. The two discuss the nature of humour, what makes a good cartoon, and I think, more importantly, what defines a New Yorker cartoon and sets it apart from the rest.

[...]

Clicks to the three parts of Diffee's interview are contained in the blog entry.

Added bonus (for those who read all about the above in m.w and are saying, "So. What."):

A 2001 Bob Staake interview with Mankoff at PlanetCartoonist.

Man, I mean. How hard can it be to draw one of those little cartoons and think up some caption for it?

Here. You try it.

Labels: art, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  12:39 AM|| |

People Are Nearly Getting Hit by Beer Bottles Every Day
An Interview with the New Yorker's Deborah Treisman

BY CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE
Nov. 2005


I'm sure you get asked this every time you do an interview, but how does it work? How do you choose the stories you choose?

There are six people in the fiction department. Most of us do nonfiction as well, so we don't have as much time as it sounds. But basically stories come in, whether they come in through slush or to one of the editors or to me, and they get read and whatever we're taking seriously gets circulated to all of the editors and we have a meeting once a week where we sit around and argue. Everyone writes a short opinion of the story and those get attached to the manuscript as it makes its way around. And sometimes it happens that all six of us think a story is great—that's maybe one in 10 of the stories that get to this level. What most often happens is three people like something and three people don't, or four people versus two. It's a funny mix and there's lots of argument—you know, arguments that can be very frustrating because you're never going to convince the other person, but that is probably what the response is among the readership as well. You just hope that, in general, the majority is going to be affected by what you publish.

Labels: writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  2:13 PM|| |

Laura Lippman's updated her self-help essay filled with advice to the writer on selling that first novel.

Step #1?

Finish the damn book.

The essay is short and to the point. Here's hoping that those who need to read it (hands raised!) will.

[Snitched Repurposed from Miss Snark]

Labels: writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  12:46 PM|| |

David Louis Edelman posts on book promotion: what worked, what didn't, what is worth doing, what not.

File this one away for later use, if you can't use it today.

[Snatched from Bella Stander's blog. Thank ye, ma'am.]

Labels: book promotion, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  5:22 PM|| |

in re the dooces of the world and my comment, "She'd make a great character in a book," someone commented,

And as a character, such a one wouldn't interest me much. Not unless they had something else going on, and the blogging was just a quirk.

I wasn't thinking of the bloggers as blogging characters but as characters, characters who don't necessarily blog but who have a certain personality, the personality that's shining through on the blog.

Folks on m.w and elsewhere strike me in a similar fashion. Not to mention any names, of course.

That's part of why I like the WWWorld out there. There are people and personalities I would never have experienced otherwise, folks I never would've met up with or talked to IRL -- the braggarts, the drug cases, the nuts, the folks who can quote Nietzsche (or can merely spell his name) without having to look it up, the self-involved editors with their ups and downs, the folks with hearts as big as Texas, engineers who sing a capella, legal secretaries who write torrid romances and all those sorts.

My insular engineer-techie sort of world and my insular Telegraph Hill-dwelling world don't really intersect with the down-and-out folks down on Market Street, f'rex, unless I make a conscious effort to do so, and even then we don't necessary connect and have a conversation.

You meet a whole different sort of character standing in line to pay your phone bill at the phone office than you ever meet at a Commonwealth Club meeting.

You meet a wide variety of folks on Muni. Well, maybe not meet them, but certainly see them in action.

Plus it's fun to make up stories about people you just catch a glimpse of.

In the WWWorld, you don't even have to talk with folks to get an idea of what makes them tick, or to see enough of them that you can bounce off that to a character who acts a certain way because of their background or personality or history. You can read their blogs, follow comments they make on other peoples' blogs, watch their antics in Usenet newsgroups or other networks.

We were at a Commonwealth Club meeting 6-8 p.m. yesterday (more on that perhaps later) that was a panel discussion: Online Personas: Defining the Self in a Virtual World, although, of course, the reality was very different from the proposed subject. Participants were

SHAWN GOLD, Vice President of Content and Marketing, MySpace
ROBIN HARPER, Vice President of Community, Second Life
REID HOFFMAN, Founder and CEO, LinkedIn
MARK ZUCKERBERG, Founder and CEO, Facebook

The event was sold out. The average age hovered around the mid-twenties, I think.

The woman next to me was up from LA, worked for Sony (she said) worrying about international distribution of Sony product, was interested in exploring the people and content available in online networks and working up some proposal for Fox (she said), had a son who was interested in film and looking at film schools (she said), and so on.

She also had never heard of Brookers, although she had seen Carson Daly speak and knew he was interested in all this online community/networking stuff that she was claiming an interest in. ... and she'd only heard of mashups like a day or two before. And you have a seventeen-year-old? I thought, and have a job in the entertainment industry and are interested in all this stuff? I thought.

We decided she was a real-life avatar. Sure she'd flown up from LA. Sure she worked for Sony. Sure she had a college-applying teenage son.

She'd never heard of mashups? She'd never heard of Brookers? Who was this in-the-belly-of-the-cutting-edge-creative-beast person? Really, I mean. Was she who she said she was and just did not pay attention or was she something/someone else altogether?

Shawn Gold, btw, is dead cute and funny. Sharp. Mark Zuckerberg seems sharp and smart and incredibly shy up in front of a crowd of people, answering questions posed by a moderator. Reid Hoffman was about as far toward the business side of things as Robin Harper was toward the opposite. But more on all that later.

As we were walking to dinner (more on that too), we commented that there'd been no discussion of avatars IRL, but perhaps there should've been.

Labels: writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  12:49 PM|| |

Updated the "A Writer's Life" section of internet resources for writers.

Subsections include Book Buying · Chocolate · Creativity Nudges · Games & Distractions · Gifts · Insurance · Journal Keeping · Pens · Time Management & Procrastination · Writer's Block · Writers' Supplies · Writing Exercises

Labels: writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  6:32 PM|| |

Lit Agent X is the not-hardly anonymous Rachel Vater at Lowenstein-Yost Associates.

I say "not-hardly anonymous" because people address her by name on the blog and her LiveJournal profile tells you not only who she is but that she's been an agent at Lowenstein-Yost Associates since January 2006. Prior to this, I worked as an assistant agent with the Donald Maass Literary Agency. Before moving to NYC, I lived in Cincinnati, Ohio and worked at Writer's Digest Books for 4 years as an editor.

Vater's blog is informative. She gives a peek into the thought processes of an agent looking for clients and selling her clients' work. She also writes about writing and how to improve yours.

Read. Enjoy.

Labels: blog, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  6:25 PM|| |

.SarahQuibbling., the blog of a forensic chemist in Baltimore who writes about evidence and crime labs and writing and Baltimore and ... more.

Labels: blog, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  1:24 PM|| |

I was wandering around.

OK.

I wander the Web. No apologies.

Today I found myself (note follows) at a very interesting monthly newsletter from Dan Simmons.

From there I explored and found ... Dan Simmons' notes on Writing Well - part one.

Go here (Installment Five) and from there wander through the "parts" and into the comments and forum.

Labels: writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  12:31 AM|| |

[...]

But there's no shortcut to getting there. You can build yourself the world's most wonderful writer's studio, load it up with state-of-the-art computer equipment, and nothing will happen unless you've put in your time in that clearing, waiting for Scruffy to come and sit by your leg. Or bite it and run away.

I'm often asked if writing classes are any help, and my immediate and enthusiastic answer is always, Yes! Writing classes are wonderful for the writers who teach them and can't make ends meet without that supplementary income. They are also good places for unattached people to meet, talk about books and movies, have a few drinks and possibly hook up. But teach you to write? No. A writing class will not teach you to write. The only things that can teach writing are reading, writing and the semi-domestication of one's muse. These are all activities one must pursue alone.

Read more: Stephen King on The Writing Life

Labels: writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  1:05 PM|| |

DEADLINE: November 27, 2006

Make a Killing

Do you have a killer book idea? Then this is your chance to make crime pay. Court TV is offering you a chance to win a book deal with Regan (an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers)."

Official Rules

Over 18yo. Legal resident of the fifty states or DC. Not under exclusive book publishing contract. Not employee, immediate family, sharing household of employee of Courtroom Television Network LLC, Regan books, "their respective parents, subsidiaries, affiliates, divisions, trustees, franchisees, participating vendors, distributors, and advertising and promotion agencies (collectively, with the Sponsor, the "Contest Entities")" and yadda and so forth.

Submit between now and November 27, 2006 a 1500-3000 word synopsis and sample chapter(s) of 5K-10K wds.

First round judging will separate out ten semi-finalists. Second round judging (by crime writing panel) will select five finalists. Final round judging will be via votes for one of the five finalists placed by visitors to CourtTV Web site.

Winner gets $1000 and "and an opportunity to sign an exclusive book publishing deal ('Publishing Deal') with Regan Books, a division of HarperCollins Publishers ('Regan Books'), at an approximate market value ('AMV') of One Thousand Dollars ($1,000)."

If you do win, your book is probably good enough to deserve a publishing contract with more than a $1000 advance.

Labels: writing, writing-market

   posted by Sal Towse at  8:30 PM|| |

Rudy Rucker has A Writer's Toolkit at his SJSU faculty Web site. The PDF file contains his "working notes for teaching writing workshops."

Also on his site are his Writings About Writing, including essays on transrealism and the book-specific notes he made while writing his books. The "notes" for a given book can be anywhere from 14K (for THE HACKER AND THE ANTS) up to 100K words (for MATHEMATICIANS IN LOVE). An interesting look into how one writer writes.

Labels: writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  9:26 AM|| |

Crawford Kilian has booted up another resource: Write a Novel.

Write a Novel is a form of open courseware: Learning materials placed online for free use by anyone who wishes to do so. At this point, it is an experiment; if it succeeds, Capilano College may create more such guides, along the lines pioneered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The guide contains 18 items, PDF documents that give you some basic information on topics related to writing fiction in general and novels in particular. Each item includes one or more assignments based on the material you've read.

Kilian is the author of a score of books including SF, fantasy, history, WRITING SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY (Self-Counsel Press, 1998), WRITING FOR THE WEB (3d rev. ed. coming soon) and more.

[via DRO at Inky Girl.]

Labels: writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  9:11 AM|| |

The Story Starter provides 298 million ideas for writers of novels, short stories, mysteries, horror, science fiction or silly stories. If you have never written a story, The Story Starter will give you ideas that will help you get started. If you are a writer who has gotten into a rut and can not think of something interesting, The Story Starter can help you too! The Story Starter randomly generates 298 million ideas (no kidding). It is also great for teachers who want a fun activity to encourage their students to write.


And! Story Starter is running the 1st Story Starter Contest

Brief rules (for more detail, check the site).

No entry fee. Deadline: midnight (EDT) 18 August 2006

1. Each story MUST contain one of the lines from The Story Starter. The line must be exactly as The Story Starter generates it.

2. Write a story using one of the millions of The Story Starter sentences. The story can contain no more than 300 words, including your title.

3. The winner will receive a $25.00 Amazon Gift Certificate. If this contest works out well, we'll increase the prize next time. :) The winner's story will also be shown on The Story Starter site.

4. In addition to the winning story, other stories may be used on The Story Starter site.

[...]

Labels: URL, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  4:39 PM|| |

TileZ is still in beta and FREE! but plans to start charging a teensy weensy tiny almost infinitesimal price once they go live.

Here is their description:

TitleZ provides:

* Data: Instantly retrieve historic and current sales rankings from Amazon and create printable reports with 7-, 30-, 90-day and lifetime averages
* Trends: Easily see how topics or titles perform over time; measure the competition; understand what's hot
* Insight: Improve decision-making; know what to publish and when

How it works:

"TitleZ makes it easy to see how a book or group of books has performed over time, relative to other books on the market. Simply enter a search phrase, book title, or author, and TitleZ returns a comprehensive listing of books from Amazon along with our historical sales rank data."

Info is ripped from amazon.com data.

Sounds boring and marketing and all, doesn't it?

But NO! TileZ is where you can compare how your book is doing against how your archenemy's book is doing and it's where you can peek and see where your ex-husband's latest book is ranked on Amazon -- 2,678,954 hahahahaha.

Here's your chance. It's free! Did I mention?

Register and tap in.

e.g.
Search: Keyword Title Author Publisher
Let's pop in Po Bronson, our local boy who showed up in an article I was reading today. His oeuvre includes

What Should I Do With My Life (pub Dec 2003) ranked 4,799.
Why Do I Love These People (pub Nov 2005) ranked 22,363
Bombardiers (pub Mar 1996) ranked 246,242
The Nudist on the Late Shift (which is in the driver's side pocket of my Mini Cooper for when I get stuck somewhere and need something entertaining to read) ranked 394,549

Hm.

I popped in Sue Hough's name (Susan E. Hough) because she has her entertaining book about Richter coming out in five months or so, but the only item listed is "Writing on the walls."(Macroscope; petroglyphs): An article from: American Scientist which was published in July 2004. The article is available for $5.95, TileZ sez, and is ranked 3,696,548.

What happened to Sue's books?

So I popped /hough/ into the app and found out that Sue is listed as "Susan Elizabeth Hough".

Oh.

So I popped /susan elizabeth hough/ in and pulled up her records with all four books she currently has in the running.

EARTHSHAKING SCIENCE (pub Mar 2004) is doing best with a rank of 155,458, but her Richter book (est Dec 2006) is not doing so shabby at 619,160.

Fun.

Pop in some author names, titles you know. Click on the green arrow next to the name and you'll get a sales rank history including best rank, worst rank, 7-day average, 30-day average, 90-day average, lifetime average, with a line graph showing ranking and everything.

Save your searches to return at a later date with MyTitleZ.

Compare titles.

I popped /diet/ in as a key word and then asked to compare the top five sales-ranked titles. Here's the result. (I think you'll need to be registered and logged in to see results.)

Fun! Go!

Really!

[found the link at Joe Wikert's blog]

Labels: URL, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:00 PM|| |