Towse: views from the hill

July 31, 2007

Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest 2007 Results

Filed under: contest,wordstuff,writing — Towse @ 6:02 pm

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]

July 19, 2007

Interview with Elizabeth George

Filed under: books,people,writing — Towse @ 1:36 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.

[BLOG] Spinning

Filed under: blog,writing — Towse @ 1:00 am

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).

July 11, 2007

Writing advice from Robert B Parker

Filed under: blog,writing — Towse @ 1:09 am

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!

July 8, 2007

The Greatest Obituary Ever?

Filed under: people,writing — Tags: — Towse @ 8:41 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]

For Villaraigosa: Sex, lies and eyes that pry

Filed under: California,news,people,politics,writing — Towse @ 12:55 am

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.

June 14, 2007

Dashiell Hammett’s old studio apartment is up for sale

Filed under: books,real estate,San Francisco,writing — Towse @ 11:58 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

June 13, 2007

Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 Misinterpreted – Amy E. Boyle Johnston

Filed under: books,video,writers,writing — Tags: , — Towse @ 8:44 pm

Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 Misinterpreted – Amy E. Boyle Johnston, LA Weekly.

[...]

Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.

“Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was,” Bradbury says, summarizing TV’s content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: “factoids.” He says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat-panel television broadcasting the Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen.

His fear in 1953 that television would kill books has, he says, been partially confirmed by television’s effect on substance in the news. The front page of that day’s L.A. Times reported on the weekend box-office receipts for the third in the Spider-Man series of movies, seeming to prove his point.

“Useless,” Bradbury says. “They stuff you with so much useless information, you feel full.” He bristles when others tell him what his stories mean, and once walked out of a class at UCLA where students insisted his book was about government censorship. He’s now bucking the widespread conventional wisdom with a video clip on his Web site (http://www.raybradbury.com/at_home_clips.html), titled “Bradbury on censorship/television.”

As early as 1951, Bradbury presaged his fears about TV, in a letter about the dangers of radio, written to fantasy and science-fiction writer Richard Matheson. Bradbury wrote that “Radio has contributed to our ‘growing lack of attention.’… This sort of hopscotching existence makes it almost impossible for people, myself included, to sit down and get into a novel again. We have become a short story reading people, or, worse than that, a QUICK reading people.”

[...]

“I was worried about people being turned into morons by TV,” Bradbury says in the censorship/television video clip. The collection of clips includes his explanation of how he wrote Fahrenheit 451 in nine days in a clip titled (oddly enough) FAHRENHEIT 451.

The Bradbury site also includes a wonderful obit for Marguerite Susan McClure (Maggie) Bradbury, who died in 2003.

May 30, 2007

[URL] Darwin Correspondence Project

Filed under: science,URL,writing — Towse @ 1:13 am

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.

Adieu, Miss Snark

Filed under: blog,URL,writing — Towse @ 12:46 am

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.)

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress