Stephen King

Everything you Need to Know About Writing Successfully: in Ten Minutes (Stephen King) appears to be part of a website for a 'zine called Random, maybe created by a Craig Snyder as part of AngelTowns.com (popups offering "free" websites). The page contents bears King's copyright but no date. If you read down from Part IV you'll find, IMHO, some good general advice about writing fiction and trying to sell it. [Tectag: King writing fiction]

Useful Sites

If you thought Grammar Stickler was feisty, Bryon Quertermous offers The 25 Really Most Useful Sites For Writers and slams Writer's Digest's 101 Best, mentioned previously, as does Tod Goldberg. So what do I think? I found the magazine incredibly useful when I began my career in the early 1970's. Eventually I quit subscribing although I truly don't remember why. A usual reason would be that I didn't feel I was learning enough to merit the cost. Unlike Goldberg, I don't find the WD website very useful. No one site can be all 'round useful to all writers (though some try and fail). Goldberg should have sat in chat with the Long Ridge Writer's Group that he vilified. He would have seen much more damning evidence. It brings to mind the cliche "avoid like the plague!" It seems strange that neither mention The Writer magazine and website in all this, either to damn or praise (however faintly).
     

Quote Week Twenty-Two

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you." Ray Bradbury

Grammar Sticklers

Grammar Stickler hobbled in for the weekend. She raised her cane at some posts she spotted, decrying the decline in writers' integrity. She threatened to name names by turning in the offenders to Eggcorns, but backed off when offered space here to get the rant out of her system:

I'd like my writing to be better known than my pension for booze.

Grammar says if anyone should get a booze pension, it is she. She deserves it for having to read such tripe. Worse yet is this self-proclaimed "pro writer" excuse for the faux pas of using "clique" when she meant "cliche":

Typo late at night, probably caused by being on deadline with five books simultaneously and not sleeping so they all stay on schedule.

Record Books

Bowker, the North American book statistics gurus, reports a record number of books published in the U.S. last year with the surprising 43.1% growth in adult fiction. The "25,184 new titles and editions, the highest total ever" ended a three-year plateau for that category. Yahoo carried the story of the grand total of 195,000 titles as business news. [Tectag: books
publishing]

Student Publishing

The National Council of Teachers of English provide a list of resources for parents and students as part of their program to encourage students to get their works published. The group also lists contests and other events and publications affiliated councils sponsor. Having work appear in a publication, however humble, can be of great encouragement to youthful writing apprentices. [Tectag: students writing publishing]

Google Libraries

Google slipped one past me, I must admit, when it quietly announced Google Print expanding into a Library Project Through its Publisher Program. I really should have paid more attention to the now unavailable news articles listed in the French Letters March post. Google put the focus on participating libraries: "We are currently working with University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University, The New York Public Library, and Oxford University to scan all or portions of their collections and make those texts searchable on Google." Well and good for libraries and readers, but publishers like Random, Wiley, Simon & Schuster, and the Association of American of University Presses (AAUP) are murmuring, yelling, and in some cases, screeching about potential copyright infringement. Businessweek broke the story two days ago, and posted the full text of The University Press Assn.'s Objections, a May 20 letter to Google. Lots of questions, no answers. The problems, according to some legal experts, arises from "fair use" vagueness in current copyright law. [Tectag: copyright Goggle publishing]

Writing Rules

A self-referent and humorous way of illustrating the rule within the rule is William Safire's Rules; that is, instead of presenting writing rules or showing examples of violations, this is a list of bad grammar sentences about good grammar. It's a two-fer as well as a keeper! [Tectag: writing grammar]

Story Idea

Last Wednesday ::Full Steam Ahead:: asked, "What if Lucifer (the fallen angel), woke up one day and realised that he missed being in heaven, being near God. And he sought God and apologised. Profusely for all the wrong he's ever done and caused. And begged to be allowed back into paradise. And that he'd do anything, no matter how long it took, to repent.
Lucifer was (according to Christian myth) one of God's favourite angels, till he got jealous and proud and was thrown out of heaven. Now God who is a forgiving God...would he accept? And take Lucifer back? What would his punishment be, if at all? And would he ever re-enter Heaven?
And if Lucifer did return to Heaven...what would happen to the balance of Good and Evil? And Hell? Or would that be the end of the world?
Hmmm...this has the basis for a good short if not, a novel."

Notice her first two words, one of the keys to creativity. Brava! [Tectag: writers creativity]

Quote Week Twenty-One

"To be thrown upon one's own resources, is to be cast into the very lap of fortune." Benjamin Franklin

Bloggle

Some days I just feel like Peggy Hill as I muse and cruise the blogosphere. Let's shake 'em up and see what we can spell:

More on Literary Blogs. I still don't know what they mean by literary.
Florida State kids are Addicted to Blogging.
Freakonomics: The Blog helped boost Freakonomics the book, according to Book Standard.
Blogs' Blog (official Blogger.com blog).
Blogger Blog (unofficial blog on Blogger).
[Tectag: blogs blogging literary books]

Yahoo! Netrospective

Worth a look is Yahoo! Netrospective: 10 years, 100 moments of the Web, a mash of Ten by Ten and Happy Birthday Yahoo! See #31 weblog: "I blog, you blog, we all blog. But not in December '97, when only a handful of personal web pages with news links and commentary exist. Jorn Barger is the first to truncate "web log" to name his own Robot Wisdom Weblog. A worldwide phenomenon is born." And here we are. [Tectag: Yahoo! blog]

Penguin Remixed

Penguin Remixed is a coup redux of writing, music, and technology -- as well as a contest and interesting website at which to amuse yourself. Turn on the speakers and fire up the Flash to enjoy this one. Penguin provides 30 mp3 files of "finest actors around" reading "best spoken" words from "greatest books of all time". If that's not enticing enough, they challenge UK residents to download the samples and combine them with their own music. The best combos are promised prizes, including publishing in a Penguin Digital Audiobook. [Tectag: podio remix mash writing music contest]

Writers' Ethics

Now, this is really scary! Less splashy than faked news or the recent brouhaha over double-checking tips, a quiet revolution around a writer, Michelle Delio, a.k.a. Michelle Finley, happens at Wired Magazine. It all started on March 21 when MIT Technology Review Online retracted two stories written in whole or in part by Delio. Subsequently InfoWorld edited out anonymous quotes from four of Delios' articles. As a result of a review of this one journalist's works:

Wired News will now require freelance reporters to submit contact information for all named sources. Also, anonymous sources will be used only with appropriate justification.

Expect more fallout. [Tectag: writers ethics]

Writing Tips

The National Council of Teachers of English offers a useful tip list for becoming a better writer including:

Have fun with writing
Get feedback
Edit in separate readings
Reflect on your progress

In all, the ten tips contain more than a dozen suggestions on ways to implement the writing tools. Applicable to writers beyond high school, and a good refresher for those of us way beyond high schools. [Tectag: writing English]

Books from Chat

Last month the L.A. Times reported on this new way to engender interest in your writing, but watch what you say in chat rooms because someone's watching what you say. Well, maybe only Japanese someones:

Some Japanese book publishers have formed new divisions, with researchers spending their days searching chat rooms for good narratives. Surely there must be "writers" with names like jimboT436 who aren't yet aware that their messages to cynthias2ndhusband, met by a witty put-down from Pocket- Rocket, are actually a perfect opening chapter for a story with the paperback sales punch of Jackie Collins.

[Tectag: writers books publishing]

Watch Amazon

From ASJA Contracts Watch this month:
*******************************
Navigating the Amazon
*******************************
Continuing the discussion on secondary and subsidiary rights, we were surprised the other day to find that Amazon.com is selling copies of articles. Given Amazon's hunger for revenue and exploration of presenting content online, even in terms of searchable books, this shouldn't be surprising. But in some cases, articles are appearing even though the writers never assigned these additional rights to anyone. Chances are that Amazon made the deal with some consolidator, but that doesn't help the writer who receives none of the revenue. ASJA and the Author's Guild are looking into this situation. We'd ask that writers go to Amazon and search under their names. If you find that your work is up there and you know that you never licensed such uses, we'd ask you to send an email to amazonwatch@asja.org. We're trying to get a scope of the problem to find an effective and equitable approach to resolving it. Please note if you actually registered the copyright on any of the pieces before February. [Tectag: writers rights]

101 Best

The Writer's Digest people, in a combination popularity and judged contest, compose a list of writing websites each year dubbed the The 101 Best Websites for Writers. There's no clue as to the standards used for selection, but they are arranged into 12 categories: articles, tips and discussion boards; creativity; general resources; genres; jobs; just for fun; media resources; niches; online writing and critique groups; online writing groups offering classes; organizations; and publishing resources. That's a difficult call because some sites try to cover all bases, risking doing all poorly. The previous four years' lists are available. If you just want to check if a site name is listed, see the alphabetical listing. Let me clearly state that I do not endorse any of these sites as an aid to writers unless I've already posted here about them.

Quote Week Twenty

I always know the ending; that's where I start. Toni Morrison

Pop Quiz

Last month I mentioned preparing to interview an author and my theory: we can know all we need about someone else from the ordinary choices they make. Think of it as Malcom Gladwell (Blink) Goes Speed Dating. Thanks to Indigo and Paula O for their contributions. Feel free to add to the list of potential questions by email or comments to this post. If anyone wants to collaborate in developing a full-blown interactive quiz delivering results with graphics, do let me know. All I can imagine are the the old "Authors" card game. So here's the Snobs and Slobs Quiz to distinguish between literary and commercial writers. (That's just a joke, folks!) The writer MUST make a snap decision between the two offerings. No waffling, no substitutions. Because there's only your Writer Mom here, I'm calling it:

Mom and Pop Author's Quiz

Dr. Hawking or Dr. Science?
Martha Stewart or Erma Bombeck?
Jim Carey or Jim Varney?

Peanuts or Cashews?
Budweiser or Coors?
Hot dog or hamburger?

Star Trek or Star Wars?
Foundation or Dune?
LA Times or NY Times?

Domestic or foreign?
High Test or Regular?
Paper or Plastic?

Yahoo or Google?
Firefox or Internet Explorer?
Paper notepad or PDA?

Here or To Go?
Male or Female?

If I took the quiz, my profile would look like the following.

Selections: Hawking/Bombeck/Varney/Cashews/Coors/Hot Dog/Star Trek/Dune/NY Times/Foreign/Regular/Paper/Google/IE/Paper/Here/Female

Results: You're a confused, lazy tree-hugging gal-Trekie with pretensions.

Lazy, because you use the browser that came with the PC, but not Yahoo which preceded Google (confused), have time to spend eating in restaurants, and feel it's too hard to learn how to program and use a PDA. "Gal" because that's the kind of woman who would eat hot dogs, prefer Erma Bombeck and Jim Varney, and buy regular gasoline; the woman you find in commercial fiction, especially the old pulps (you mentioned paper twice). Pretensions for all the rest of the selections. Talks like a snob, acts like the rest of us.

Well, I AM an old pulp! The only problem with this analysis is that my interests in Hawking, the NY Times, drinking Coors, and buying foreign goods have more practical bases in quality than affectatious snob appeal. People are complex. None were hurt in the course of this experiment. [Tectag: quiz authors]

Up Market

Anyone who works in the book industry must be schizophrenic what with the big guys gobbling up smaller presses (Wiley just ate Sybex), small presses expanding lines (Shambhala's new imprint for frontlist titles is Trumpeter), and independent book stores and publishers popping in and out like galactic hitchhikers. Here's what's Trumpeter Books will publish: a broad range of topics and genres, such as up-market [expensive] fiction, literary nonfiction (what's this?), psychology, and memoir. The imprint will be very open-ended, publishing across categories, President and Executive Editor, Peter Turner says. So, if a small press publishing eastern philosophy branches out to what sounds like mainstream offerings, doesn't this make getting your writing to market an incredible moving target? A shooting gallery in a carnival or county fair comes to my mind. Targets popping up, ducks moving along, whirligigs spinning hypnotically. "Four shots for a quarter. C'mon! Over here! Looka, looka!" [Tectags: books literary publishing]

Deep Links

Writers who make work available on their websites need to be concerned about this: The Article Page: New Kingpin of Online News? It's written from the perspective of newspapers' websites; we all have lessons to teach each other. The message for everyone with a website is the growing trend for visitors to enter your site on any page, especially coming from a search engine having returned a URL other than your home or index page's. Read the article carefully for tips on how to structure all your website pages for the most impact. You can also control to some degree where a particular page will rank in the search engine results to raise your profile in the public's attention.[Tectag: writers websites]

Recreation Densification

I strolled out this morning for a little recreational cross-training and came home with a new word. O.K., it was Free Tuesday at Balboa Park, our town's cultural heart. I was practicing two of my principles: that writers need to get away from the keyboard regularly to recharge, and that contact with works and artists of different disciplines strengthens creativity. After indulging in floral enjoyment in the lath house, I popped in to see The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky at the Museum of Photographic Arts. I think the fine resolution of his prints of industrial sites prompted me to muse for a moment, "Wow! This looks like a watercolor." Silly me. The scene was one that I would have chosen to paint. The title of another amused at first: "Densified Tin Cans" (a shot of cubes of squashed cans.) The exhibit and other titles were serious and straight, so I assumed I'd learned a new verb, to densify. I'm puzzled, though, because dictionaries have no such word. Densification, yes. Now, to work that into a conversation.[Tectags: photography words]

Fictional Days

The Book of Fictional Days is a collection of events that did not really happen in a weekly desk diary format. Every day contains a fictional event from a book, movie, or even a song. For example: today Solomon Moretsi claims he cut his finger (from The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander Smith.) Compiled by Bob Gordon from classic and contemporary sources, the book lists occasions like the day Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee arrived in King Arthur's Court (June 19) or the day Isabella eloped with Heathcliff (March 11). The facing pages contain illustrations of literary greats by artist Barry Moser. What a wonderful collection of daily prompts for the writer's imagination! It would also be a great gift for the enjoyment of well-read writers, readers, or for those becoming writers.
[Tectags: books, writers, writing prompts, gifts]

Mean Girls

Brigham Young University researchers find girls as young as three engage in "relational strategies" to become the queen bees of cliques. They said the little mean girls use psychological control techniques to freeze out others and get their way. This pseudonews arrives concurrent with my reading of C.J. Cherryh's Cyteen: The Rebirth in which a girl child clone learns to manipulate and bully both peers and elders. Both items reminded me of a kindergarten incident: sitting at tiny tables of six, my group includes the class' only colored child. I am last to receive the boys' whispered message to "kick Sharon". Long afterward I learn that her latte skin color was the excuse for cruelty. I am ashamed. It's all I remember of my first school experience. When Sharon shows up at Roosevelt, the "white" junior high school, I slink around corners to avoid her eyes, not knowing if she remembers.

Quote Week Nineteen

"Good writers are free to break the rules of grammar, but their freedom gains meaning when they know the rules and overrule them only for an artistic or polemical reason. " William Safire

[Tectags: quotations Safire writers]

Blurbosphere

A lexicon of blurb words is what William Safire offered earlier this month in his "On Language" Blurbosphere column in the NY Times. Some of the "Language Snobs" words he cited as overhype include:
meticulously researched = dull
long-awaited = writer had a dry spell
acclaimed = received at least one good review
All this hyperbole developed from "desperate copywriters", Safire contends, and now "we have a language that treats lesser-known authors like stars shooting toward the firmament of literary fame." I wonder if it's related to the too many books, too little time phenomenon?

[Tectag: English,words, books, reviews]

Pseudodictionary

If you love words to the point of creating new ones, you'll love dipping into the pseudodictionary. It bills itself as the place where words you've made up can become part of an actual online dictionary! slang, webspeak, colloquialisms... and the dictionary for words that wouldn't make it into dictionaries. The randomizer function had me howling with this result:

word to that
pseudctionary was shown to increase the IQ's of 34% of the lab rats in the countrol [sic] group

gravitass - Taking yourself too seriously, when everyone else thinks you are an idiot.

e.g., Many TV evangelists need to deal with their gravitass a little better.

Randomized image:

Wooden Horse

The glossary at Wooden Horse Publishing lists only terms concerning the magazine industry. Still, useful and at the right price -- free! Not free is the database of [o]ver 2,000 US and Canadian consumer and trade print publications with the most complete information anywhere, including: Contact and publishing information, editorial calendars, reader demographics, editorial concepts, writer's guidelines. Rates vary from $1.99 for a day to $119 for a year's access. Or you could try to win week of free access by submitting a term that's not already in the glossary. I was not favorably impressed with two of the top three categories in the sample database report: "Status" (active or not) and "Uses freelance writers" (yes or no). Why research a database with inactive magazines or ones that don't accept my work? It seems more reasonable to simply deactivate those entries as long as they don't apply. Still, many of the rest of the characteristics look useful, assuming the data are current.

English Mustard

Your English Skills

Grammar: 100%

Punctuation: 100%

Spelling: 100%

Vocabulary: 100%

Does Your English Cut the Mustard?

Yes, yet another fun quiz. If your English doesn't quite cut the mustard, consult a stuffy, old style guide and, of course, a dictionary.
[Tectag: English,quiz, mustard]

David Morrell

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