Wandering around the web this afternoon, I seemed to trip over more links than usual that led to pages where someone was angry about something. Angry enough to vent their spleen at any and all passing eyeballs. This wasn’t just in comments sections, or on message boards either. There were entire blog posts, sometimes multiple […]
You’ve seen the ads, haven’t you? On the internet, in magazines and newspapers, sometimes even in publishers’ catalogues? The ones that promise to publish your novel for FREE (this word is important) and are peppered with testimonials from authors, all of whom are brimful of joy and talking about a revolution. A revolution that takes […]
WARNING: EXTREME PRETENTIOUSNESS FOLLOWS Ain’t no pretty wordybabble round these parts. And this could be a problem. I should explain. From the moment I started writing the story I’m working on (working title, Cuss), it was in first person. The main character narrates the story, and her voice came through clearly and effortlessly. She has […]
In my early twenties I thought I was super-talented when it came to writing. I’d edited my school yearbook, written reviews and articles for the local newspaper, written plays and seen them staged in college. I’d written a novel, to see if I could, and had mothballed it without doing anything with it. I had […]
Back in 2010, I was a bookseller, and had learned a lot about what goes in behind the scenes in publishing. How James Patterson can be so prolific, for one: He readily admits that his co-written books are largely written by the co-author. Patterson himself provides characters and a lengthy plot outline, the co-writer actually […]
I wondered yesterday how Grantland would respond to the outcry over their publication of Caleb Hannan’s piece on Dr. V (not her magical putter, despite what the headline claims). ESPN offered a sort of non-apology (of the sorry people are upset, we’re looking into it type) and word filtered out that Grantland’s editor in chief […]
I spent a lot of the past weekend mulling over the Grantland article which was ostensibly about a new type of putter, but morphed into the character-assassination of a (now deceased) trans* woman. I don’t want to link to the article itself, because page-views can be used to justify all kinds of things, and the […]
I finished reading The Circle the other day, zipped through it in fact, which was unexpected. I know the standard techie’s response to the book is to complain that the central premise is outlandish and could never happen, and to sprinkle criticism with guesses at who each of the principal characters may be based on. […]
