Moving days

From now on, head on over to Krasnaya Ekra for all your literary needs. And other nibbles as well.

See you there!

 

A paper addict on the digital revolution

I love my computer. I love how Bloglines organizes my RSS feeds for me (although Yahoo doesn’t have a Books feed - grrr). I love watching Law & Order SVU reruns. But I love even more the quarter ton of books I have collected throughout my life. I love even more smudging newsprint, and printing first pages. I love JStor and printing out articles only to attack them with highlighters for my research papers, and yesterday’s speech on…

dun dun dun…

the death of the newspaper and the rise of the Internet. Boo hiss. But as the last magnate Rupert Murdoch told a gathering of newspaper editors, “we have been complacent, hoping that this thing called the digital revolution would just limp along.”

Newspapers are still working on the switch. I do like the idea of local papers going more in depth locally, because why go to the national networks to read about your home town?

Publishers, however, may have found their savior. My ink-and-paper soul wrenches to say it, but Kindle just may be the industry’s saving grace. The thing has a lot of technical kinks that still need to be worked out, but the concept alone just might bring people back to reading. It saves physical space - think thousands of books in the space of one paperback; great for travelers and people with itty bitty apartments. (My apartment is small but I fit all my crap, including 500+ books, just fine.) People obsessed with gadgets would no doubt love to get their hands on this thing. Also, since they’re essentially selling e-books for these things, the books themselves are cheaper (though the device still tops $350).

The shrinking market of us Luddite page-strokers is becoming more of a niche, whether we like it or not. So if our market in general is to be saved, we must admit at least partial defeat and let the techies have their toys.

 

Wel…come

50 Word Fiction

Cute idea. He’s probably got a huge stockpile of prompts somewhere.

And another…

Micro Fiction

These are even better. I wish she updated more recently though.

 

An odd feeling

Well, I’m glad I’m not paying for this MA course, because I can read all about publishing ‘n stuff from Miss Snark. But it’s somewhat interesting to be around other writers, and not in the blogosphere, and watch them probably waste their money. I can’t wait to read their work and see for sure.

Here’s hoping these pointy-headed academic types don’t turn me off from what I like to do best.

 

Sleight of hand

I wiggled my way into an MA class in writing arts…. get this, it’s called…..
Publishing and Creative Writing.
I was giddy as hell when I read the course description for a few reasons:

1. I’m not even an MA student
2. Though signing into it as an undergrad is possible, I have a thousand and one scheduling conflicts
3. It’s with a very nice professor
4. I like getting into things over my head

Stay tuned…. the first class is today at 2:45 and since it’s a graduate five-week, the class is almost four hours long, four days a week. Holy shitfucks, Batman. But I’m sneaking in! At no cost to me because I’m not really signed into it!

This deserves a new category. Srsly.

 

This devil wears off-the-rack

I read - rather, tried to read - The Devil Wears Prada, and it was terrible. I was having doubts after page ten and finally tossed it aside around page twenty. The movie was great and the cast was great, but the book read like a whiny diary, like something I would have written in middle school after being dumped. Sure, short sentences and fragments can be used stylistically, but not when your genre is chick lit or commercial fiction. Then it just comes off as sloppy.

 

Snarky

I’ve jumped on the Miss Snark bandwagon, albeit more than a year late, but the archives are a priceless vault of information nonetheless. Everything you want to know about publishing is there for free, and debunks tons of rumors and bad advice spread by how-to publishing guides. Every wannabe author should read this blog.

Miss Snark

 

Rejected

I subscribe to Writer’s Digest and worship the Internet so naturally, when they published a list of top sites and resources for writers I pounced on it, especially the blogs. One blog in particular, The Rejecter (see the RSS feed below and to the right!) strikes me as particularly useful. The Rejecter is a literary agent’s assistant, and her job is to sift through the piles of query letters and reject most of them. Her blog answers questions from writers who email her directly, but more importantly, points out blunders in queries and provides a window into what the first crucial step into the publishing world is like.

 

Essays

In case you haven’t noticed, I have a few pages of literature essays I’ve written in the past month or so. Check ‘em out; they relate directly to this blog. Thanks!

Related to essays, one of my other classes is based almost entirely on the literary essay. The book list for this class is as follows:

• The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, by Oliver Sacks
• The Education of Richard Rodriguez, by Richard Rodriguez
• Mortal Lessons on the Art of Surgery, by Richard Selzer
• The Star Thrower, by Loren Eiseley
• A Sand County Almanac, by Aldo Leopold
• Plaintext, by Nancy Mairs

I don’t know how well these names are known outside their respective fields (to include anthropology and psychology), but one thing that my professor impressed upon us is that writing is not these people’s day job. To quit everything in order to write, you have to be either independently wealthy, crazy or Stephen King (qualities which are not necessarily mutually exclusive). So when they say “don’t quit your day job,” it’s not personal - it’s solid financial advice!

 

Don’t Ask Stupid Questions

Janice Harayda pointed out the retardedness of discussion group questions in the back of a certain book. I cannot help but to agree that yes, they are retarded. I have a few books with such questions in the back, and reading them makes me roll my eyes at best. But asking questions that have little or nothing to do with the book? That’s just dumb. Philippa Gregory books are prone to such dumbness. Why can’t book groups come up with their own discussions? Or is it unfashionable to mark up a book with a pencil, pointing out sections to oneself to come back to later?

I’m so disgusted, I’m going to go to class now.