Negative Space: writing
- 90% of life is Steven Boyett
- “Before I knew I wanted to be a writer, I was a writer.”
- Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter Writing
- Charles Dodgson—AKA Lewis Carroll—gives us advice about writing letters that may be satirical but also might not be.
- Gender Neutral Instructions
- Writing for all of your readers.
- How black are jets?
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Outdated phrases in modern times: a topic so beyond the pale that this article isn’t worth a warm pitcher of spit, but now that you mention it… whose water are you carrying in that warm pitcher?
- ia Writer for iOS and Mac OS
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You have to enjoy using asterisks and/or underscores for emphasis, and hashes for headlines, but if you do, ia Writer is a great app for writing and note-taking on Mac OS and iOS.
- Jerry Stratton
- Jerry Stratton is a writer, blogger, and reader. You can read his works at the blog, Mimsy Were the Borogoves, the satirical newspaper The Walkerville Weekly Reader, and everywhere fine words are bought and sold.
- La Jolla Writers Conference wrap-up
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A quick wrap-up of stuff from my notes on the 2011 La Jolla Writers Conference.
- La Jolla Writers Conference, 2011
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Score one for Apple’s non-removable batteries. I have an awesome Olympus Pen in my bag… and the battery is sitting in the charger back in my apartment. Which means I’m using the lesser camera in my iPad. So I’m not sure you can see the rain in this photograph that’s keeping the lawn free of lounging authors.
- Lessons from the Publishing Revolution
- Working with a publishing services provider, and how to plan for the chaos that ensues.
- Let the reader be smart
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I’m sitting out in the dark right now with the stars overhead. The touchingly funny keynote by Jacquelyn Mitchard is over (that’s where the amazing sunset came from). Most of the attendees are now settling in for the night, but the hard-core late-night read-and-critique will be starting in about an hour with Mark Clements. I think I’ll read from a page of thorny dialogue in the current book.
- Must-have iOS app: Editorial
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Editorial stands out among Markdown editors by being far more flexible and at the same time easier to use.
- New Grub Street
- As the Milvains sat down to breakfast the clock of Wattleborough parish church struck eight; it was two miles away, but the strokes were borne very distinctly on the west wind this autumn morning. Jasper, listening before he cracked an egg, remarked with cheerfulness: ‘There’s a man being hanged in London at this moment.’
- Notes from the Publishing Revolution
- The self-publishing revolution is probably just more of the same for authors: yet another hurdle to overcome on the road to “being published”. I see a future where the major publishers will not even look at works that haven’t made a name for themselves in self-publishing first.
- Old, Unused Term Papers and Reports
- Excuse me? You mean even my stupid old high school term papers are ‘in your face’? That’s the case in Texas as of September 1, 1997: the law makes me a criminal if I “should reasonably have known that a person intends to use them to satisfy an academic requirement”. Come on, somebody out there is going to be stupid enough to try and pass one of my mediocre papers off as their own. I’ve been working for years to convince people to put their studies, reports, and papers on-line and share their data. Is that now a subversive act? Heads up, Texas. Maybe it ought to be illegal to prepare, pass, or encourage laws when the person knows, or should reasonably have known, that the law in question is silly as hell.
- Role-playing design notes
- Random notes on the design of Gods & Monsters, and maybe even Men & Supermen if I can remember what I was drinking when I wrote it.
- Satire isn’t comedy
- Satire isn’t comedy. It can be, and often is, but that isn’t what makes it satire.
- Simone de Beauvoir on writing
- Simone de Beauvoir’s views on the folly of female writers applies disconcertingly to male and female writers today.
- Time is not fungible for writers
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Time isn’t fungible for writers; it’s not really fungible for anyone else, either. Time stolen can never be regained, because many of the things that would have been created during that time are lost forever.
- A writer’s will
- Neil Gaiman and Miss Snark encourage even unpublished writers to make known their desires with regard to their writings. Mine will be transferred to an open license within five years after I die.
More Information
- An Incomplete Guide to Print-on-Demand Publishers
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This is by far the best site on print-on-demand/publishing services companies I’ve seen. I wish I had read this before making my choice!
- Paying the Price
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“It might seem to you that creation is normal, because we tend to run in packs of our kind. For you to understand how rare it is, you might have to go back to elementary school or middle school.”
- The Oak and the Calf• (hardcover)
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(Alexander Solzhenitsyn)
