And another thing...

Remember that Web site Stuff White People Like? Or that other Web site, the Angry Journalist? If they got together and made a baby, it'd be Stuff Journalists Like.

You can learn that journalists like things such as reporter's notebooks (#15), writing standing up (#84), free food (#30) and procrastinating (#63).

Oh, hey!

The Chicago Reader's annual fiction issue came out here.

The stuff of common jokes

Woman: What do you do?

Man: Me? Oh, I write books.

Woman: How interesting! Have you sold anything recently?

Man: Why, yes. My couch, my car and my flat-screen television.

A snarkier writer-father might have added, “and I sold those things to pay for your private school tuition!” But instead it got me thinking that there was a real problem here. Not just a small problem involving issues of respect between one writer and one teenager, but rather a national problem of respect where being a writer has become so widely associated with being a loser that we have become the stuff of common jokes.

Ah, I think anyone in my writing group relates to this idea. And all my journalist-newspaper-writing friends feel some empathy here too.

From Bail out the writers! in the New York Times.

Read it and weep

The end of days is here for the publishing industry -- or it sure seems like it. On Dec. 3, now known as "Black Wednesday," several major American publishers were dramatically downsized, leaving many celebrated editors and their colleagues jobless. The bad news stretches from the unemployment line to bookstores to literature itself.
Read it here on Salon.

How To Write Your Memoir

From Reader's Digest:
You don't need to have had a hardscrabble youth in order to write a memoir. You don't need eccentric parents. Believe it or not, you don't need anything dramatic. And you certainly don't have to publish it.

Read the full story here.

More best-of lists

This guy totally schooled me in how to collect best-of lists.
Largehearted boy, a music blog, has gathered up dozens and dozens of these things here.
The list is even subdivided by category -- audiobooks, comics and graphic novels, science, teens, und so weiter.

It's truly an impressive roundup.

Turning political scandal into literary gold

OK, I don't know if it's literary gold, but Salon's imagination of the Blago scandal is entertaining. Combine FBI-recorded conversations with some David Mamet and you get Glengarry Rod Blagojevich:

ROD BLAGOJEVICH, AKA BLAGO, the governor of Illinois, is at his tacky Ravenswood home, on the phone. His wife is sprawled on the couch behind him, petting a fur coat made entirely of hundreds of white kittens. Blago waves a copy of the Chicago Tribune as he speaks.

Read the whole thing on Salon here.

Writer=artist?

Artists at Work Forum: How to Turn Your Art Into a Career
Join local artists (photographer Dawoud Bey, public artist Juan Angel Chavez, painter and professor Joyce Owens, and artist, poet, and actor Tony Fitzpatrick) as they share their secrets to success and missteps on the way to becoming successful artists. FREE at the Chicago Cultural Center (78 E Washington St). 6-7:30pm. 312-744-6630.

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Stupendously ultimate first paragraph

Have you written a stupendously awesome first paragraph to a work in progress? If so, maybe think about entering lit agent Nathan Bransford's blog contest. The winner will get "their choice of a partial critique, query critique or 15 minute phone conversation in which we can discuss topics ranging from reality TV shows to, you know, publishing. Your choice. Runners up will receive query critiques and/or other agreed-upon prizes."

Details on Bransford's blog here.

Monkeying around

Imagine a nursing home attendant escorting a very hirsute, very old George Burns into the solarium, and you're halfway to picturing the scene. The sinewy, solemn, 4-foot-tall Cheeta, somewhat grizzled and a bit threadbare, stared straight ahead. It wasn't easy reconciling this character with the lovable scamp who had made a career out of getting Tarzan out of serious trouble.

Just a little monkey business for good reading. From Lie of the Jungle: The Truth about Cheeta the Chimpanzee in the Washington Post.

Ayatollahs of books...

The last straw came when the group picked “The Da Vinci Code” and someone suggested the discussion would be enriched by delving into the author’s source material. “It was bad enough that they wanted to read ‘Da Vinci Code’ in the first place,” Ms. Bowie said, “but then they wanted to talk about it.” She quit shortly after, making up a polite excuse: “I told the organizer, ‘You’re reading fiction, and I’m reading history right now.’ ”

From "Fought Over Any Good Books Lately?" in the New York Times.

The good news about being rejected?

All it takes is one rejection letter to make you an instant life member of a club whose luminaries include Walt Whitman, J.K. Rowling and Dr. Seuss.

From 10 Hidden Gifts of Rejection Letters in the Guide to Literary Agents.

Overwhelmed by all the book options in year-end round-ups?

Maybe looking at a top 10 list (instead of top 100, top 50, top by a million different categories) is more manageable? If so, we can turn again to the New York Times. The best part of this list? Almost all of them have excerpts or the full first chapter posted with summary.

Five fiction and five nonfiction choices are listed. But you don't have to take my word for it!  I haven't read ANY (the shame, the shame!) so I can offer no verdicts on their recommendations. 

6900...

....languages spoken in the world.

Who, outside the linguistics profession, knew that one thing Chinese and Icelandic have in common is that they both resist borrowing words from other languages?

For language lovers, the NY Times Papercuts blogs suggests “One Thousand Languages: Living, Endangered, and Lost.”
Details at Papercuts here and at the University of California Press here.

Are we human or are we dancer?

I just needed something to take my mind away from words. And dancing is not words.

Where they write.

Writers' Rooms: A slideshow from the BBC.

See: typewriters, laptops, books books books, piles, minimalism, maximalism, red, white, orthopedic chairs, track lighting.

Your life, in 500 words

Opium magazine is hosting a contest for 500-word memoirs. Think you've got a winning life and winning words?
Details are here. Deadline is February 2009.

Best books round-up

The best nonfiction from the Christian Science Monitor here.

100 notable books from the New York Times here.

Best books from NPR here.

BONUS: Bad Sex in Fiction Awards from the Literary Review. An excerpt from an "honorable" mention:

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell (Sceptre)
If Dawn Madden's breasts were a pair of Danishes, Debby Crombie's got two Space Hoppers. Each armed with a gribbly nipple. Tom Yew kissed them in turn and his saliva glistened in the April sun. I know watching was wrong but I couldn't not. Tom Yew slipped off her red panties and stroked the cressy hair there.

Scary, scary, scary.

There are no other words for this: "Indians are writing about everything from the Pasadena Christmas tree-lighting ceremony to kitchen remodeling to city debates about eliminating plastic shopping bags."

Outsourcing reporters and editors? Owwiiieee. It hurts so much inside. I've read about it before, but this Maureen Dowd column just drives it home for me. I refuse to believe this is the real future of journalism.