Don't quit your day job

Writer's Digest has a funny round-up of "The Oddest Odd Jobs of 10 Literary Greats." The you'd-never-guess-it prize goes to JD Salinger, who was a cruise ship entertainment director.

Writers love to grumble about how it'd be so nice to "just write" for a living, instead of working as a (bartender, coffee barista, corporate shill, teacher, fill-in-the-blank). Even for those lucky enough to write and edit in their daytime work, the writing is often less-than-glamorous items like crime briefs, press releases, corporate memos or newsletters. No matter how much you want to sex it up, a newsletter is a newsletter is a newsletter.

But I say, take pride in that day-job! It may lead to your next great short story, or if nothing else, a better understanding of how the common man (or woman) lives. These experiences and observations fill our stories with quirky details and rich character.

Photo of JD Salinger from Wikipedia, credited to Lotte Jacobi.

Thirty days and nights of literary abandon

It's time for the annual wrote-your-heart-out extravaganza known as NaNoWriMo, a.k.a. National Novel Writing Month.
This is the first year I'm taking the plunge. 1600 words a day x 30 days = 50,000 words.
I am planning to bend the rules to suit me a little more. Bending as in, it doesn't have to be words towards the same novel. My goal is to just carve out time every single day this month for writing, specifically for a few different projects I've got cooking.
Join me, won't you?

Writing about writing

If you've ever been to a writer's conference, you know they have a way of putting your mind in a different place. Being around all those writers, fascinating and bizarre people, can distract you from your original purpose for attending (working on your craft). If you're lucky, accomplished and talented people are there, too, inspiring and coaching and sharing their thoughts. But there's also the element of strange, the parallel-universe-ness of it, that take you into a whole new world.

So maybe that's why I liked Rebecca McClanahan's piece, Scenes from a Weekend Poetry Conference, in the latest version of Brevity. She captures the beauty and the mystery of such events.

"Never before so much hair in one space, so much hair so carefully out of place, and to arrange a ripped T-shirt to slide over one bare shoulder is an art in itself, as is the negative capability of shawls that fall just far enough. Here are jeans slashed to reveal knees polished to perfection. The mysteries abound: why such violence? Was it passion, going down on the Muse, and who mussed her hair into such chaos?"

Read more from Brevity here.