http://www.internet-resources.com/writers/

Hit counter stands at 999439. When it rolls over to zeroes, I plan to swop it for a different counter.

Mercy me. A million hits. Who woulda thunk back when that this day would come to pass?

Labels: stats, URL, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  12:54 PM|| |

A Rebellion and an Awkward Embrace
By PEGGY NOONAN
February 1, 2008 / Wall Street Journal

In the most exciting and confounding election cycle of my lifetime, Rudy Giuliani, the Prince of the City, is out because he was about to lose New York, John Edwards is out, the Clintons are fighting for their historical reputations, and the stalwart conservative New York Post has come out strong and stinging for Barack Obama. If you had asked me in December if I would write that sentence in February, I would have said: Um, no.

Noonan's column continues ...

Labels: news, people, politics, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  7:00 PM|| |

The top 12 'Top 10' lists of 2007

Brilliant set of links from Mark Morford.

Labels: San Francisco, webstuff, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  3:14 PM|| |

The World Question Center -- 2008:
WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?

So far, 165 contributors, including Alan Alda, John Baez, Greg Benford, Aubrey de Grey, Ricahrd Dawkins, Ray Kurzweil, J Craig Venter ...

Interesting ...

e.g. Stewart Brand


[...]

The message finally got through. Good old stuff sucks. Sticking with the fine old whatevers is like wearing 100% cotton in the mountains; it's just stupid.

Give me 100% not-cotton clothing, genetically modified food (from a farmers' market, preferably), this-year's laptop, cutting-edge dentistry and drugs.

The Precautionary Principle tells me I should worry about everything new because it might have hidden dangers. The handwringers should worry more about the old stuff. It's mostly crap.

(New stuff is mostly crap too, of course. But the best new stuff is invariably better than the best old stuff.)

[via Mark Morford]

Labels: life, people, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  2:54 PM|| |

Word out in today's SFChronicle that Sara Zarr -- whom I met many many moons ago at a WTQ gathering of misc.writers, back when she lived in this fair city, before she moved to Utah -- is a finalist for the National Book Award for The Story of a Girl in the Young People's Literature division.

Yippee! Yahoo! for Sara!!!!!

Sara's Web presence: The Stories of a Girl

Sara is published. Sara is a finalist for a National Book Award.

Sara no longer engages with folks on misc.writing.

Hmmm. Is there a connection?

(A slight one, perhaps. Her success is primarily due to ... Sara is talented, and determined, and focussed and ...)

Yay, hooray for Sara!

Labels: blog, books, URL, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:04 AM|| |

A request from DebbieRO, my former Inkspot.com boss lady, on her Inkygirl blog.

If you have a link to Inkspot.com, PLEASE DELETE IT.
Pass the word.

A plea to anyone linking to Inkspot.com

Labels: URL, webstuff, wordstuff, writing, writing-market

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:42 PM|| |

Coach Stops Runaway Horse by Biting Ear

Labels: news, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  2:33 PM|| |

Asha's back. Her blog pics today are of Tonopah, Nevada.

Tonopah. Check it out! It's not just an alliterative town name found in an old Lowell George song.

And I've been from Tucson to Tucumcari
Tehachapi to Tonopah
Driven every kind of rig that's ever been made
Driven the backroads so I wouldn't get weighed
And if you give me weed, whites and wine
And you show me a sign
And I'll be willin' to be movin' *

(* as sung not only by Little Feat but also by Ronstadt and others)

Asha noted that the Grand Old Lady of Tonopah, the Mizpah Hotel, is For Sale! [PDF]

Sounds perfect for a writers' retreat, doesn't it? Out in the middle of nowhere, halfway between Las Vegas and Reno. Two bars. (for those convivial evenings) Two restaurants. (soze you don't have to go far to find eats). No gaming license. (fewer distractions for you)

Gutted and rebuilt in 1976.

56 rooms, including 6 parlor suites, all with private baths and thermostatically controlled heating and air conditioning. Fine Brussels carpeting was laid throughout, new stained glass windows were hand-crafted for the first floor and the finest of wall paper was hung on all of the walls. The exterior was given a face lift and park benches and iron lighting fixtures installed along the sidewalk. The old bowling alley and other buildings were also incorporated into the expansion.

On the National Registry of Historic Places. Resident ghosts! Wyatt Earp tended bar here! Dempsey worked as a bouncer!

Take a look at Asha's Tonopah photos and travelogue.

ONLY $1.5m for the Mizpah Hotel! Perfect writers' retreat, I think.

What'd'ya think?

Labels: real estate, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:29 AM|| |

2007 is the silver anniversary of the contest.

Jim Gleeson, Madison, WI, is the grand prize winner this year with

Gerald began--but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them "permanently" meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash--to pee.

Additional prize winners here: 2007 Results

re the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

[...]

Conscripted numerous times to be a judge in writing contests that were, in effect, bad writing contests but with prolix, overlong, and generally lengthy submissions, he [Professor Scott Rice] struck upon the idea of holding a competition that would be honest and -- best of all -- invite brief entries. Furthermore, it had the ancillary advantage of one day allowing him to write about himself in the third person.

By campus standards, the first year of the BLFC was a resounding success, attracting three entries. The following year, giddy with the prospect of even further acclaim, Rice went public with the contest and, with the boost of a sterling press release by Public Information Officer Richard Staley, attracted national and international attention. Staley's press release drew immediate front-page coverage in cultural centers like Boston, Houston, and Miami. By the time the BLFC concluded with live announcement of the winner, Gail Cane, on CBS Morning News (since defunct through no fault of the BLFC), it had drawn coverage from Time, Smithsonian, People Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Manchester Guardian, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Australian Radio, and the BBC. Most important, over 10,000 wretched writers had tried their hands at outdoing Bulwer's immortal opener, with the best entries soon appearing in the first of a series published by Penguin Books, It Was a Dark and Stormy Night (1984).

Since 1983 the BLFC has continued to draw acclaim and opprobrium. Thousands continue to enter yearly ...

[via Bob Sloan at misc.writing]

Labels: contest, wordstuff, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:02 AM|| |

Interview with Elizabeth George in the June 2007 WRITER Magazine. [Caution: PDF!]

[snippet]

You talk a great deal about the craft of writing. What do you mean?

It's important for beginning writers to learn the craft, the basics, of writing. You can't teach somebody to be a creative artist, to have talent or passion, but you can teach somebody craft. Whether they can apply it in an artistic fashion, well, that's in the hands of the gods. But they can certainly learn what the craft of writing is.

Labels: books, people, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  6:36 PM|| |

Spinning is the blog of Susan Marie Rose Maciog Gibb.

Who?

Interesting look into the life of a reader, someone self-defined as "Learning life through Writing, Reading, Traditional Archery, Nature and Harvest, Computer Hardware, and watching people."

The Web is a wonder these days, providing loads of opportunity to watch people act, roleplay (perhaps), wig out, gracefully sail through upsetting circumstances, overreact, underreact. ...

Find someone on a newsgroup, in a blog, posting comments in reaction to an article. Imagine that person as a character in the story you're writing. What you see on the Web gives you the barebones, the skeleton of the character. It's up to you to flesh out the motivations, insecurities, craziness, saneness and make the character your own.

There's been discussion here and elsewhere about whether (or not) dooce is a blog worth reading. I think so. Talk about finding someone who gives you loads of opportunity to peer into their lives!

"but she whines and whines and I'm tired of her whining about her boring life," some say. Well. I'm tired of bombast and vicious rants, which is why I stopped reading certain blogs. I don't read dooce daily. I do pop in every month or so to get a flavor of the personality. She would make such a good character in a story I haven't quite cooked up yet.

What a brave new world this is, where no matter what sort of person we are or wish we were, we can read about others like or unlike us (and others can read our ramblings and dish with friends about how witless we can be and so on ad infinitum).

Labels: blog, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  6:00 PM|| |

Interesting read in the Bostonia that came in the mail last week re Parker's donation of his archives to the Boston University Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, his writing methods, his PhD thesis ("The Violent Hero, Wilderness Heritage, and Urban Reality: A Study of the Private Eye in the Novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald") and more.

The article got me poking around on the Web and I came across his blog and an interview by Eric Berlin (3.2005) which included this bit of advice:

EB: Thank you. Classic question to any author: any advice to aspiring writers out there who are looking to become novelists?

RBP: Write it, send it in. There isn't anything else to do. Somebody asked me at a signing the other day if I have any tips for a first-time writer and I said, "Yeah, try and write good." There isn't anything I can tell them - there are no tips.

There are very successful writers who don't write anything the way I do. John Updike, who I know, and who is a nice guy and a great writer, does not write in any way the way I do. So you can't say, "You better write like me!" I mean, you can write like Updike, that will work..

If you need tips, it's almost too late for you. If you can't fix it, you can't send it to me and have me fix it. You write it, you send it in, and if somebody at a publishing house thinks they can make a profit by publishing it, they will. And if they think they can't, they won't. And I can't make them do it, your Uncle Harry can't make them do it.

I suppose Michael Jackson or somebody can write a bad book and somebody will publish it at the moment. His life story would be swell. But other than that kind of celebrity hogwash, actual writing...

[At this point, we're interrupted by Mr. Parker's PR rep. We're told that that we have five more minutes, and we're asked how everything is going. Mr. Parker deadpans, "We're doing my favorite thing. I'm talking about myself."]

So no, I don't have any advice. There are still publishers who will read unsolicited manuscripts. They'll read them all, but they may read five pages in and say, "Ooh..." And I think that works. I think that if you have a manuscript, I can read one page, or maybe half a page, and know whether you have any talent or not. But the odds are long, most people don't have it. And you're competing with a lot of other submissions, but some of them are written in crayon. I mean, some are so apparently tripe that you read one sentence and throw it out.

There are also agents listed in the Literary Marketplace. I got published without an agent. You need an agent to get read at some houses, which require agent's submission - they're listed in one of those books, Writer's Marketplace or Literary Marketplace. But they can't get you published if you can't get published yourself, except that they can get you read places where you might not get read otherwise. And they've done the initial screening: if they take you on, the publisher will give you more attention. The publisher saves the trouble of bothering the initial editor.

It's been so long since I've been a beginning writer that I don't really know what it's like anymore. I don't know what the market is like. I don't know whether it would really be better to find an agent or just get published and then get an agent. If you get published, you can get an agent easy enough. And you need one: an agent is very valuable.

But the one thing you have to do is to write it. With non-fiction, you may be able to get a deal on a sample chapter and an outline, but with fiction, it's made on the writing. Non-fiction can be the idea, the story, or whatever. Fiction is in the execution. Write it, and send it to somebody who can publish it. Not me!

Labels: blog, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  6:09 PM|| |

Labeled "THE GREATEST OBITUARY EVER" by Poor Mojo Newswire

Count Gottfried von Bismarck, who was found dead on Monday aged 44, was a louche German aristocrat with a multi-faceted history as a pleasure-seeking heroin addict, hell-raising alcoholic, flamboyant waster and a reckless and extravagant host of homosexual orgies.

The great-great-grandson of Prince Otto, Germany's Iron Chancellor and architect of the modern German state, the young von Bismarck showed early promise as a brilliant scholar, but led an exotic life of gilded aimlessness that attracted the attention of the gossip columns from the moment he arrived in Oxford in 1983 and hosted a dinner at which the severed heads of two pigs were placed at either end of the table.

When not clad in the lederhosen of his homeland, he cultivated an air of sophisticated complexity by appearing in women's clothes, set off by lipstick and fishnet stockings. This aura of dangerous "glamour" charmed a large circle of friends and acquaintances drawn from the jeunesse dorée of the age; many of them knew him at Oxford, where he made friends such as Darius Guppy and Viscount Althorp and became an enthusiastic, rubber-clad member of the Piers Gaveston Society and the drink-fuelled Bullingdon and Loders clubs.

Perhaps unsurprisingly he managed only a Third in Politics, Philosophy and Economics.

[... Continues]

Labels: obit, people, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  1:41 PM|| |

For Villaraigosa: Sex, lies and eyes that pry - commentary by Timothy Rutten in the LA Times.

Is this affair a newsworthy tidbit? Is it any business of ours? Is it the business of people who watch Salinas on Telemundo or who live in the city for which Villaraigosa is mayor?

Is it newsworthy only as relates to whether Salinas should've kept covering the news? Had she told her bosses about the relationship? Does it matter whether Salinas and Villaraigosa were "just friends" or lovers? If she told her bosses "just friends" and not "lovers," should that have affected the limits her bosses put on her reportage?

Oh, the questions, the reckless behavior, the conflict-of-interest.

Does it even matter except as a way of selling the news in an industry where the more news sold the better?

My favorite part of Rutten's commentary is his reprise of the late Abe Rosenthal's standard in such cases:

It doesn't matter if a reporter sleeps with elephants, so long as they don't cover the circus.

Labels: California, news, people, politics, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  5:55 PM|| |

Dashiell Hammett's old studio apartment is up for sale.

(That would be me that socketsite.com refers to as their "plugged-in reader.")

307 sq ft. *only* $249K

Labels: books, real estate, San Francisco, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  4:58 PM|| |

Darwin Correspondence Project

Welcome to the Darwin Correspondence Project’s new web site. The main feature of the site is an online database with the complete, searchable, texts of around 5,000 letters written by and to Charles Darwin up to the year 1865. This includes all the surviving letters from the Beagle voyage - online for the first time - and all the letters from the years around the publication of Origin of species in 1859.

Labels: science, URL, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  6:13 PM|| |

Well, looks like she's serious.

Miss Snark, the literary agent, has retired from blogging. She'll keep agenting, she sez, and It wasn't a specific event. The questions were increasingly ones I'd already answered or ones I couldn't answer.

Adieu, Miss Snark. Bon chance. It's been a grand run.

(Miss Snark promises to keep the blog up with all its tasty bits of knowledge for the foreseeable future. ... and, no, she's not writing a book based on the blog.)

Labels: blog, URL, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  5:46 PM|| |

The site for all you'd want to know about The Pulitzer Prizes

• Resources
• Archive of winners (including Full texts, photographs and cartoons [...] for Journalism winners from 1995 - 2006)
• History
• Luncheon Remarks

Labels: journalism, URL, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  4:47 PM|| |

Classic Shorts brings you the texts of classic short stories.

The majority of the stories are old (classic) enough to be out of copyright. How did they get a Tobias Wolff short though? Or GGM?

Sample shorts:

• One of These Days by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield
• The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell
• Hunters in the Snow by Tobias Wolff

[via StumbleUpon]

Labels: URL, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  12:55 PM|| |

I told author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf a while back that at some point I'd get around to telling folks how much I like her "actually writing blog."

LeBoeuf is an inspiration in her willingness to say "I'm screwing around and need to get back to work" and her "read this blog and got these hints" and her "I'm working on XYZ and it is not going well" and, of course, her other writerly-related posts. This blog consists only of writerly-related posts and I like that focus.

Sometimes she posts too little because she's actually writing or off at Viable Paradise or busy doing something else, and then she's back on a semi-regular basis and ... life is good.

I like her snippets.

I like her focus.

I even like her whining.

Labels: blog, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  8:45 AM|| |

I've decided to keep writing markets "stuff" at the writers' resources site from this day forth. The posts were taking up too much real estate.

The resources blog will carry the markets information I've been carrying here. Coolio writer stuff may wind up in both this blog and that. Info on the writers' resources site will be updated to include new markets information and links wigati. The resources blog will probably be updated from its 2002 look some day as well.

From now on writing markets info will live there not here. Those of you who read here for great apps, interesting sites, San Francisco foodie news and life, the universe and prayer flags can continue on uninterrupted. Those who only cared about the markets info will find their focus more focussed at the other blog.

This has been a management postie. We now return you to the normal blog content, sans writing markets information.

Labels: blog, internet resources for writers, URL, writing, writing-market

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:11 AM|| |

Author Terry Ryan, 61, dies in S.F. home

I've been sorting through boxes of books lately. Came across Terry's book just a couple days back. I hadn't realized she was ailing.

Survived by her nine siblings and Pat Holt, her partner of almost a quarter-century. Pat and Terry were married on Valentine's Day weekend, 2004. The state nullified that marriage.

That wrong can never be righted now. Here's to the day things change for those who carry on the good fight.

And here's to Terry, may she be remembered fondly.

Labels: obit, San Francisco, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  4:10 PM|| |

Update your Bloglines or whatever it is you use to track RSS feeds or whatever. Anna Louise Genovese (although still a consulting editor at Tor) has started a freelance editorial service called Aleuromancy and has transferred her blog from anna louise's Journal to Aleuromancy.net.

Go thee thither.

Labels: blog, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  12:11 PM|| |

DRO has posted her updated "Tax Tips and Resources For Freelance Writers" over at InkyGirl.

Here's my annual updated list of useful tax resources for freelance writers. Sadly (for me, anyway, since I live in Canada), most of the info is specific to the U.S., but I did manage to find some info specific to Canada and other countries, listed below in the "international tax info" section partway down this list.

I was unable to find ANY tax-related resources of use to writers outside of North America. Suggestions welcome! [...]

Labels: information, URL, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  12:05 PM|| |

Today in Letters: Letters and Diary Entries from this Day in Literary History.

Today (08 Mar) brings us

Lord Byron: March 8, 1816

A letter to Thomas Moore.

I rejoice in your promotion as Chairman and Charitable Steward, etc., etc. These be dignities which await only the virtuous. But then, recollect you are six and thirty, (I speak this enviously—not of your age, but the "honour—love—obedience—troops of friends," which accompany it,) and I have eight years good to run before I arrive at such hoary perfection; by which time,—if I am at all,—it will probably be in a state of grace or progressing merits.

[...]

Labels: blog, books, history, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  5:04 PM|| |

The Curmudgeon cranks on about Craigslist ads that offer next to nothing (or worse!) as payment for wordsmithing.

Yahoo! sez: The Curmudgeon's chief complaint: would-be content providers that offer wordsmiths no pay. More specific no-nos: ads offering piddling in-kind compensation, ads with dubious payment schemes, ads offering nothing but "exposure," and ads offering no pay for ridiculous assignments.

And the ad-meisters fire back.

Entertaining all around.

[nod to Yahoo! picks]

Labels: URL, webstuff, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:43 PM|| |

Recent Earthquakes - Info for event nc40193932:

A moderate earthquake occurred at 4:19:54 AM (PST) on Monday, February 26, 2007.

The magnitude 5.4 event occurred 52 km (32 miles) W of Ferndale, CA.

The hypocentral depth is 0.4 km (0.2 miles)


Right at the seaward edge of the Cascadia subduction zone.

We'll be having dinner with Susan Hough on Thursday after her author talk at Kepler's down in Menlo Park for her newest book: Richter's Scale: Measure of an Earthquake, Measure of a Man

(In the area? Stop on by! Thursday March 01, 2007 -- 7:30 p.m. at Kepler's in Menlo Park)

(Buy now!)

I'm sure the our dinner conversation talk will turn to local earthquakes and Cascadia and Hayward and San Andreas. It always does.

Labels: book promotion, books, bookstores, life, quakes, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:26 AM|| |

For those set-upon (and blessed) folks who organize writers' conferences, Miss Snark has a most excellent post detailing the care and feeding of guest agents.

Miss Snark's must-haves give a peek into the world of agents.

Next time you're at a conference, take an agent to lunch or buy one a drink, just because. You may never use their services but your karma will be polished.

Labels: blog, book promotion, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:38 PM|| |

News from Internet Resources for Writers:

Checked and updated all links on Business/Submissions.

The page includes subsections:

• Grants, Prizes, & Contests - lists
  
• Markets - market listing resources on the Web
  
• Scams - known scams and how to avoid them
  
• Submitting - information on manuscript formats, queries, writing a synopsis and more.

I also added a separate header for our Miss Snark's blog.

Occurs to me that at some point I need to port all the content over to a CSS-driven revamped site.

sigh

Not today.

Labels: internet resources for writers, URL, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  3:05 PM|| |

Received a note from my SinCNorCal cohort with word that Barbara Seranella died Sunday while awaiting a liver transplant.

Sad news for those who'd known her.

More information at her site.

Life's too short for some. This is, as one of her titles said, an unacceptable death.

Less than three weeks ago, I blogged that her New Year's message showed such spirit.

We all had hoped ...

Labels: mystery, obit, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:04 AM|| |

Christopher Lockhart, Executive Story Editor at ICM has a blog called THE INSIDE PITCH: a Hollywood Executive answers questions from screenwriters.

What applies to screenwriters can also apply to writers.

Take a look-see, if screenwriting or fiction writing be your smack.

Labels: blog, URL, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:05 PM|| |

Ten Rules for Suspense Fiction
Brian Garfield

[Editor's note: In 1994, John Grisham revealed to NEWSWEEK that he credited the following article by Brian Garfield with giving him the tools to create his ground-breaking thriller, THE FIRM , as well as subsequent books. Garfield himself is a noted bestselling novelist, as well as a screenwriter, producer, and nonfiction writer. He won the Edgar Award for HOPSCOTCH, which was made into the prize-winning movie of the same name, starring Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson. For more of this renowned author's credits, please see his bio at the end of this article.]

The English call them thrillers, and in our clumsier way we call them novels of suspense.

They contain elements of mystery, romance and adventure, but they don't fall into restrictive categories. And they're not circumscribed by artificial systems of rules like those that govern the whodunit or the gothic romance.

The field is wide enough to include Alistair MacLean, Allen Drury, Helen Maclnnes, Robert Crichton, Graham Greene, and Donald E. Westlake. (Now there's a parlay.) The market is not limited by the stigmata of genre labels, and therefore the potential for success of a novel in this field is unrestricted: DAY OF THE JACKAL, for instance, was a first novel.

The game's object: To perch the reader on edge --- to keep him flipping pages to find out what's going to happen next.

The game's rules are harder to define; they are few, and these are elastic. The seasoned professional learns the rules mainly in order to know how to break them to good effect.

But such as they are, the rules can be defined as follows.

continues ...

Labels: writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  6:00 PM|| |

Seranella wrote a New Year's op-ed for the LA Times to clue us in on how she's doing since July 2005, when she had two liver transplants, followed by a month-long coma.

I HAVE DEDICATED every shooting star, broken wishbone and blown-out birthday candle to the same thing during the last year: I want my health back.

We want the same for you too, Barbara.