39 Things to Remember While Struggling to Build Your Writing Career by Kimberly Grabas.
Some good thoughts here, not about incomplete sentences, but stuff like failure, personal manifestos, practice, and simply doing it. “Writing is supposed to be hard work.” Yeah. It’s not hard work like pulling weeds either. It’s hard work like speaking the truth in love when you’d rather throw snark from the corner.
The Writer by petebritney on deviantART
Why are storytellers often bad preachers and preachers often bad storytellers? Smith writes, “This isn’t going to be another missive from an artistic apostle of Doubt-as-Creed, hammering his 95 thesis of why Theology is, like, so dumb and stuff, to the wall of the Witlessburg Cathedral for Zeitgeist Studies and Hugs.”
Austin Kleon writes, “We all love things that other people think are garbage. You have to have the courage to keep loving your garbage…” He says this because someone out there is telling us we should be embarrassed to read certain things. Kleon points to Alan Jacobs’ twitter feed for some good points on reading what you like. There’s also this.
“We were told nothing ahead of time.”
This comes from the Åland Saltvik Vikingmarket in 2009. It’s far more demonstration than the fights we’ve seen in Minot, ND. They aren’t playing by the same rules, but there’s some appeal here. It’s a crime they cut the video too soon.
In 2010, Amazon disputed its arrangement with Macmillan on ebook prices and removed the publisher’s books from its site. Today the largest book dealer on the Internet is refusing pre-orders on new books from Hachette and delaying shipment on existing titles. Stephen Colbert is one of the authors with un-new books on the shelf, and he isn’t amused by the delay of what he says could be 30 of his books sold in a year. J.K. Rowling’s new book is coming out soon, which means thousands of readers would have pre-ordered it through Amazon by now, but cannot–not for ebook or print.
Since Amazon has 65% of the ebook market, working a deal with them is important to any publisher, but they aren’t the only ebook dealer. Barnes and Noble, Powell’s, and others are available, and maybe conflicts like this will make any argument for DRM pointless. If I have a Kindle and want to buy an ebook, do I need Amazon to sell it to me?
“There is a difference between inspiration and imitation,” so stop copying Ace Ventura: Pet Detective in this workshop. (via Prufrock)
All righty then.
In other news, they had automated hot dog machines in Gothenburg, Sweden, in the 1950s.
Patrick Kurp talks about writing and discusses the diary of WWI veteran: “The ‘ideal reader’ is a phantom. The writer who says he writes exclusively to please himself is a solipsist, and one who writes exclusively to please others is a whore. Neither is worth reading. I won’t pander just to pack the house, nor will I resort to fashionable chatter.”
John Wilson talks about Alan Furst’s latest novel, thirteenth in the series, Midnight in Europe.
“A lot of spy fiction prides itself on a pervasive sense of world-weary disillusionment. Note that, while in one sense self-consciously “anti-romantic,” these books are often quite romantic in their own way. (Are you, Reader, among the few willing to look into the dark heart of things?) By contrast, Furst gives us idealized but not impossibly heroic versions of ordinary people making moral choices. Romantic? Sentimental? OK, sure—as long as you acknowledge that those labels apply equally to John lé Carre.”
Tim Keller writes about his congregation sponsoring a full Shakespearean play improvised by the Improvised Shakespeare Company. For example:
The company takes a title or theme from the audience and then improvises a full Shakespearean play, complete with couplets, iambic pentameter, and the use of Shakespearean plot-lines. When asked for a title someone in the audience called out “Cat food for Breakfast.” The company proceeded to improvise a multi-act play based on that unifying theme, bringing it to a satisfying and hilarious conclusion. Most of the people in the audience I talked to afterwards said they couldn’t remember the last time they laughed so long and hard.
After the performance the director, Blaine Swen, shared how his Christian faith shaped his work as an actor and improv artist. He said “since Jesus has solved the big issues—he died on the cross for me—I am free to go on stage and have fun.” This is a powerful resource that all Christians have available for their work. We don’t go out on the stage or into the workplace trying to find ourselves, trying to justify our lives through our performance.