“Whack away at everything pertaining to literary life – mechanical part as well as the rest. Learn to set type, learn to work at the ‘case,’ learn to be a practical printer, and whatever you do learn condensation.” Walt Whitman’s advice: don’t become a poet
Though we would never admit this to anyone, there is a major flaw in Firefox: things open in tabs remain available for reading all day long. Tabs don’t close themselves in disgust. Sometimes we take that step for them, but often we watch with sick fascination, wondering what we’re going to do with the article we clicked on in a moment of vague interest. Chances are, we’ll move on (this sometimes takes days, which would normally worry us, but we’re distracted at the moment). Unless the article grows on us. Like this New York Times story about authors living the
Let us suggest that HelenKay Dimon is a nice person. She does stuff like warn people before she offends them. We do not pause for such niceties, meaning we’re going to leap right in to the best method for word count we’ve heard this week*. Here’s my new answer: You actually have to count each word. Every damn one. Then you have to count the punctuation and spaces, do an excel spreadsheet setting out the number of each, have it bound and attach it as an exhibit to the end of your submission. If you don’t, the editor will automatically
GalleyCat has come to the rescue of those looking for detailed plot information, but unwilling to take that extra step and read the cover copy. Yes, you can judge a book by its cover (it’s always worked for us). . .especially if you know the shorthand. BECAUSE MUCH MORE THAN A BOOK’S CONTENT IS PRONE TO UNORIGINALITY. EPISODE 5: LEGS, FEET, SHOES
Here is the thing: when you have two unavoidable topics, it is better not to avoid them. Avoidance leads to more questions. If you come up with a highly probable but incredibly dull response to the questions, more power to you. Nothing kills reader interest in a topic faster than dull responses. And why do we have to explain this to Nicole Krauss and Jonathan Safran Foer? Because clearly they cannot be bothered to hire media consultants to do this helpful work for them. Refusing to discuss your spouse and feigning wide-eyed innocence when confronted with the similarity of topics
MediaBistro continues to make our days easier by going out and doing the interviews we would do if we had the time and energy. We don’t, so we pretend to be reporting by linking to their stories. In a way, it’s a win-win situation for us. Except for the part where we pay for the privilege. Must work on that. This morning, they buttonhole Kendra Harpster of Doubleday and get her to spill on all sorts of topics. We’ll just skip ahead to our favorite parts, though, as always, we suggest reading the full article. That way you’ll know she
We must say that our readers are busy little bodies. While we took advantage of the electric blanket and the lack of coffee (we were on strike until caffeine was freely available), they were off gathering news and forwarding, forwarding, forwarding. This is how it should be. In what we believe is the second major publisher deal with Vocel, Harlequin is going all cell phone on us. While we’re very exxcited about the possibilities of cell phone content (from an intellectual perspective), we’re already having gag-me thoughts. Maybe it’s the description of the cool services: Harlequin will provide subscribers with
LA Observed, in what is surely its second scoop in as many weeks, reports that the evil Calendar Live experiment ends tomorrow at 5 a.m. While normally we’d spend a few moments dwelling on the precision of the timing, we simply don’t have a spare moment to spare. What does this mean for you? Well, first, all the stories we don’t link to on the Los Angeles Times site will become fair game for our thoughts. Second, if we do link to a story, you have an excellent chance of reading it without having your credit card handy. No word
We know, we know. We said we were bored with the death of the book stories. No more, we swore. That’s so 2004. But that was before the Europeans started thinking about this book digitization thing that captivated us a few months ago. Turns out they’ve been studying the fine print while the rest of us have moved on. Probably there’s a life lesson there, but we can’t see it. Robert McCrum starts by quote Nigel Newton of Bloomsbury, a born worrier if his words are anything to go by: According to Newton, professionally cautious, mass digitisation is not a
As we now know, while the world was off stereotyping librarians, they were fomenting revolution. Which is exactly the same thing you’d do if you were faced with the prospect of another patron looking for a book “by that British guy. The famous one.” All of this means that if you really want to be radical in library circles (which we imagine are more fun than Disneyland), you have to be a Cuban librarian. Yes, it’s true (or as true as possible, given that we’re not planning on heading south to do any real reporting): in its effort to suppress
