Tools and Craft

Want to be a successful writer? Then go with genre fiction. If you can follow a simple recipe, you can write bestsellers. Just mix the ingredients, pop into the mail, and sit back and watch the money flow. No tricks, no gimmicks — just easy-to-find ingredients (available everywhere) and a few steps…this isn’t fancy French novel writing! Oh, and we’re also offering bargains on swampland in Florida. Seriously, right now is the time to swoop in and get the best price possible. When the ground dries, you won’t see deals like this. We’re about to break into a Tom Waits […]

Dan Green (The Reading Experience — an absolute must-read, in our opinion) picks up on one of our favorite themes: artists who “disappoint” by not producing clones of previous successes. He notes that the motion picture business thrives on repeat successes, so it expected in other media. The publishing industry, alas, can’t turn around fiction rapidly enough to build on the same concept. Which, we maintain, is the best possible thing for our society. Locking authors into slots is a product of a marketing-dominated business. Marketing, rather than editorial influence, has become a dominant factor. We like money, don’t get

Due to the extreme need to test-drive Entourage for a client, the husband took a long look at our iBook this morning. It is, he declared, a wonderful piece of art (would that all art be orange), but it is insufficient for our current needs (less bulk, longer battery life, memory, speed, bigger hard drive). We blinked and smiled, bearing in mind the advice of the great Arlene Dahl: Always let him think it’s his idea. So, off we went to the place where we buy our laptops (for some reason, we enter physical establishments for laptops, but always get

Seriously, you can take the girl out of the contracts, but you can’t take the contracts out of the girl. No really — earlier this week, we were reviewing a complicated acquisition deal involving several companies (where, if you ran your finger up the org charts, you’d discover there were really only two entities involved), one movie (or two, depending on whose perspective you took), and lots of shadowy figures (we were pleasantly surprised to encounter an old con artist from our past in the correspondence we read). And we were doing this for fun. Just moments ago, the husband

We are on a personal mission this year: we, with a little help from our friends, are going to reprogram minds. It won’t be easy, mostly because each of us failed brain surgery in high school. And it strikes us that we weren’t particularly successful with persuasive writing. Nor speaking. But never you mind — we will achieve our goal. We just need to buckle down and focus our energy. What is this momentous project? We are happy you asked: we are going to stop the world from adding the word “dreaded” to the word “synopsis.” We won’t get into

Once upon a time, we took an art history class. We still remain perplexed that art was defined as sculpture and painting with a smattering of architecture. Are those areas not broad enough on their own that they deserve individual treatment like the various forms of literature and music? Are literature and music not art? The end result: we can identify certain paintings and sculptures and something called a relief, which to us is like a sculpture, but not. Still can’t draw to save our life, but we found we like the strong lines of Caravaggio. Also that we still