“A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.”
~ Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder”
Cold River was a first roll of the dice for me as a memoir writer...
At 81, John Hatton is learning to ski and has returned from six weeks in New Zealand, which is why he missed the ACT Supreme Court’s reference last month to Mafia involvement in Colin Winchester’s murder. Organised crime figures who believed they had been double-crossed were said to have a motive for killing assistant federal police commissioner Winchester, but police had been unwilling to reinvestigate Mafia links. John Hatton
Cold River was a first roll of the dice for me as a memoir writer...
At 81, John Hatton is learning to ski and has returned from six weeks in New Zealand, which is why he missed the ACT Supreme Court’s reference last month to Mafia involvement in Colin Winchester’s murder. Organised crime figures who believed they had been double-crossed were said to have a motive for killing assistant federal police commissioner Winchester, but police had been unwilling to reinvestigate Mafia links. John Hatton
Political satire with Mike Baird on tweets
Neil Gaiman explains one of the easy ways to become a writer. You just wake up one day, after having tasted the fruit of a certain tree. You'll see what I mean. Do Not Cite or Circulate
Authors publishing through both traditional and independent methods earned $7,500-$9,999 per year, thousands more than authors who published with either method exclusively.
“While some scholars may shun such developments, others are embracing them, leveraging analytical tools and techniques to account for a landscape of authorship and reading that is no longer confined to simple geometries and lines of influence, and no longer served by the established critical schools.”
~ Can You Really Know An Author If You Don’t Follow Him Social Media Dragon? Los Angeles Review of Books
14 Reasons why you shouldn't dream of being a full time author
“I realize I don’t want any record of my days. I have the kind of brain that erases everything that passes, almost immediately, like that dustpan-and-brush dog in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland sweeping up the path as he progresses along it. I never know what I was doing on what date, or how old I was when this or that happened – and I like it that way.” Why Zadie Smith Will Not Keep A Diary Ever Rookie
“We often know very little about those who live closely and share the lives of the writers about whom we apparently know so much. Part of this is wilful mythologizing. We like to think of the writer as indestructible as the text, preferring not to imagine who might make them breakfast in the morning or help them put on their shoes when they are too old to manage it by themselves.” A look at “Miss Alice” Lee, Ted Hughes, John Bayley, Leonard Woolf, and Valerie Eliot. Malchkeons Who Stay: The Lives Of Writers’ Companions Melville House
Why it is better to read on paper
The power to spread and transform the alphabet — once concentrated among medieval scribes, British and French printers, or Christian missionaries spreading words to spread the Word — has been democratized. Now with tablets and smartphones, “the smallest building blocks of the shared written language (i.e. print) are more in your hands . . . than they have ever been. Washington Post
“The research suggests fantasy stories — or at least those good enough to hold our interest — produce neural reactions that are above and beyond those created by other narratives — even ones that are just as exciting, involving, or humorous.”
Fantasy X Stories subtitled: Parliamentary Library Stack on Level 6 Pacific Standard
“What does this movement in travel writing bear for the genre as a whole? What can the graves of dead poets in Vrbov and Venice, a boat ride down the Amazon to the coast of Brazil, or a visit to the homes of D. H. Lawrence and George Eliot tell us about life, about living?”
Los Angeles Review of Books
“This idea Franzen posits that literature teaches us you’re not the ‘heroic figure you think of yourself as, that you might be the very dubious figure that other people think of you as’ is as deeply embedded in many big YA novels as it is in Munro stories. To say these books are simplistic is to mistake grandness, ease of narrative, and breathless pace for mere shallowness.”
Latitude East Flavorwire
“Getting
an author booked on ‘The Daily Show’ was often the Holy Grail for book
publicists,” says Kate Lloyd, Scribner’s associate director of
publicity. Her authors loved Stewart, she says, because “his audience is
made up of smart, book-buying readers who respond to the thoughtful
treatment and authentic passion he customarily expresses for the books
he features.”
~ Washington PostDigital Book World’s new survey of just under 1,900 authors found fairly low annual earnings. Dana Beth Weinberg tells the Guardian, “We see for the third year in a row – even though we made a strong effort to get representation in the survey from successful indie authors – that most authors aren’t making much money and most books sell very few copies. We also find that traditionally published authors and authors who combine traditional and indie publishing have higher annual incomes on average than indie-only authors. Last year, we took a lot of heat for these unpopular findings, especially from the indie community.”
The Birth of Politics: Eight Greek and Roman Political Ideas and Why They Matter