Sunday, January 24, 2016

Czech Out the Tools to Make 2016 Your Most Productive Writing Year Ever

Reminder! The American Society of Magazine Editors announced on Tuesday the 50 finalists for ASME's Best Cover Contest, now celebrating its 10th year. You can vote here until January 26. Winners will be announced February 2 ...


It’s that time of year to look toward the promise of 12 months to come, to envision shedding of pounds, bulking up muscle, stamping out that last cigarette and, for journalists and other writers, producing work they can be proud of. Well intentioned they may be, most New Year's resolutions fail because it’s easier to stick with old habits rather than forge new ones.
Blue skies. If you could wish for anything this year, what would it be? An investigative series? A gripping narrative? A novel or screenplay? Productivity guru  David Allen  (Not David Allen of Minister-Counsellor (Taxation) Australian Delegation to the OECD fame) recommends envisioning “wild success” as a dream come true tactic.
Novelist Gail Godwin called it “the watcher at the gate” and speed is the way to silence it. As Roy Peter Clark put it, “Write like hell.” It doesn’t eliminate revision from the process, but it does guarantee that you’ll have prose to polish. 
 5, Punj, Pet, tools to make 2016 your most productive writing year ever


Bernard Williams saw his work as reminding moral philosophers of truths that are known to all adults except moral philosophers. He had a point ...
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Successful columnists connect with their readers by offering not just the tale, but the "teller," a person with a distinctive voice. One of the building blocks to develop your voice is narrative lens: the way you relate your readers to your story  Connecting as a Columnist: Your Voices, Your Choices

After spending months retooling the way it reports on the nation's capital, The Atlantic on Thursday launched new sections aimed at capturing the attention of policy wonks and political junkies alike.
The new verticals — dubbed "Politics and Policy" and "2016 Distilled" — are part of an effort by The Atlantic to maintain a presence in two different but interconnected areas of D.C. coverage: The deep-dives on Washington laws and lawmakers that are synonymous with its brand and the higher-metabolism, snackable reporting craved by political obsessives With new sections, The Atlantic aims at covering the long and the short of Washington 

Some of you may have heard about this novel for  all the wrong reasons:
The launch of From Now On Everything Will Be Different by Eliza Vitri Handayani at the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2015 was cancelled after warnings from local police, ostensibly because of references to the 1965-66 massacres of communists in Indonesia.  There are sensitivities best left undisturbed, it was thought. The cancellation raised a storm of protest about censorship and (in Australia anyway) a rehash of the historical events of 1965, publicity which seems to have defeated the censor’s purpose (if there was one, rather than just over-officious local intervention) From now on everything will be different

By Paul Elie. A half-century ago, One Hundred Years of Solitude earned Gabriel García Márquez single-name stardom. How did Gabo’s magic reach the masses? 50 Years of Solitude

Robert tRivers, Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist.  A wild memoir, full of tales of bipolar, murders in Jamaica, study at Harvard, marijuana, knee symmetry as a key variable in sprinting success, and the Black Panthers.  It has sentences like “Best way to put it, nobody fucked with Jozef Imrich.”  From one of the leading evolutionary biologists, recommended if you are up for the offbeat and the exotic and not obsessed with coherence.  Burial instructions are included ...