I’d never heard of Mockingjay when my Twitter page exploded about its upcoming release last week. I follow mostly writers and publishers, to be sure, but the surge of popularity coupled with my complete ignorance left me feeling like the odd one out—like the only one who didn’t know what a Tamagotchi was while the rest of the school fed and played with their virtual pets. (Tangent: There’s probably a better simile to be had there, but do you remember those?!) For those that don’t know, I will share my new found knowledge: Mockingjay is the final book in The Hunger Games Trilogy, which is another one of those young adult series that has found just as many—if not more—adult readers—than child ones.

Had you mentioned a book called The Hunger Games to me I would have said, “Yeah, I think I’ve heard of it, maybe,” but I couldn’t have told you the first thing about it. But on Thursday, despite my lingering state of unemployment, I bought a copy. Then I came home, turned to page one, and started reading. Three-and-a-half hours (and one nasty migraine) later, after telling myself twenty times I would read just one more chapter, it was one thirty in the morning and I had just finished the book. Read more »

I have two things to admit: First, that I read fantasy. And second, that I feel no shame in this. I believe firmly that there is something to be learned from any book, be it good or bad, literary or otherwise; I’ve banished the phrase guilty pleasure from those I use to describe different aspects of my reading habits. For example, while I know that world description is a huge thing for some readers, reading fantasy, more than any other genre, has taught me how much I hate long-winded descriptions, and so I leave this out of my own stories, because I don’t want my readers skimming entire pages.

But while I enjoy some fantasy (yes, certain works are horribly formulaic, and I don’t like that in any type of writing), I despise most fantasy book covers. With few exceptions, they seem to me childish, to play into fantasy archetypes rather than to break them, and to have too many design elements competing for attention. Not to mention I hate having a character’s cover image fighting against the one I develop in my own mind. These complaints, of course, go for any genre of books, but I tend to see these problems most in the fantasy books, where simplicity is almost always discarded in favor of chaos and where the cover seems to be more interested in making the book fit into the fantasy genre rather than making it stand out.

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Dean Wesley Smith has got something against the publishing world, and so he’s writing a book about it, Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing.

Smith, known primarily for his book adaptations of television shows, movies, etc., has identified over twenty-five of what he says are writing and publishing myths, and has been ever so kind as to set writers straight with a series of book chapters on his website (which, if you enjoy, you are invited to donate toward). But what Smith seems to have forgotten is that the entire writing/editing/publishing/agenting/reading world is subjective, and that his opinion does not make something fact.

To be sure, there are some gems up there, and some pretty unarguable statements: writing slowly does not mean writing well, and writing quickly does not mean writing poorly; all writers are different, have different habits and strengths and weaknesses; writing requires practice. Most (though not all) of what I agreed with had to do with writing advice—which is unsurprising given that Smith has published over ninety books (even if he did have a pre-established base for many of them, such as character and world).

What he really seems to hate, though, are agents*. He is quick to mention the 17-year relationship with his own agent and that he is friends with a few agents, but it is all but impossible to miss his disdain for their usefulness, unless they are top tier, and especially for new writers.

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Despite the outcry earlier this year about the uselessness of Twitter after the Library of Congress announced it would be archiving every tweet, Twitter is still around and kicking, and users are finding new uses for it almost every day. Want to use it to find a job? Forbes will tell you how. Want to join a book club? Picador has one for you. Want to find new books to hopefully replace those your child is obsessed with so that you can read a new bedtime story for once? Well, you’ll have to talk to Susan Orlean for that one.

Last week New Yorker author Susan Orlean turned to Twitter in search of books to replace her son’s cherished “Magic Treehouse” books, asking her 65,000+ followers to suggest books for her five-and-a-half-year old using the hashtag #booksthatchangekidsworlds. She then posted a few hundred of these suggestions in an article on the New Yorker website. Not all the books on there are age appropriate, or readily inspire the image of a mother-son pair curled up in bed enjoying a quick story (I don’t know about you but the dictionary was never on my bedtime reading list). Still, looking through the titles brought me back a bit to my own childhood. Frog and Toad, anyone? Or perhaps The Boxcar Children. There’s a copy of The Little Prince on my bookshelf right now.

It's a beautiful, beautiful thing.

As a self-professed grammar geek, I was a little upset to realize that I had somehow missed the news that the 16th edition of The Best Style Book Ever (aka the Chicago Manual of Style) was given a publishing date of August 1 (although Amazon claims I can have it tomorrow if I select one-day shipping—and yes, that hyphen is necessary). Had I known about this glorious event sooner, I might have thrown a party, at which the main form of entertainment would have been sharing our most despised grammar, style, and usage pet peeves (a recent one of mine is unnecessary quotation marks). I even might have served these cupcakes.

But all that aside, I can’t wait to see what additions and changes are included in this new edition. More guidelines for electronic mediums and sources is a given, and Amazon tells me there will even be something called a hyphenation table, which makes me more excited than I care to admit.

The bad news, though, is that without a job I can’t afford this marvelous piece of editorial genius (okay, that might be overdoing it slightly—maybe). Until such time that I can spend over $40 on a reference manual, I know what to ask for for my birthday.

Also, isn’t that cover just gorgeous?

There’s a new writing Internet meme floating around the web this past week or so called I Write Like. Basically, you enter a few paragraphs of text and the program analyzes it for you and tells you which famous writer you write like.

Now, I’m (admittedly) a bit of a cynic, and so I immediately set to testing the validity of this statement, wondering if it actually analyzes some aspect of your writing or if it’s a random author generator. So I started submitting snippets of my writing, mostly paragraphs from my thesis. With the first few I was told I wrote like Chuck Palahniuk, Vladimir Nabokov, Dan Brown, then Margaret Atwood. Ah yes. Clearly my writing is nothing but an elaborate hybrid of the four.

However, two of those four writers were actually on my thesis list (I’ll give you a hint, Dan Brown is not one of them, though I’ve read all four of those writers), so I thought I’d dig a little further. I resubmitted a previous chunk of text, wanting to see if I would get the same result. I did. Read more »

Short post today since I was up late working on a book review, but take a look at the Brevity article here or at a longer article here on Barthelme’s forced retirement after 33 years at the University of Southern Mississippi despite his intention to remain director of the program for another few years. We should be used to this in the arts, to having our interests held as less important by those higher up, but this still feels shocking.

A 15-year-old girl in Tennessee recently published a suspense book with Tate Publishing (not a vanity press but the website says there is a small author investment in production, so it’s not exactly fully the NY-model either). But whatever the publisher, I’m still inclined to see this as an achievement, though it does get me wondering: Does age matter when it comes to writing/publishing? I know that, personally, at age 15, I was a better writer than most of my classmates, but in the grand scheme of writers worldwide, I was still pretty bad. Heck, sometimes even reading things I wrote three or four years ago makes me hurt inside, but I think this has less to do with age than with experience. So I went searching for what other people think, and it looks like the general answer (at least in the blogs I frequent) is that, no, age doesn’t matter.

Here are some other people that accomplished big things at a young age:

• Christopher Paolini wrote the first book of the best-selling Inheritance Cycle at age 15 and was on the best seller list by age 19
• Mozart began composing at age 5
• Jackie Cooper was nominated for Best Actor at age 9
• Kieron Williamson sold out his second exhibit in 14 minutes and sold 16 of his paintings for over £18,000, at the age of 7
• Michael Kearney received a bachelor’s in archaeology at age 10 and went on to teach college at age 17
• Abdul Aleem Siddique memorized the entire Qur’an at age 4

Anyone else feeling like a failure yet?

The Mona Lisa

So I went to the Louvre this morning and saw the Mona Lisa (or, as the French call it, La Joconde). I wasn’t particularly interested in going out of my way to find it, but my sister wanted to, and so we battled the massive crowds so that eventually, we could view the small painting from about ten feet away (you aren’t allowed any closer). I stood, trying for a look of reverence, while my sister snapped a picture (no flash), and then we fought our way back out of the room (apparently there’s no better place to stop and have a long conversation with someone). We continued through the hall of Italien painteurs, looking at the paintings, but not stopping to stare. We had discussed earlier how we are each more impressed by the sculptures and ancient artifacts (like the mummified cat) than we are by paintings, and so maybe this is why, but neither of us can understand what makes the Mona Lisa so special. I assume that many people there saw it for the same reason we did—because if you’re in Paris, and you’re in the Louvre, you are sort of supposed to see it—but why? We even saw a large-ish group of people clustered around a similar looking painting (we think they were confused), so even with our relatively high level of painting ignorance, we were by no means the worst off—but how special can something be if you mistake it for another painting? Read more »

A professional writing blog I read recently started a digital portfolio showcase feature, and one of the people they featured describes himself as a fiction writer. As far as I can tell, he has no book publishing credits, so it really is more of a portfolio rather than an author webpage. And it’s got me thinking.

As some of you may know, I also have an online portfolio, but I’ve been wondering recently about its use to me as an unpublished fiction writer. Yes, I also showcase my design (and, soon, my editing skills), but since I don’t have a following and I’m not trying to convince anyone to buy anything, I wonder if it’s worth it to continue to maintain the creative writing section. Here are my thoughts:

• None of my work appears online for me to link to—in fact I have no publishing credits as of yet
• Anything I aim to eventually publish cannot be posted on my website due to copyright issues and so I’m left showcasing the stuff I know isn’t publishable, that is in fact some of my weakest work
• Maybe one day when I do have a name I can release new material on my site and it will still be respectable, but that day is a long way off
• But I do still want people to know I am a creative writer

So help me out here: What is the value in maintaining the creative writing section of my website? Does anyone else have one?