So now that I’ve complained about how Nanowrimo steals a month of your life away and you’d have to be CRAZY to want to sign up, another perspective, excerpted from my post over at Dailywritingtips: Kickstart Your Writing With Nanowrimo Nanowrimo teaches important writing habits that no fiction writer can afford to ignore: 1. Discipline: [...]

Via Kahunna, an essay called Always Carry A Pencil: “An adept reader “phrases” a book as Ella Fitzgerald “phrases” Cole Porter, here leaning into the words and holding them back, there partnering them as Kafka partnered Goethe in February 1912: “I read sentences of Goethe’s as though my whole body were running down the stresses.” [...]

(This is the sixth in a weekly series about tools for writers. For the rest of the series, go here.) In the coming weeks, I’ll cover some free resources for nonfiction book writers, but I’d like to showcase this book as it’s the best non-free tool I’ve found for book proposal writers. (Unless you go [...]

Via Blue Tea, two artists that create miniature dioramas using books as their medium. Su Blackwell‘s scenes are part Joseph Cornell, part fairy tale (not that Cornell’s works aren’t themselves fairy tale). Thomas Allen uses pulp covers in much the same way, though I’d say his work is more humorous (perhaps inherently so, due to [...]

I love New York with a love that can be considered unhealthy, and Colson Whitehead’s (what an unfortunate last name) The Colossus of New York had received rave reviews. “Pitch-perfect,” one reviewer wrote. Maybe I’m just not hip enough, but the book didn’t grab me. Maybe I’m too much of a journalist, but I wanted [...]

This is something new for this blog: a plug for a book I have not actually read. But Anu Garg’s newest book, The Dord, the Diglot, and an Avocado or Two: The Hidden Lives and Strange Origins of Common and Not-So-Common Words, looks to be pretty great. Anu Garg is the guy behind the A [...]

I love this concept. From the site: “Just get yourself to a real-life or virtual book store… and, well, buy a friend a book! But here’s the fun part: you can’t buy your friend a book because it’s their birthday or they just graduated or got engaged or had a baby or anything else. You [...]

My Metro book (small enough to fit in a bag, can be read with one hand while straphanging) last week was Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, a story about average Richard Mayhew who “falls through the cracks” and finds himself in London Below, or the Underground. Here Earl’s Court really has an earl, Shepherd’s Bush has shepherds [...]

The day dawned over the Ghats, the day rose over the Blue Mountain, and churning through the grey, rapt valleys, swirled up and swam across the whole air. The day rose into the air and with it rose the dust of the morning, and the carts began to creak round the bulging rocks and the [...]

The first book I dug into this year was Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon’s 750-page monster. (Although, what of Pynchon’s work couldn’t be considered a monster by those standards?) It was my first exposure to Pynchon besides The Crying of Lot 49, which I’m told is not his best work by any means. What can I [...]