Tag: writing

When I get around to writing a novel loosely based on this period of my life (but not legally actionable), I may want to call it South Lake. I like the name for some reason. I try to name all my novels, even the ones that are still just a glimmer in my eye. Having…

These are the days of our lives. Today I reached the 100% submission milestone on one of the most difficult writing projects of my life. I kept getting “nearly” done and then I’d be stuck again rolling a rock up a hill. This last piece, an appendix, took me at least three or four weeks…

You, gentle reader, probably did not notice my most recent experience of nanofame, a weekend flirting with the top of the weblog charts on the strength of a weak little song parody I call Blogistan Pie. Now, I’m already conflicted about Radio Free Blogistan. It’s a good outlet for my writing, memoir, and publishing interests…

Today marks the tenth anniversary of my first post to Usenet (May 11, 1993). I actually posted four times that day, all to rec.music.gdead. None of the posts are especially memorable (though one gives a fair idea of my other favorite bands of that time), but I still find it noteworthy to mark the passing…

Back when we started Enterzone, a “hyper web text media zine art” project, the goal was not just to produce a kind of ‘zine without paper or distribution costs but also to take advantage of the new internetworked medium to publish writing and art that simply couldn’t be represented fairly or at all on paper.…

Since I started Radio Free Blogistan last July I’d managed to post at least one entry every day, until yesterday. Since I use RFB to aggregate blog posts to a number of different sites, this means that RFB had a continuous calendar running back to its first day. I was kinda proud of this although…

If there’s any blogger out there who deserves a decent-paying column gig, it’s Ken Layne. He’s got the writing chops, the journalism dues paid, and the blog cred. What more is required?

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So I’m goofing around thumbing through the always entertaining Craigslist and I notice that they’ve added (or made more accessible) a system basically allowing people to flag items as inappropriate, misfiled, or especially good. In a way it’s like the modding up and down they do at Slashdot. Anyway, I go to check out the…

Since late last year I’ve been meeting once a week with a good friend in a bar or café to do some writing. We encourage each other. It’s a bit like having an “exercise buddy.” If either of us don’t feel like doing it, we can use the fact that the other guy is depending…

The usually impeccable attitude on display at The Gawker shows a slight crack today when editor/writer Elizabeth Spiers responds to an illiterate slam from some Tim Goodman groupie. The main response on the Gawker home page is just perfect, but the extended entry tries too hard: I was merely challenging his assumption that American audiences…

New current favorite blog of note: shrevie hoister’s LiveJournal. Jump in anywhere. Looks like shrevie’s been backfilling to 1995. Random shards of a mind (and fingers, and probably toes) at work, good linkage. Brain says: yummy.

I’m so out of it. After returning from a week and a half in New York I’m still reading The Gawker but without that same sense of immediacy (not that it matters where you are when you read about New York, and not that that prevents me from reading the Times, the Nation, the New…

Now it can be told: In some ways the most frustrating thing about the deal I signed in August to write a guide to blogging for professionals was that I wasn’t permitted to discuss the project here or in my blog-about-blogging. This was probably a good business decision for my publisher, as they did not…

Here’s one of my pet peeves about television writing. It seems that a writer wants to show a character getting serious and reinforcing some sombre truth, she has that character say to another “know this: I will never leave you alone” or “know this: I’ll be watching you” or something like that. This always grates…

I feel that one of the things I’d like to be “logging” is the start, milestone-reaching, or conclusion of any of my writing projects. For example, today I completed the first draft of a review of The Deadhead’s Taping Addendum (PepperTonic, 2002) for the upcoming issue of Dead Letters Magazine, a scholarly (believe it or…

Five years ago today, on my 33rd birthday, I started my first online journal, breathing room. It wasn’t a blog in the sense we mean today, as it was more of a writer’s journal, a daily writing practice, a place for unvarnished honesty and fleeting thoughts. But to me the transition from journal to blog…

Found art? Reality programming? Pop anthropology? You make the call.

A few months ago, I recall, you reviewed (in the New York Times Book Review) Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens and Letters to a Young Lawyer by Alan Dershowitz. How about Letters to a Young Free-Lance Writer? In highly abbreviated form, I would offer the following advice …