• You knew this was coming: the zombie Tarot deck.
• On cave paintings, art, and cognition.
• More old stuff: were those ancient figurines of voluptuous women goddesses . . . or toys? Don’t suggest the latter to the idol-makers of today.
• Have beautiful handwriting by Christmas. You have a whole year now to improve!
Dave Wilton links to a fine rant in The Atlantic about hyphens. (Yes, we care.) And that link will get you to this one in Mental Floss about the difference between the em-dash and the en-dash.
Now I am careful to use the en-dash when separating ranges of numbers, such as an article being on pages 317–24 of a journal (although you can’t see the difference in this font), but how did I get through various writing and editing jobs without knowing about “the storied ‘compound adjective hyphen,’ an event so rare in the English language that proofreaders shiver with excitement whenever they come across it”?
Me with a copy of The Chicago Manual of Style always within reach. I am but an egg.
Servers die, hard drives die, disks degrade, formats change. Paper still has its uses.
Your mother can help — and other hints.
“Back to the basics” works if you chose the right basics. (We could debate that.)
“The Writing Revolution,” an article in The Atlantic, argues that attention to basic rhetorical principles — as opposed to expressing your feelings or writing in order to become a better person— helps disadvantaged high school students to succeed.
And so the school’s principal, Deirdre DeAngelis, began a detailed investigation into why, ultimately, New Dorp’s students were failing. By 2008, she and her faculty had come to a singular answer: bad writing. Students’ inability to translate thoughts into coherent, well-argued sentences, paragraphs, and essays was severely impeding intellectual growth in many subjects. Consistently, one of the largest differences between failing and successful students was that only the latter could express their thoughts on the page. If nothing else, DeAngelis and her teachers decided, beginning in the fall of 2009, New Dorp students would learn to write well.
1940s technology might save the day.
Seriously, Jonathan Frantzen wrote The Corrections blindfolded?
So this article on writers coping with Internet distraction claims. Since most of my work requires copious reference to notes and text — and since I am a lousy touch-typist — the blindfold would not work. I understand what this guy did, however:
Born in 1985, [Ned] Beauman is a digital native – he has spent the entirety of his adult life surrounded by digital technology. Yet despite being immersed in the internet from an early age, Beauman is not immune to its power to distract, and he employs a level of computing trickery that makes Zadie Smith look like a Luddite.
“There are five layers of technological solutions I use,” he explains. “I edit my host file to block some websites, but that’s too coarse grain. I use K9, which is a parental control application, to block certain pages within websites, and I use an ad-blocker, not to block adverts, but to block the comment sections of many sites. And when I’m working I use Nanny for Google Chrome and SelfControl to block certain websites.”
The sites he blocks that cause so much distraction? “Virtually all newspaper and magazine websites as well as blogs and Twitter. And,” he says with amusing candour, “I also block things relating to my career that it’s probably best not to look at.”
Or maybe you just walk away from the computer and try something else. M. found this late 1940s portable typewriter for next to nothing and gave it to me for my birthday. It dates from when Smith-Corona was able to stop making M1903 rifles and other war matériel and go back to its core business — typewriters.
Of course, I had to ship it off to an old-school typewriter-repair shop in eastern Pennsylvania (Where did all the typewriter repairmen go? Rhetorical question.) and have it reconditioned at no small expense.
Then I sat down to write a letter to a friend in England and, guess what, I could not stop to read a blog or check the weather radar for a thunderstorm. It was liberating.
I keep thinking that I should go into the city, find a Starbucks, order a double cappuccino, pull out my Smith-Corona “Silent,” and get to work.
But — like its rival the Remington “Noiseless” — it is not.
If you like reading lists, here is one from Publishers Weekly.
I confess to having read none of them, although I did manage Gravity’s Rainbow, one of the runners-up — twice!
The editors of The Wiccan/Pagan Times have taken ten interviews with contemporary Pagan authors and published them in ebook and paperback format.
Presented here are some of the many memorable interviews we have published over the last 13 years. We have taken 10 of these interviews and put them together with author bios, pictures and weblinks so you can explore the authors further.
Interviewed are Anna Frankin, Dorothy Morrison, Edain McCoy, John Michael Greer, Kristin Madden, M. R. Sellars, Margot Adler, Patricia Telesco, Raymond Buckland and Yasmine Galenorn. Preserved here is a place in time within the pagan community when we were still new, but growing. We feel these interviews convey the flavor and the heart of the pagan community.
I have ordered it.
Joanne Bedford, who teaches creative writing at The Open University in the UK, has a simple writing technique:‘
• Select
• Copy
• Paste
Then you change a few words. Evidently that is the part that requires university-level instruction, since her students certainly arrive knowing the first part.
It’s one thing to plagiarize Dylan Thomas as well as some lesser-known (but alive and angry) British writers. But read to the end and you see that she also stands accused of plagiarizing Aleister Crowley.
Which of his works? Inquiring minds want to know.
By the way, Choronzon has a Wikipedia entry. (Via University Diaries.)
M. gave me this vintage (late 1940s) Smith-Corona “Silent” portable typewriter for my birthday earlier this month. Let it be a sign. Time to start writing—with the latest technology!
Speaking of writing, my former department chairman used to teach a once-weekly one-credit course called “Careers for English Majors.” He would bring in outside speakers, and he always tapped me to talk about a writer’s career path.
But there isn’t one.
Some people figure that out, e.g., Cassie Boorn, 24, in this article, “Six Young Female Journalists, One Year Later.”
Here is what I spent the past year learning; there is no path to success. Social media changed everything, the recession ruined most industries, too many people go to college and any sort of path that once existed is gone. That path is now paved with women who are too poor to have children and burn out by the time they are thirty. Forget the path you have been sold and make your own. Start a blog, major in Philosophy, have a baby in college, pitch a story to Forbes, ask too many questions, take things apart and put them back together and turn it into a good story.
The path is that there is no path. If you are a writer, you will be writing. Says another of the six, speaking of her still-younger self, “My diaries read like chapter books, with clear beginnings, middles, and ends as I planned, undertook, and achieved milestones.”
That kind of thing.
Kathy Shaidle is not the first person to say that the successful writer is not necessarily the most talented writer, but in this post at PJ Lifestyle she offers some guidance for being a successful freelancer.
One of the reasons I’m a freelance writer is that, frankly, I don’t “play well with others.” I am too introverted, tactless, demanding, opinionated, and “masculine” to fit in with today’s feminized workplace — a pink and purple extravaganza of giggling, weekly birthday parties, crying-in-the-bathroom, “diversity training,” “team building,” and boring baby pictures/anecdotes — everything, it seems, except actual work.
And today, “fitting in” with the company “culture” (of bridal showers and non-stop conversations about food and “stupid husbands”) is prioritized over competence and intelligence.
Yet somehow, even a curmudgeon like me can manage to remain polite, helpful, and engaged for the length of that email or phone call with a client.
So just imagine how impressed they’ll be with a genuinely nice person like you!
Good links, too. The part about working regular business hours is important, I think, if you have clients who expect to reach you by telephone during their regular business hours. For the person working around another job, it might not be so easy.
Somewhere out there is advice for writing after you have just spent three hours grading essays. When I find it, I will post it.