Having trouble writing? Try this famous author’s technique “Sometimes in a nervous frenzy I just fling words as if I were flinging mud at a wall,” says Pulitzer Prize winner John McPhee. “Blurt out, heave out, babble out something – anything – as a first draft,” he says in an article called Draft No. 4 now in The New Yorker magazine where he’s been appearing regularly for 48 years. McPhee, the author of 32 books, says he first wrote these words of advice in a letter to his daughter Jenny years ago when she was starting out as a writer herself. “The way to do a piece of writing is three or four times over, never once,” he told her. “You work it over and alter it, you begin to shape sentences that score higher with the ear and eye. Edit again, top to bottom. The chances are that about now you’ll see something that you are sort of eager for others to see.”

http://www.incidentalcomics.com/ Just found this great site for publishing peeps.

How To Run A News Site And Newspaper Using WordPress And Google Docs - 10,000 Words

The workflow integrates seamlessly with InDesign, meaning the paper now has one content management system for both its web and print operations. And if you’re auspicious enough, you can do it too — he’s open-sourced all the code!

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Randomness at play

I liked how this

http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2011/06/17/137221886/yes-those-people-ar...

Led to this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/01/arts/design/01tino.html

which led to this:

 

http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/03/against_writingthis_prog...

and now I feel so much smarter.

 

 

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You are a dog ....

I just read a blog post from Eoin Purcell where he uses the saying 'people don't know you're a dog online' to make a point. It occurred to me that with google talk, skype, social networking etc.,that that old trope about nobody knowing you're a dog online just isn't true anymore.  The internet is not about being anonymouse anymore. The digital space has changed dramatically since the time of the cartoon that Purcell mentions was drawn, (New Yorker 1993) 

Of course the point he was making was about how backlist competes with frontlist because now no one knows that it is backlist. It just is. And while I agree that digital distribution has changed the game for frontlist and backlist I still think that pubdate is extremely relevant and that it will be pubdate that influences purchases. Pubdate is what creates backlist and media is going to still push/review new over old. So while backlist is no longer constrained by material space it is still very much constrained by it's actual original existence and the way dialogue happens around books. 

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