I was recently contacted by Dorothy Dreyer, who runs the always interesting blog, We Do Write, which has great features about books generally and the publishing process in particular, and lots of interviews with writers. Dorothy wanted to ask me a few questions for the blog, and of course I was delighted to answer them. You can read the whole …
Writer’s Toy
This is my new writer’s toy. I believe it’s called a “lapdesk”. It’s a desk that sits on your lap. Hence, “lapdesk.” Stop me if I’m going too quickly for you. Look. It even has its very own light. All mod cons, you see. My wife bought this for me yesterday. Now, rather than sitting at my desk all day, …
Polish, Schmolish
After a busy weekend, I’m just over half-way through my final polish of the manuscript before sending it back to my editor and publisher. Things have been going smoothly enough, but occasionally I get a page like this one: That’s not a polish, that’s industrial cleaning.
The Promise of an Empty Page
As I approach the end of the re-write for the Book With No Name, I find myself thinking more and more about my next effort. While the manuscript for the new novel was out in the real world, looking for a home, I had several months to flesh out my thoughts for the next one. The original kernel of the …
Gonnections (with apologies to Meyer Wolfscheim)
It’s busy work being a writer these days. As I’ve observed before, it’s no longer enough just to, you know, write books. You need a blog, a website, a twitter account, facebook… the list goes on and on. Anyway, I’ve been a good boy and done all (or most) of these things, and I wanted to give anyone interested a …
Word Clouds!
I recently discovered this great site that creates beautiful word clouds from texts that users can submit. (Thanks to Emily St. John Mandel for the idea – she has a cloud of her most recent novel on her site.) It’s pretty cool. The size of the various words depends on the frequency with which they appear. Here’s a cloud I …
Monday Morning Novelist
Been there, done that.
Video Book Trailers, Part Deux
A little while ago I posted an item about book trailers. As I noted then, these can often be rather clunky affairs, due principally to the insurmountable chasm between the product (a novel) and the media being used to sell the product (2 minute You Tube video.) Gary Shteyngart’s answer was to say nothing at all about the book – …
Freedom!
No, this is not a review of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel – although I can’t wait to get my hands on it. (The online book community has talked about little else for days, it seems. People don’t know whether to celebrate Franzen as the (quite obviously) brilliant novelist that he is, or to snipe about why he doesn’t have the …
Status Update
We’re back from a wonderful week away. Four days with friends in Boston, then four days in Maine. There we visited an old friend, Don, and his wife Samantha. Don and Samantha own Rabelais Books, a bookshop dedicated (and I do mean dedicated) to cookbooks. We loved our time with them. I will write more about it in another …