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 – …
Exciting New Book from, um, Alex George
You couldn’t make this stuff up. A little while ago I dabbled with the idea of a slight name change, reducing myself to a pair of gnomic initials in the manner of Chesterton, G.K., Rowling, J. K., Byatt A.S., and Hartley, J.R. (inside joke for my English readers with long memories.) Anyway, that didn’t last too long, and here I …
Better Titles
Given my on-going struggle to find the right title for my book, I was excited when I read about this site. It’s done by comedian Dan Wilbur, who might just be on to something. The idea is that these new titles “cut through the cryptic crap”, as Wilbur puts it, and tell you what the book is really about. I …
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 …
Glee!
So, yeah, about this book. No title as of right now, it’s true, but still much to tell you about. One of the major themes in the new book is singing. The story tells the tale of three generations of one family, and everyone sings. In particular, there are four brothers who sing unaccompanied barbershop harmony together. Now, it would …
On the Move…
After my brief flirtation with possibly the least inspiring nom-de-plume in history, I have now triumphantly reclaimed my name as my own. So long, A.H. George, we hardly knew ya. One consequence of this exciting news is that I have changed (with help from webmeister Boomer, naturally) addresses for this blog. Its home, as you’ll see from the top of …
Full Steam Ahead
I’m back in the saddle again. Following delivery of Amy’s notes and edits on the manuscript last weekend, we then exchanged some long emails addressing various matters arising. That was followed by two long telephone conversations towards the end of last week. Result: we have agreed what needs to be changed in the book. Amy’s suggestions were inspired. Some of …