Age: fortysomething

Location: Los Angeles, CA

What are you working on now?
I'm working on my first novel about black punk rockers in Los Angeles in the early '80s. I'm also busy promoting a blog guide book called "Blogosphere: Best of Blogs" that I co-authored with Peter Kuhns and researching radicals who lived in LA in the '30s.

What's the most helpful thing you've learned about writing?
That a writer is someone who finishes what they are working on. Also, that revision is the key to writing well.

What's the worst career advice you ever received?
Go to law school and that way you can earn money while you pursue your creative endeavors.

How did you write the blog book with timeliness in mind? What could you do to make sure the information would still be relevant when it came out?
Timeliness was key. I evaluated blogs by several factors in order to address the timeliness issue.
1. I only included blogs that had been consistently updated for a year. Aside from current events tied to a particular catastrophe such as Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, I selected blogs that had been consistently updated.

2. I checked blogs at the end of the proofing process to make sure that the blogs were still current.

3. In certain situations, I emailed the author of the blog to tell him or her what I was doing and to confirm that they planned to keep blogging.

4. We emphasized research tips and taught readers research skills so that they could explore and find blogs, regardless of how timely our listings remained. We wrote the book so that readers could use it as a how-to book as well as a guide to cool blogs.

5. We created a blog about the book and published the URL in the book on several different pages. We also encouraged readers to write in and tell us about new blogs that they'd discovered or that they felt that we missed. That way readers could return to the site for fresh updates. We also posted extra chapters on the site that were not in the book. We wanted to keep a dialogue going with our readers.