Archives: January 2006

“Want to know the innermost secrets of Writer Beware? Of course you do! Come and read about hunting down scam agents, and get information on writing and publishing from authors/scam hunters Victoria Strauss and A.C. Crispin. Got questions on how to avoid scams in the writing world? Ask the experts! Got questions on writing and publishing? Get the straight dope here.” This seems like a good resource, although it’s brand spankin’ new, so we’ll see if it becomes bookmark-worthy.

Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion's Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook's Morin Oluwole, and bitly's Tim Devane. Register now.

A new online magazine for women has launched today called Sirens and it looks pretty cool, featuring amongst other things a fashion rant by EW correspondent Whitney Pastorek. I hope it has a long, happy and storied career.
I know how many of you feel about writing for free, but you new freelancers out there might want to get in at Sirens while the getting in is good. It seems very freelance-friendly and a good spot for submitting essays. Of course, nobody is forcing you to write for free so if you hate the very notion, then just ignore me or wait until Sirens can afford to pay you.

Did you resolve to pitch more articles? Clean out your files? Write 500 words a day? Have you quit yet? A lot of people have. I can tell because finally all the wanna-bes have left my gym. But if you’re still plugging along, now that it’s the end of January, congratulations. If you’re still on the resolution wagon but aren’t sure you can keep it up all year, there are some tips on making your resolution stick from WorldWit.

On November 9, Brooklyn musician and writer Rafi Zabor (author of the new memoir I, Wabenzi: A Souvenir) joined his editor, Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s Lorin Stein, for the third in mediabistro.com’s Authors and Their Editors discussion series, co-sponsored by McNally Robinson Booksellers. Over the years, Zabor garnered attention as a jazz drummer and music writer for Musician, Playboy, The Village Voice, and Harper‘s. His novel, The Bear Comes Home, won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1998 and was voted one of the Best Books of the Year by The Los Angeles Times. His memoir I, Wabenzi: A Souvenir is the first of four volumes. Check out what they had to say here.

Intenational Besteslling author M.J. Rose has written six novels and two non fiction books. Her most recent novel is The Delilah Complex, the second novel in her series about NYC sex therapist Dr. Morgan Snow. The first novel in the series, The Halo Effect was an Anthony Award finalist. Rose also teaches a class on marketing for authors, runs the Buzz, Balls & Hype and Backstory blogs and runs Authorbuzz.com – the first marketing service for authors. So you wouldn’t think she would have much to say on the topic of procrastination, being the overachiever that she is, but she does.
By. M.J. Rose
1. Don’t Write
If you want to write but just can’t seem to get your novel finished, don’t despair. You’re not alone.
For years I wanted to write fiction.
I had a million ideas.
But I couldn’t get past the first ten pages. Two dozen first ten pages as a matter of fact.
I’d read far too many books on “how to write a novel,” had tried hundreds of writer’s exercises and followed far too much advice much too seriously.
A quick search at Amazon.com lists over 18,000 books on writing. More than 2000 just on writing literature and fiction alone.
Overwhelmingly the authors who penned those tomes said: just sit down and write every day. Even if nothing comes out, even if all you write about is last night’s dinner, even if you record your dreams, just write.
Guess what? Just sitting down and writing will get you writing, but it will get you writing a journal, not necessarily a novel. My head was so filled with the pressure to write, that I wasn’t thinking straight. I wasn’t looking for a process, I wasn’t discovering a path. I wasn’t immersed in my imagination. I wasn’t in touch with the feelings and conflicts of my characters I felt compelled — but incompetent — to put down on paper.
I even went to a therapist to discuss the writing block. Is it a writing block if you’ve never even gotten started writing?

Read more

Starting to get those tax forms in the mail, aren’t you? Didn’t we just pay our taxes last year? Jeez. This article from Writers Weekly “provides guidance to those concerned that their profit motivated trade or business activities remain deductible, particularly in those cases where losses have been generated in the past and/or are expected to continue to be generated in the future.”

From the HuffPost: “In order to protect his brand as a hard-charging, truth-probing journalist,” John Cusack said, “Team Russert needs to do an Oprah: haul back on his show Cheney and Rumsfeld and all the politicians who’ve lied to him on the set and damaged his credibility and confront them straight out.”
italics mine.

Playwright Wendy Wasserstein, who celebrated women confronting feminism, careers, love and motherhood in such works as “The Heidi Chronicles” and “The Sisters Rosensweig,” died Monday. She was 55. (AP)

My sister at FishBowlNY got to chat with Frank Rich, who recently returned to the NYT op-ed page.

It’s interesting to hear Rich, stalwart of the MSM, wax on about the possibilities of blogs (for God’s sake, man! You’re behind the TimesSelect wall!). He’s getting excited about war blogging (“Can they do the kind of blogging in a war zone that the conventional media, with all its resources, can’t do?”), how bloggers tackle investigative reporting as a group, picking up Zeitgeisty threads as in Rathergate (though “getting to the bottom of where Bush actually WAS during his guard service” has been another thing entirely); and whether the blogging form lends itself to cumulative investigative stories, like Enron (“What do you do when you get to the place that doesn’t involve documents at all? With something like Enron the only way you’re going to find out is by talking to this person and that person, and then talking to them again”). It’s hardly surprising that this should fascinate Rich, given his beat: making sense of the new Beltway revelations each week, trying to parse out truth from spin. It will be the focus of his current book — “a narrative bout post 9/11 America” — for which he has just begun leave from the op-ed page (with Ted Koppel stepping into the breach). I tell him how much I enjoy his column, sincerely. “It’s very truthy,” I say. He laughs. “What more can I ask?”

More here.

MONDAY: Break Into Ghostwriting: Profit from being the silent partner.
The mb One-Night Workshop: Pitch Clinic with David Hochman: Bring plenty of ideas and be prepared to talk and write your way through rejection to the pitching A-list.
TUESDAY:
Screenwriting and Book Literary Agents: What they can, cannot, and won’t do
How to Find, Understand, and Translate a Medical Study: In this seminar, learn how to read journal articles and interview their authors with authority and confidence.

WEDNESDAY: How to Write for Men’s and Women’s Magazines: This seminar, taught by an instructor who’s worked on both sides of the aisle, will help you pinpoint the kinds of stories the different magazines look for from freelancers, and how to get your foot in the door.
Travel Writing Boot Camp: Students will be expected to investigate unfamiliar neighborhoods, seek out experts in the field and demonstrate the highest levels of research and reporting.
Writing and Editing for Brevity: So, how do you tell a story in 250 words or less?
THURSDAY:Party reporting: Quote hustling on the red carpet
Intro to travel writing: (in Seattle!)We’ll reveal all you’ll need to successfully break into the travel publishing world.
SUNDAY: Perfect Pitching: Target, craft, and sell magazine stories through query letters.
How to Write for TV: From spec script to staff job