[This is one of what will no doubt become a series on my experiences in using a Kindle 2. It's not a drum I want to beat often -- don't want it to become one of those "I have X but you don't, haha!" gloatfests. But it might be useful for people on the fence [...]

[Read more →]

The Missus has a refrigerator magnet which features a head-and-shoulders hand-tinted photo of a wealthy, hoity-toity society-matron sort of woman; the text alongside says, “‘Frugal’ is such an ugly word.” (Ha!) Like many people, I suppose, I have great ambivalence about acquiring ever more Stuff. Examined closely, expressions like Wow, that would be so cool! [...]

[Read more →]

You’ve probably encountered references to NaNoWriMo here, at least in the comments — the so-called “(Inter)National Novel Writing Month” of November. This project encourages people who want to write fiction to, well, do it; everyone who signs up agrees to try writing a complete 50,000-word novel over the course of the thirty days. (There’s no [...]

[Read more →]

Like most writing and reading households, The Missus and mine has books way in excess of the available bookshelf space. We’ve lived in this house for more than eight years now, yet still — still! — somewhere around six or eight cartons and big plastic tubs of books take up space in our (mercifully dry) [...]

[Read more →]

At the Dennis Cass Wants You to Be More Awesome site, in a thread about dispensing with the whole query-an-editor/agent process, member Paul Mikos pointed me to an experiment by publisher HarperCollins UK. The experiment goes by the name “authonomy” (a cute neologism I’m still trying to make up my mind about). From the authonomy [...]

[Read more →]

Yesterday I went into a soapbox-lecture rant, shall we say? (yes, let’s — rants seem to be another thing that’s done a lot), about some of the comments to a recent post on Nathan Bransford’s blog. At the end of every week, Bransford posts a “This Week in Publishing” entry summing up recent industry news [...]

[Read more →]

This Sunday is Father’s Day in the US. Last week, 20 years ago, my Dad died. I thought a fitting tribute to both of these occasions would be to post here a short story which was, in many ways, a story of my Dad (although none of the actual events described in it occurred to [...]

[Read more →]

The Editorial Ass blog is running a fascinating series of posts. Collectively referred to as “Celebrate Reading Month,” each post in the series is written by a guest blogger, each describing a book which had an impact on the blogger’s life, understanding of books, reading habits — whatever. MoonRat, who runs the blog, has made [...]

[Read more →]

The blog known as Editorial Ass (which is short, of course, for “Assistant”) is written by an anonymous editor in NYC who identifies herself only as MoonRat. It’s linked over in the “Touchstones” category. A recent post there, on the surface, was stimulated by a lecture, which MR attended, given by one Jonathan Karp, one [...]

[Read more →]

I know, I know… I said, “In my next post on How It Was, I’ll include an excerpt from ‘Book 1: Spring.’” It’s coming. In the meantime, please check this page. It describes how I’m hoping to make the whole process of posting, downloading, and reading excerpts easier for both you and me. Eventually, it [...]

[Read more →]