Monthly Archives: September 2006

This week's online writing resource: Writing-World.com

Posted on September 13, 2006 by Keren

Writing-World.com is a huge collection of writing-related articles (currently with over 600 articles and columns), on an enormous variety of subjects: from absolute basics to handling your writing income and expenses.

There’s something here for everyone, whether you’ve never written a thing before, or if you’re a published author. Check it out.

Posted in Articles, Resources, Websites |

9/11: birthday of the blog

Posted on September 12, 2006 by Keren

When the world changed on Sept. 11, 2001, the web changed with it.  While phone networks and big news sites struggled to cope with heavy traffic, many survivors and spectators turned to online journals to share feelings, get information or detail their whereabouts. It was raw, emotional and new — and many commentators now remember it as a key moment in the birth of the blog.

…

Since 9/11, the rise of “warbloggers” and online political commentators like Glenn Reynolds’ Instapundit has been, in many cases, a direct response to the U.S. government’s post-9/11 foreign policy, kickstarting a culture of questioning, poking and prodding from which no public figure is safe.

Read the full Wired News article here.

Posted in Articles |

Amazon reveals ebook reader

Posted on September 12, 2006 by Keren

Engadget reports:

Oh, come now, like you thought the world’s largest book retailer (online) — which just started peddling digital video under the Unbox brand — wasn’t going to go head to head with Sony’s Reader on an e-book device and service? Say hello to the Amazon Kindle, their take on a book reader device that comes equipped with a 6-inch 800 x 600 display (which we can only assume is e-ink), 256MB internal storage, smallish two-thumb keyboard cursor bar, scroll wheel, standard mini USB port, 3.5mm headphone jack, SD slot, and get this: EV-DO data! (Don’t believe us? The spec sheet is after the break. Why do you think it was in the FCC?)

Looks a little big and clunky to me. And surely they could have done better than 256mb of storage? True, ebooks don’t take up as much space as mp3s, but it’s several times as big as any iPod. The real question, though, is will it work with ebooks that weren’t bought from Amazon?

Read the report here (with pics!). (Via futurismic)

Posted in E-books, Reading, Technology |

Hitler biographer Joachim Fest dies

Posted on September 12, 2006 by Keren

German historian and publisher Joachim Fest, author of a landmark biography of Adolf Hitler, has died aged 79, German media reported on Tuesday.

Fest, who was seen as one of Germany’s leading authorities on National Socialism (Nazism), died at his home in Kronberg near Frankfurt on Monday, according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), the paper he co-published between 1973 and 1993.  The FAZ did not give the cause of his death.

Read the Yahoo News article here.

Posted in Authors, Obituaries |

7 Steps to Creating Quality

Posted on September 9, 2006 by Keren

Yehuda Berlinger has posted a step-by-step article on improving the creative process – applicable to writers, game designers, inventors or anyone else who spends their time trying to come up with ideas.

2. Prepare your brain so that worth can flourish.

All ideas, thoughts, inspirations, inventions, and so on appear in your brain seemingly at random. The very subject of this article, the very words of this sentence, simply come to me. Why to me, and not to others?

The primary reason why worth comes to some people is that the groundwork is laid. Ideas come as a result of triggers in thought patterns. The more diverse the thought patterns, the more ideas you’ve been exposed to, the more relationship possibilities that can exist and appear.

If you never learn about the sky, the stars, the moon, or anything in outer space, you will never come up with an idea about how things in outer space interact. You may come up with an idea about outer space, but you will be re-treading ground that already exists.

Read it here at his blog (via Lifehacker).

Posted in Articles, Resources |

Science Fiction and the City: An Interview with Jeff VanderMeer

Posted on September 8, 2006 by Keren

The novels of Jeff VanderMeer fall somewhere between science fiction, urban surrealism, dark fantasy, magical realism, and even horror comedy. VanderMeer’s literary range becomes immediately apparent when you consider that he’s been “a two-time winner (six-time finalist) of the World Fantasy Award, as well as a past finalist for the Hugo Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the British Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.”

VanderMeer: I get my inspiration from real life as much as possible, and then from history books and then from other writers. I find Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, for example, stultifyingly boring because of this idea of speculative urban design. Although I like the idea of a setting also being a character, it has to also be a character – not be the only thing in the book.

Sometimes I will use authors as something to react against – and say, well, okay: this is an interesting design for a city and this is an interesting design for a city, but neither of these actually work. By kind of cross-correlating them and looking at the differences I can figure out where it is that I want to go.

Link to the full interview at BLDGblog (via Boingboing)

Posted in Authors, Interviews, Science fiction/fantasy |

Google opens up 200 years of news

Posted on September 7, 2006 by Keren

Attention, historical fiction writers: Google has added a new search engine to their collection - Google news archive search.

BBC says:

The web-based tool allows users to explore existing digitised newspaper articles spanning the last 200 years and more recent online content.

“The goal here is to be able to explore history as it unfolded,” said Anurag Acharya, an engineer at Google and one of the team behind the project.  “It’s fascinating to see how people’s attitudes and emotions have changed through time.”

Link to the Google news archive search engine (via BBC)

Posted in Resources, Websites |

Government mandate gives publishers a marketing hook

Posted on September 7, 2006 by Keren

It may not rank up there with Christmas and Easter as a book-buying holiday, but Constitution Day (September 17, the day of the Constitution’s signing in 1787) is gaining some recognition, thanks to a law enacted in December 2004 requiring schools and colleges that receive federal funding to provide some sort of educational program concerning the Constitution on that day.

Read the Publisher’s Weekly article here.

Posted in Events |

Minny Book Awards in Jeopardy?

Posted on September 7, 2006 by Keren

The Minnesota Humanities Commission, an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities and home of the Minnesota Center for the Book, announced yesterday [Aug. 30] that it is discontinuing its sponsorship of the annual Minnesota Book Awards. The award program was launched in 1988 and the MHC has sponsored it since 1999. The MHC cited the ongoing impact of a $1 million funding cut by the Minnesota legislature in 2003 as the principal reason behind the decision to end its sponsorship.

Read the Publisher’s Weekly article here.

Posted in Awards |

Sarah Bradford chats about her Jackie Kennedy Onassis biography, 'America's Queen'

Posted on September 6, 2006 by Keren

Sarah Bradford is a historian and biographer. She is the bestselling author of several biographies including “Disraeli,” selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; “George VI,” and “Princess Grace.” Her most recent biography, The New York Times bestseller “Elizabeth,” received praise by everyone from John Updike in the New Yorker to The Wall Street Journal and Time magazine.

Chat Moderator: Please tell us a bit about your book, “America’s Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis” and how it differs from other biographies about Jackie.

Sarah Bradford: Number one, it differs in the length of time. And number two, the range of interviewees — particularly people like her sister, Lee Radziwill, who have never spoken to writers before. I think this has given me insights to a new Jackie that most people don’t know about.

Read the CNN interview here.

Posted in Authors, Interviews |