Pinboard: bookmarks for shadowsun7 tagged 'writing'

The Awl is now two years old.

What I mean to say is that the current rules in place to win at having a New York internet publishing entity are stupid and wrong, both in terms of perceived and actual success.

For the former, perceived success, it’s all about getting attention and talking about how great you are, all of the things that I said I hated above. It’s not about actually doing anything, or building an audience, or making money, it’s about interacting with a lot of insufferable people who overvalue their own importance and want other people who overvalue their own importance to write about their collective overvalued importance. That doesn’t mean that everyone who participates in this system and wins is a jerk (there are lots of those people I don’t think are jerks), and that doesn’t mean that everyone who participates and wins is not smart (there are lots of those people who are way smarter than me). But also, and I want to be clear here, a lot of those people ARE phony jerks who are not smart and, to me, are also insanely annoying.

awl publishing writing content website business
april 2011 by shadowsun7

copy to mine

Tai Nasha No Karosha: Reflections on a Week of Blogging - Ta-Nehisi Coates - Culture - The Atlantic

Novelist time is reptile time; novelists tend to be ruminant and brooding, nursers of ancient grievances, second-guessers, Tuesday afternoon quarterbacks, retrospectators, endlessly, like slumping hitters, studying the film of their old whiffs. You find novelists going over and over the same ground in their novels—TNC was talking about Gatsby last week, Fitzgerald's a prime example—configuring and reconfiguring the same little set of preoccupations, haunted by missed opportunities. That may be because getting a novel written, or a bunch of novels, means that you are going to miss a lot of opportunities, and so missing them is something you have to be not only willing but also equipped by genes and temperament to do. Blogging, I think, is largely about seizing opportunities, about pouncing, about grabbing hold of hours, events, days and nights as they are happening, sizing them up and putting them into play with language, like a juggler catching and working into his flow whatever the audience has in its pockets.

authors writing blogging
february 2011 by shadowsun7

copy to mine

The Editor as Wizard « Snarkmarket

Important idea: The problem with self-published books, for authors and for potential readers, is that the physical book no longer signifies that anyone has read it. In fact, the physical fact of a self-published book is far more likely to signify that astonishingly few people have read it.

Self-publishing publishing novelr writing reading
april 2010 by shadowsun7

copy to mine