Recently in Writing Category

The last we heard of him was a picture postcard from Mazatlan, on the Pacific coast of Mexico, containing a message of two words: "Hello -- Goodbye!" and no address.

My article yesterday on content theft has sparked some keen conversation here and in my email stream.  One reader -- "Robert William King" ... I put his name in quotes because he refused to sign in using OpenID to leave a comment confirming his identification -- sent me an email that appears to defend the behavior of the pirates stealing my content and I share his thoughts with you now...

I spent my Memorial Day tracking down the jerk who took my hardcopy book -- Picture Yourself Learning Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard -- and scanned it into a .PDF file for easy downloading on his website.  There are few people who believe this sort of behavior is content theft -- but let me assure you what was done to my book is a violation of International Copyright Law, it is pirating -- and in giving away something for free that my publisher paid me to write and paid to have distributed as a hardcopy book -- only ruins the book publishing economy in its core.  That means fewer books will be published and fewer authors will want to write books that can so easily be stolen.  Here's a screenshot of the page for my book from the pirate site.  The .PDF file size description was the dead giveaway that this site was not selling my hardcopy book.

I read something interesting somewhere the other day and the simple, arresting, argument was this:  "The memoir-as-a-book as we know it is dead."

Jack the Cat died yesterday -- Saint Patrick's Day now provides a whole new depth -- and today I am missing the best writing partner I ever had.  Even though Jack had been extremely ill the last three months of his life -- his Veterinarian said he was a "Miracle Cat" because his blood numbers were so bad he should have been dead long ago -- yet Jack still fought on with us to live because he seemed to know what we could never admit:  We could not live without each other.  Even in the throes of his last days with failing kidneys, anemia and heart failure -- Jack always remained the elegant, bi-color, Persian show cat he was born to be 15 years ago.  He never lost his class:

I have had the delight of editing, teaching, discovering, and publishing over 1,000 new and established writers across a 25-year career.  In the last decade or so, I have had the honor -- but rarely the horror! -- of working with a wide variety of writers and their quirky personalities.  I admit upfront am the wackiest and quirkiest of them all -- so I condemn my own foibles before even peeking at anyone else's need for petting. 

I am very pleased to announce that after only a mere eight years in development, the novella Kate is available for purchase on the Kindle. The process has been rather long and difficult but well worth it.

The newsprint newspaper is DEAD!  Let it die!  Bury it.  Let the bugs and worms eat the decaying pulp and let's move on with our lives and getting the news quick, fast, and deadly on the internet.  As an online author and itinerant publisher, it is delicious to watch the traditional media bandwagon crumble under the weight of their new irrelevancy.  They have their worry beads in hand and their self-flagellation in process and they aren't waiting to sound their own public death knell on your front stoop and in your mailbox:

If you're a word lover, then you'll go bonkers for the fun and learning you can have with Visual Thesaurus.  Just type in your word and you'll be presented with an associative visual mapping.  In the example below, I keyed in "duplicitous" as my base word.  The various branches extend the meaning and history of the word with other words.  Hover over any of the words in the Visual Thesaurus interactive box and you'll be presented with extended definitions.



Yesterday, SuperAgent Matt Wagner Tweeted a link to Peter Osnos' take on eBooks.  Is SuperAgent Wagner oddly tooting his own funeral dirge?  Or is Matt Wagner sensing an opportunity on the horizon the rest of us are unable to envision?