Friday Finds for Writers

Treasure ChestWriting-related resources, news, and reflections to enjoy over the weekend.

  • If you’re new to Twitter, you may find this primer to be useful.
  • 71 Ways to Promote and Market Your Book.” (h/t @JennCrowell)
  • A promising new-ish website I’ll be keeping an eye on: “The Writer’s Job,” which describes itself as a “guide to writing and making a living.”
  • For the next few weeks, Cathy Day plans to dedicate her “Teaching Tuesday” blog posts to some of her teachers and what she has learned from them. First up: Michael Martone.
  • This Q&A with Adam Berlin addresses the author’s new, post-9/11 novel; his work as co-founder/co-editor of J Journal: New Writing on Justice; and the gaps that can occur between books.
  • Have a great weekend, everyone.

    Wednesday’s Work-in-Progress

    A few professional highlights from the past week:NSSWM

    1. A visit to the new Scarsdale Library Writers Center, where I had the honor of presenting the first lecture in the center’s Professional Series. The topic: “Mapping the Changing Publishing Marketplace.” Thanks so much to my gracious hosts and to the great crowd that turned out.

    2. The arrival of my contributor copy of the 2014 Novel and Short Story Writers Market. (The volume includes my article on “Habits of Highly Successful Short-Story Writers,” with sage insights and advice from Roxane Gay, Michael Griffith, and Midge Raymond.)

    3. Publication of my article, “10 Ways to Celebrate Jewish Book Month,” on The Forward‘s “Arty Semite” blog.

    How about you? Anything you want to share from the past week or so?

    Weekend Web Wanderings

    Usually, I limit writing-link roundups to the “Friday Finds” posts. But I’ve run across so many interesting items over the past couple of days that I’m going sharing an exceptional set of “Weekend Web Wanderings” today as well. Hope that you enjoy!

  • Over on the Ploughshares blog, Rebecca Makkai advocates “writing as if…”. (h/t @occasionallyzen)
  • There’s something kind of whiny about this piece by Lionel Shriver on how much non-writing is involved in a writer’s work life. But there’s also something true about it.
  • Fascinating interview with poet Nikki Finney. Among the thought-provoking morsels: “Nobody wants to hear your rant. If you want to rant and if you want to be full of rage, you can put that in your journal book. Art is about the provocative, but it is also about the beautiful. I never forget that. They go hand in hand for me.”
  • Carol Tice takes on the subject of early-reader reviews–and how to make them better.
  • And I’m cheating a bit with this one. Let’s just say that I’ve recently been “inspired” to revisit my own “7 Reasons This Writer May Unfollow You on Twitter.”
  • Sunday Sentence

    BetweenFriends
    Another Sunday in which I participate in David Abrams’s “Sunday Sentence” project, which asks others to share the best sentence(s) we’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”

    When Lilah remarked that in order to have progress, there have to be victims, David Dagan agreed with her and added that history is by no means a garden party.

    Source: “Father,” by Amos Oz, in Oz’s collection Between Friends, trans. Sondra Silverston