Archive for September, 2011
Let me paint a picture for you here. Imagine yourself at the kind of the party where people get drunk, smash holes in the wall, and then patch the holes up with cardboard from spare cases of beers. Drunken but not thoughtless, as it were. Now imagine that the owner of this newly-perforated home comes [ READ MORE ]
One of the things writers like to talk about is feelings. Writing what you feel; expressing the inexpressable in words. That’s the name of the game, right? Freelancing has a way of shattering writerly illusions like a sixteenth-century Dutch church window. When you are being paid to write for a wide range of employers you [ READ MORE ]
It’s really very important that I know how long it’s been since your last shower. Ok — it’s not actually important for me to know. But are you aware? Because if you have to think for a minute, chances are your own O Best Beloved (or whoever else you might live with, or work with, [ READ MORE ]
Do you remember that Seinfeld storyline where Kramer wanted to make a coffee table book of coffee tables? (I don’t, as it happens, but I know it exists because people bring it up whenever I advance this theory of publishing.) The joke was basically that there’s already a big, glossy-paged book of full-page images with [ READ MORE ]
I’ve never set up any kind of advertising on MA101. It’s more professional vanity than anything else; I just don’t like blogs with lots of random keyword-generated crap popping up all over the place. It looks cluttered and, to my mind, makes you seem a little less authoritative. So imagine my surprise when O Best [ READ MORE ]
Writing fiction has never been easier. You’ve got all the research you need right at your fingertips, whether you’re struggling with the details of an ancient Egyptian setting or wondering exactly how many alleys a villain could theoretically flee down between Broadway and Amsterdam on the 6800 block (and I had to look up streets [ READ MORE ]
I’m not a very classy person. I have, for example, a tendency to prefer cheap pizza to the fancy wood-oven-fired stuff with weird ingredients. Pine nuts and truffle oil? No thank you. I’d like fat with more fat on it, please. Things like that. But I draw the line at carrying my porn around in [ READ MORE ]
So there’s actually two ways to do what I’ve promised up there in the title. One involves hard work and advance preparation; the other mostly comes down to gimmicking the backstage of your blog. Guess which one we’re going to talk about here? Getting a blog post up “on time” is a sort of variable [ READ MORE ]
Mom, Dad, stop reading now please. Just come back tomorrow or something. Okay. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk about my career as a sex toy tester. It was a surprise to me too. But apparently this is the sort of thing that happens after a while of doing small [ READ MORE ]
Today’s post started out as something different. I was Googling “PBR case” for a good image to steal, with my usual dedication to copyright and proper citation, that might help illustrate the concept of Wisconsin hospitality to readers from less fortunate states. But what I learned in the process was that “PBR” stands for an [ READ MORE ]
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