A Little Help From Our Friends
NOTE: You may not know that my wife is a special ed teacher, and you may not know that special ed teachers in many school districts get even less support than general ed teachers, but both are true. The following is from her annual “Beg-A-Thon” appeal, and any help you can offer would be greatly
Review: Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
Zeitoun by Dave Eggers My rating: 5 of 5 stars In ZEITOUN, Dave Eggers does an excellent job of weaving Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun’s compelling backstories and Katrina experiences together, shaded by post-9/11 xenophobia, and delivers a powerful documentary of what will most likely be looked back upon by history as one of this country’s
Reading Is Fun(damental)
“A man practices the art of adventure when he breaks the chain of routine and renews his life through reading new books, traveling to new places, making new friends, taking up new hobbies and adopting new viewpoints” Wilfred Peterson (via dhammza) At the beginning of the year I made several resolutions, one of which I
Writers Write, Even When They Don’t Realize It
The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn’t require any. –Russell Baker That Baker quote has been on my About Page forever, but I only just recently realized its irony
Our Bookshelves Are Over-Flowing With Books
Like a good bookstore, our bookshelves are a curated collection of stories and ideas – some true, some imagined, some a questionable mix of both. Each one of those books say something about who we are, what we believe in, what we cherish.
Thinking About New Orleans #mojogce
Group creativity experiment: 1 – “Litanie des Saints,” Dr. John I’ve always felt a personal connection to New Orleans. My mother’s family lived in Baton Rouge for a long time, and I spent a few summers down there as a kid. I remember one summer coming back home with a slight accent that never fully
Collaboration is the Killer App – #DIYdays
For a writer, it’s an amazing opportunity to leverage the full depth of their creations through a truly collaborative process — ideally starting after the first draft is written, IMO — instead of parceling out chunks of rights for a licensing fee and complete loss of control.
Why Keep Blogging? and other SXSW Takeaways
The best blogs are driven by passion, not obligation, and that you can tell when someone is just feeding the machine to maintain their traffic, a la Seth Godin, for whom I often use the hashtag #bloggingtoohard.
On DBW, SXSWi, Upcoming Gigs and Steampunk
You’re losing control of your own destiny. Authors, distributors and readers are getting closer to each other. –Shiv Singh, Engaging Readers in the Digital Age Three weeks ago, when I last posted something here, I was on the verge of completely disappearing into Digital Book World, both the conference and the community that spun out
Generalization Fail
When you’re ranting about the evils of “Big Publishing”, it helps to remember that for every My Life Outside the Ring, there’s also Boneshaker, and The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, and the entire First Second catalog! All of those happen to fall under the Macmillan umbrella. I’m not saying publishing isn’t all screwed up right