… from Joe Konrath: No matter how talented you are, no matter how hard working, no matter how awesome and[…]
Read more
Latest Posts
Context is everything! Cats and dogs in the Bible
I spotted this quote in a magazine this week … “The dog is mentioned in the Bible 18 times —[…]
Read more
Check your popularity with n-grams
Y’all know about n-grams, right? Wikipedia nails ’em: … an n-gram is a contiguous sequence of n items from a given[…]
Read more
Literary Putdowns
In America, only the successful writer is important, in France all writers are important, in England no writer is important,[…]
Read more
Memories of James Siers
I first met Jim Siers when my flatmate, Mike – a dab hand with a soccer ball (or should that[…]
Read more
Writing – Steven Wright
Grant Snider’s writer’s comics
If you’re looking for an excuse for not writing, (and I have a few suggestions here, here, here and here),[…]
Read more
Why Key is going now
Executive Summary 1: There’s a crash coming. Executive Summary 2: Poisoned chalice, anyone? Whatever you might think of John Key[…]
Read more
Kurt Vonnegut and the shapes of stories
As Kurt Vonnegut demonstrates, almost all stories follow one of two basic shapes. Then there’s a third, which you probably[…]
Read more
Leonard Cohen, Suzanne and “a standard writer’s contract”
I’ve always loved this song by the late Leonard Cohen, but I was intrigued by his opening comments in this[…]
Read more