Martin Amis responds with wit and grace to Anna Ford’s bizarre attack in The Guardian.

In The Guardian’s Books Blog, Robert McCrum celebrates the rise of self-publishing.

Writing for The Observer, William Skidelsky wonders why Britain still has it in for Martin Amis.

At the same time, Americans quite like writers who behave badly, the classic example being Norman Mailer. The French, too, tend to be more respectful of writers than the British and also expect them to be polemicists and provocateurs. If Martin Amis were French, you imagine that he would be considered a great intellectual.

In The Guardian A. L. Kennedy struggles with the writing process.

Everyone is probably sick of the topic by now, but I would feel remiss were I not to note April L. Hamilton’s cogent take on the row between Macmillan and Amazon.

Issue 13 of The Journal of Specialised Translation focuses on the difficulties of moving texts between Chinese and English.

Mainichi Daily News reports that Joh Sasaki and Kazufumi Shiraishi share the 142nd Naoki Prize.

“The moment I thought I might be a novelist, that was when my luck ran out,” the younger Shiraishi jokingly recalled.

The Millions notes Frank Kovarik’s spreadsheet tracking fiction published in The New Yorker.

National Public Radio’s Morning Edition has a segment on the deleterious effects of e-books on readers and writers.

Laura Miller of Salon misses the march of weird little marks.

Authors who have eschewed quotation marks include E.L. Doctorow, David Guterson, Charles Frazier, Nadine Gordimer, Kate Grenville, William Gaddis and (sometimes) Raymond Carver.

Why do they do this? I once heard Doctorow tell a group of journalists that if a writer knows what he’s doing, quotation marks aren’t really necessary. “You can tell when it’s dialogue,” he explained. Often enough, that’s true. However, to say that an element of written language can be eliminated without rendering the language itself incomprehensible is not tantamount to saying that the element is superfluous and ought to be abandoned.

At The Awl Choire Sicha writes about a curious inversion.

At a bar last night, I was talking to someone smart who made an excellent point: that a very quiet, revolutionary act in the history of publishing had just taken place.

It was already clear, in December of 1999, that books were a dying species. Already more people seemed interested in producing novels than consuming them, and when it came to serious works, there seemed more fascination with the writer than the writing. Books, I heard from two serious, bewildered editors in New York on the same trip, were now part of the “entertainment industry,” and a first-time novelist was as likely to be judged on the power of his author photo as on the character of his content.

In the Los Angeles Times, Pico Iyer escapes the tyranny of the moment.

Tin House picks the best debut novels of the decade. I have read only the first and second on the list (number one was a bit of a bust; number two I liked), but I will probably add the others to my teetering stack.

At The National Post Mark Medley talks to Martin Amis about teaching writing.

In The Atlantic, Alice Sebold contemplates literary awards.

The Guardian covers this year’s Booker prize longlist.

In the Times Damian Whitworth interviews David Peace.

When he is writing he is “at his happiest, even when writing the things that I write. The act of writing is good for me”. If the writing isn’t going well he seeks refuge in his obsession with the number 9. “I rely on it more when my confidence is low. If I am not confident that what I have written is good I will count up the number of words I have written and if it comes to a number divisible by nine I think ‘great’.” He chuckles. “There’s all kinds of weird rubbish.”

At The New Republic, Antoni Cimolino explains why John McWhorter’s assertion that the works of Shakespeare should be rewritten for clarity is silly.

In The Globe and Mail Andrew Nicoll, author of The Good Mayor, recounts how his former agent urged him to pose as a woman in order to sell his novel.

I am a bloke of the brick-outhouse variety, a little over 6 foot tall and a little under 280 pounds. In my youth I played a bit of rugby – which is like football but without the helmets. I am a heterosexual man with a 16-colour default setting, completely unable to tell cerise from fuschia; I couldn’t find “rose-whisper” on a colour chart with the aid of a sat-nav.

The Guardian’s series on writers’ rooms looks at Justin Cartwright’s workspace.

Terry Gross of WHYY’s Fresh Air interviews Roya Hakakian.

In the New York Times, Sewell Chan reports that J. D. Salinger has prevailed in his court battle against a pseudonymous hack who ripped off his work.

In a victory for the reclusive writer J. D. Salinger, a federal judge on Wednesday indefinitely banned publication in the United States of a new book by a Swedish author that contains a 76-year-old version of Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of “The Catcher in the Rye.”

At the Guardian Stuart Evers wonders why contemporary British literary novels rarely “venture outside the greater London confines.”

J. Robert Lennon’s piece on writing in the Los Angeles Times certainly mirrors my experience.

Acquiring a literary archive can be a difficult, time-consuming task but it does not normally entail heavy farmwork.

At the Guardian Mark Brown follows the British Library’s pursuit of John Berger’s cache of papers, drafts, and correspondence.

The Washington Post’s Marie Arana interviews Eduardo Galeano.

At the Guardian Robert McCrum lists working titles of literary classics.

The Wall Street Journal covers the Justice Department’s intensifying interest in the settlement between Google and publishers and authors.

On National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Robert Siegel notes J. D. Salinger’s lawsuit against a Swedish author accused of ripping off The Catcher in the Rye.

For The New York Review of Books, Julian Barnes remembers John Updike.

Elizabeth Taylor Ruth Padel, the descendant of Charles Darwin who was recently elected the first female professor of poetry at Oxford, resigns her post amid allegations that she engaged in a smear campaign targeting her closest rival.

At Publishers Weekly Jim Milliot reports a surge in on-demand and short run titles.

At the Guardian Stuart Evers argues that prodigies have taken over fiction.

In The Australian Kevin Rabalais profiles Tash Aw, author of Map of the Invisible World.

He is burningly intense about his chosen career, and one feels he has staked everything on it. As he puts it: “Writing has warped me. I have not fitted myself for anything else.” In the beginning, he took jobs in warehouses, shops and offices, “menial work with very little responsibility that allowed me to keep all my mental space for writing”.

For the Observer, Olivia Laing interviews Adam Foulds.

Joan McAlpine’s article in the Sunday Times reveals that James Kelman regrets winning the Booker prize in 1994.

At the Washington Post, Bob Thompson notes retrenchment in American publishing.

Ishiguro’s fiction is acclaimed for the spare elegance of the writing, a testament to the power of what is left unsaid. But he is not spare in conversation – in fact, he talks readily for more than two hours. The curious thing is that, by the end of it, I still have no idea what he’s like. You couldn’t say he was closely defended – he is too personably forthcoming for that – but there is an opacity about him that eludes description, giving no glimpse of what might lie within.

In the Guardian, Decca Aitkenhead interviews Kazuo Ishiguro.

For The Village Voice, Eli Epstein-Deutsch profiles Can Xue.

The New Republic highlights its Nabokov archive.

National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition profiles Barney Rosset.

Columbia University announces the 2009 Pulitzer Prize winners.

For the Guardian, James Campbell talks to August Kleinzahler.

“The poet taps into a larger, inhuman force,” Kleinzahler says, “unpredictable and sometimes dangerous. Like Eros. The Greeks designated gods for these forces – they’re not particularly nice.”

National Public Radio’s Morning Edition has a segment on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Elements of Style.

At Salon Sarah Hepola reports the disappearance of gay-themed books from Amazon’s search results and sales rankings.

For the Guardian, James Lasdun covers a new generation of short story writers.

In the New York Times, Miguel Helft covers a legal challenge to Google’s settlement with publishers and authors.

Opposition to the 134-page agreement, which the parties announced in October, has been building slowly as its implications have become clearer. Groups that plan to raise concerns with the court include the American Library Association, the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School and a group of lawyers led by Prof. Charles R. Nesson of Harvard Law School.

At the Globe and Mail Craig Boyko broaches the delicate subject of size.

I am not writing a novel.

The pressure to do so has been subtle but pervasive. It usually takes the form of the question, “So, are you working on a novel?” (The “yet” is implicit.)

This attitude is understandable coming from a publisher or agent, who after all wants to sell lots of your books (and short stories do not sell well), but it is surprising to hear it from other writers. Even the editor of a periodical that was publishing a story of mine once gushed, “You should write a novel!” It was meant as praise, I think.

Alison Flood at the Guardian notes that “debut novelist Joanna Smith Rakoff was forced to change the title of her book after it emerged that acclaimed Irish author Colm Tóibín had plumped for the same name for his own forthcoming novel.”

In the Guardian, authors describe the joy and chore of writing for a living.

Salon has Haruki Murakami’s acceptance speech for the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society.

Reading is required for any John Updike pilgrimage. That’s not “reading,” as in books, but Reading, as in Pennsylvania. It seems you can’t go a block in this city of about 83,000 without running into one of the author’s old stomping grounds or a scene from one of his books, where often the city is named Alton or Brewer.

For the Washington Post, Ben Chapman takes the tour.

At The New Republic, Javier Marias frets about the behavior of artists.

The most worrisome thing for those of us who have turned out to be novelists or poets or sculptors or painters or musicians is that not even as adults have we seen much reason to admire our predecessors. We might feel great admiration for their work, but we rarely take to them when their lives are recounted in books or depicted on screen. I don’t know if it’s just that our profession has been particularly unfortunate in that respect or if artists really are unbearable.

At Three Percent Chad W. Post examines the furor over the inclusion of arts funding in stimulus spending.

The New York Review of Books has Robert Darnton’s analysis of Google’s settlement with authors and publishers.

. . . Google will enjoy what can only be called a monopoly—a monopoly of a new kind, not of railroads or steel but of access to information. Google has no serious competitors. Microsoft dropped its major program to digitize books several months ago, and other enterprises like the Open Knowledge Commons (formerly the Open Content Alliance) and the Internet Archive are minute and ineffective in comparison with Google. Google alone has the wealth to digitize on a massive scale. And having settled with the authors and publishers, it can exploit its financial power from within a protective legal barrier; for the class action suit covers the entire class of authors and publishers. No new entrepreneurs will be able to digitize books within that fenced-off territory, even if they could afford it, because they would have to fight the copyright battles all over again. If the settlement is upheld by the court, only Google will be protected from copyright liability.

In n+1’s new book review supplement, Darryl Lorenzo Wellington describes judging Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel contest.

I write all my first drafts by hand — not, however, with a quill pen — because there seems to be some kind of symmetry between the muscular movement of my hand and the flow of ideas in my head. That symmetry gets destroyed by a keyboard, which becomes an alien intruder in the dialogue within myself. Lots of friends assure me that I could quickly make the transition to the laptop and enhance my productivity. I’m sure they’re right, but my dirty little secret is that I want to prolong rather than shorten the writing process, since it is my only source of creative fulfillment.

In the Washington Post, Joseph J. Ellis defends putting pen to paper.

Bookforum interviews Mary Gaitskill.

The Guardian’s series on writers’ spaces features Jane Gardam’s work room.

At Salon Jason Boog examines missed opportunities in book publishing.

“It’s going to be very hard for the next few years across the board in literary fiction,” says veteran agent Ira Silverberg. “A lot of good writers will be losing their editors, and loyalty is very important in this field.”

In Prospect, Tom Chatfield examines literature’s prize culture.

At a lean time for everyone in the print industry, it doesn’t do to bite one of the few hands that’s left feeding you. But the increasingly interchangeable (and arbitrary) feel of each literary event in the calendar cannot serve the long-term interests of a trade that ultimately relies on fresh talent, readers and ideas for its survival.

It’s a troubling, self-destructive trend—and one that may yet see shopping for serious literature driven entirely online.

Salon and Big Think present a conversation with Egyptian novelist Alaa Al Aswany.

In the Guardian, Sarah Weinman investigates “Schadenfoer.”

Jonathan Safran Foer is a young, rich and successful literary writer, an oxymoronic state that arose at the moment his debut novel Everything Is Illuminated was published in 2002.

Yesterday J. M. G. Le Clézio delivered his Nobel lecture.

In the San Francisco Chronicle, Heidi Benson profiles Robert Silvers of the New York Review of Books.

Pairing writer with subject is an art. And such matchmaking is “part of the excitement of being an editor,” Silvers said. “We want brilliant and beautiful articles – works of criticism and imagination.” From the start, he added, “if we [Barbara Epstein and himself] had one thing in common, it was this feeling of intense admiration for wonderful writers.”

These aren’t particularly healthy times. A breed of lyrical Realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked.

In the New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith follows two paths for the novel.

Back in 2002 I had a running debate with a friend of mine on the subject of “dignity.” She claimed that this was something I was excessively concerned about. She didn’t think it was possible for people like us to be really dignified in the old (and possibly imaginary) way of prior generations and characters in classic novels.

In writing about David Foster Wallace at n+1, Benjamin Kunkel writes about art and criticism in general.

At the Guardian Mark Brown notes the passing of Pat Kavanagh, wife of Julian Barnes and former agent of Martin Amis.

In the Washington Post, Sir Ian Kershaw contrasts the writing of history with the writing of fiction.

One of the most frustrating feelings I experience when I sit in front of a computer screen before I start writing is knowing that I have to put words onto the empty space and that I am the only person who can do this.

Haruki Murakami appeared at Berkeley. Ben Dooley has the details at The Millions.

On Murakami’s next novel: He finished it last week.

Sian Pattenden at the Guardian notes Random House’s attempt to sneak an unacceptable termination clause into the contracts of writers of children’s books.

Fresh Air remembers Ted Solotaroff, founder of The New American Review.

The New York Times has an article on the passing of L. Rust Hills.

At the Powell’s Books blog, Jonathan Segura submits a defense of unlikable protagonists.

At Salon Rebecca Johnson goes in search of blurbs.

At The New Yorker, Adam Kirsch writes of John Keats’s obsession with fame and death.

Do you despise choppy modern forms of communication such as text messaging? There is nothing wrong with the model, Luddite. The problem is your vocabulary.

At The Guardian’s books blog David Barnett wonders why we have so little interest in independent writers.

At The Globe and Mail, Andrew Pyper delivers a sobering report.

The pressures on writers coming into the second decade of the quickly aging century go well beyond the previous demands of meeting deadlines and improving one’s craft. The midlist–we are soberly told by agent and editor alike–is, like the Titanic, a place no less doomed for all its comforts and good taste. Gone are the tweedy days of publishers sticking by an author because their editors believe in him. Now every book has to “work.” That is, move product. A lot.

On National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, David Gura examines writers’ Web sites. The popular ones seem to be designed to appeal to those who do not read books.

In his article in The Chronicle of Higher Education covering the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference, Michael Dirda wonders whether New York is still the city of dreams for young American writers.

The rain was slashing down when my train from Washington pulled into New York. Outside Penn Station, the line at the taxi stand was long, and, with little else to do for the next 20 minutes, I found myself thinking about all those young writers who, year after year, had come to this city of dreams, some bringing with them nothing but their ambition, others already clutching the manuscript for a novel, a play, or a book of poems. Here a few had found great or moderate success — and most none whatsoever. Yet even as the disillusioned gradually drifted home to Nebraska or Indiana, the next generation of hopefuls was already stepping off the bus at Port Authority and looking around at the city they would surely conquer with their pens.

In “The Social Side of Literature” at the Guardian, Shirley Dent writes of literary cliques.

Cliques that matter are about breaking rules in private, about pushing against the boundaries of current thinking. They are about ideas. And they come about through people who have certain ideas in common joining together to explore and expound those ideas.

Cliques should be tough places – they’re where artists and writers wash their dirty intellectual linen in private, where no idea is unthinkable and criticism is no-holds-barred. Honesty and trust and privacy combine to permit this.

10 Zen Monkeys asks. A few hardy individuals answer.

Erik Davis:

. . .I find most comments sections boring and/or tendentious and/or tough to read for one still invested in proper grammar.

Mark Dery:

As someone who once survived (albeit barely) as a freelancer, I can say with some authority that the freelance writer is going the way of the Quagga. Well, at least one species of freelance writer: the public intellectual who writes for a well-educated, culturally literate reader whose historical memory doesn’t begin with Dawson’s Landing.

John Shirley:

Editors are no longer permitted to make decisions on their own. They must consult marketing departments before buying a book. Book production has become ever more like television production: subordinate to trendiness, and the anxiety of executives.

And in my opinion this is partly because a generation intellectually concussed by the impact of the internet and other hyperactive, attention-deficit media, is assumed, probably rightly, to want superficial reading.

A Salon reader asks:

The thought of publishing the novel terrifies me. However, I do long to be published. I would not be happy just writing for the sake of writing. I want to write to be heard. It’s just that I’m afraid of being heard, as much as I want it.

. . .Have any suggestions?

Salon answers.

The Guardian has a short piece on writers’ rooms. The spaces themselves contain what one would expect–desks, computers, reference books. Some are tidy (perhaps only for the camera), some unkempt. A few of the quotations provide a bit of interest.

National Public Radio’s Morning Edition has a story about writers who draw inspiration from Shanghai.

Salon has a best-of list twist: some of their favorite authors weigh in on the best books of 2006. The list so handily transcends the meme that it should be in a separate category entirely.

New York Magazine has a delightful feature on Beatrice Monti’s Tuscan retreat for writers.

There is a lot of very bad writing advice out there. The best piece that I have received is to write two pages a day, no matter what happens. That advice has been repeated so often that its origins are misty and trotting it out in writing circles seems tired. An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Jay Parini explains what is so magical about that particular quota. It also has some tidbits on elder statesman Updike’s writing habits.

The New York Times is running a piece on Senator George Allen’s (R-VA) sleazy attacks on challenger Jim Webb’s novels.

Even after years of teaching and tutoring, it still amazes me that college students so often need basic writing advice. Students do not want to write and do not understand why they need to be able to write well.

The “Thinking” section of Michael Harvey’s The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing begins by addressing student attitudes toward writing:

Why do students write? Easy, most students would say: Because we have to. Honest, perhaps, but discouraging. It makes writing seem pretty trivial. How about another go? Here’s a likely second answer: To show what we know. Hmm, I’m not sure I like that much better. Isn’t there something more positive we can say about writing?

Slate has an article on authors’ sometimes absurd efforts at cultivating mindshare, with a focus on Hemingway’s exploits and ad copy.

Canadian writers have won a class-action lawsuit. The primary issue was whether a publisher (The Globe and Mail, in this case) can reuse a writer’s printed work in electronic form without permission or compensation.

A post at ALG explains the author’s reluctance as a reader to discover anything about the lives of the writers whose work she enjoys.

A New York Times review by Emily Barton begins:

At the start of her new book on writing, Francine Prose dispatches with The Question–the five words that inevitably confront writers who teach, writers who don’t teach, and possibly even nonwriters who do neither: “Can creative writing be taught?”

Prose’s succinct answer is “no,” but she elaborates on it with characteristic humor, asking us to imagine “Kafka enduring the seminar in which his classmates inform him that, frankly, they just don’t believe the part about the guy waking up one morning to find he’s a giant bug.” Repelled by that sort of poisonous atmosphere, I used to inveigh against writing workshops–right up until the day I started teaching one. Now, like many of my colleagues, I find myself wondering just how much success I (and my students) can reasonably expect.

A Boston Globe article reveals the lengths to which authors are forced to go to protect themselves from sales tracking algorithms.

The study seems to be full of holes to me, such as the following attempt to divorce reading skills from writing and speaking skills:

Yet the study also found that the program did not help improve students’ scores on the city’s standardized English language arts test, a result that the study’s creators said they could not fully explain. They suggested that the disparity might be related to the fact that the standardized test is written while the study’s interviews were oral.

Read the rest of the article at The New York Times.

This is a fine example of why I believe most how-to-write books are claptrap. I’ve never felt that a writer has any responsibility to his readers except to do the best work he’s capable of. Of course that includes some sub-rules–being true to the characters, not cheating on the plot–but if he spends time thinking about what the readers want, he’ll end up writing for them, not for himself. A writer who doesn’t write first and foremost for himself is unlikely to satisfy anyone else.

Read the rest of the post at Poppy Z. Brite’s blog.

The one job I never left was writing my novel. Unfortunately, it left me. Two hundred pages into it. My computer crashed and died–and my novel died with it.

I was left in the precarious position of starting over or giving up.

I started over.

Read the rest of the post at Powell’s Books blog.

When I found the book store, it was quiet as a morgue. . .I passed the time–and time passes slowly in Arkansas–chatting with the store clerks, one of whom let slip that I was competing not only with the chili cooking contest, but also with the annual football game between the Arkansas Razorbacks and the Oklahoma Sooners. . .Nobody ever showed up to hear me read.

Read the rest of the article at The Denver Post.

The three-day conference here drew the backing of the singer-songwriter Gilberto Gil, who is also Brazil’s culture minister and an advocate of overhauling the global copyright system. Mr. Gil was a founder of the Tropicalist movement, which used cut-and-paste, mix-and-match techniques as early as the 1960’s, long before digital sampling became commonplace.

Read the rest of the article at The New York Times.

With very few traditional paying markets left for short fiction, contests have become the bread and butter of beginning writers. A few magazines have even taken a hybrid approach. I recently received in the mail an advertisement for Narrative and was surprised to see that its editors charge a reading fee for each submission. In the past such behavior would certainly have been labeled a scam. Now it is not so clear. Narrative pays its authors, and each published piece becomes eligible for a $4000 annual prize. If we need any more evidence that short fiction, and perhaps fiction in general, is moving into poetry’s territory–being of interest to only a small group of readers, most of whom are also writers–then we do not have to look far to collect it.

Contests usually charge a fee for each story entered and use the funds thus raised to provide the prize to the winner and a well-known author as judge. Recent years have seen some of these judges deciding that no entry deserves the prize. Poets & Writers is running a poll on what should be done with the funds in this case.

I am reminded of a nature documentary I once saw that followed the lives of the animals trying to eke out an existence from a shrinking pool in the Kalahari. As the size of the pool shrinks, things become quite contentious.

In the early, heady days of the World Wide Web, the Utopian fantasy of having a virtual printing press in every home took hold. While the surface of the idea shone with an appealingly egalitarian luster, what we had long known–that most people do not write well–again became painfully apparent. The Web was not going to usher in a golden age of plebeian poetry.

By 2000 it had become clear that the Web had become largely a conduit for commerce. Some idealism remained, and Stephen King engaged in his famous experiment, publishing The Plant in serial fashion. The installments were made available in an unencrypted format, and payment was on the honor system. King and his publisher considered the experiment a failure, and that single announcement silenced many who had been clamoring for a new paradigm in publishing. The money men woke up, took the reins, and put the wheels of the cart back in their well-worn tracks, perhaps whipping the horse a little more than was strictly necessary in the process.

Although most of the publishing industry was going through recidivism, science fiction mavericks pushed ahead, Baen Books leading the charge. The Baen rallying cry, one Cory Doctorow often repeats as a reason for making his books freely available, was:

Losses any author suffers from piracy are almost certainly offset by the additional publicity which, in practice, any kind of free copies of a book usually engender. Whatever the moral difference, which certainly exists, the practical effect of online piracy is no different from that of any existing method by which readers may obtain books for free or at reduced cost: public libraries, friends borrowing and loaning each other books, used book stores, promotional copies, etc. [1]

Baen authors and Doctorow claim that sales have been adequate, and while I certainly find their approach to publishing intriguing, I am not convinced that it will work for literary fiction in the same way that it seems to work for science fiction. Science fiction has the “cool” factor that creates wide interest, and its readership is already accustomed to doing most of its reading from a screen.

In the early days of the Web, I created a site for some of my writing and had the horrible experience of seeing my work propagate, often uncredited or simply with someone else’s name pasted where mine went, to other sites for the gain of others. This led to my pulling back from the Web and not posting any of my writing for many years. I still get the occasional e-mail from a harried English professor whose student has ripped off a poem of mine that was only on the Web for a period of eight months almost ten years ago.

Reference

1. Flint, Eric. “Introducing the Baen Free Library.” 11 Oct. 2000 http://www.baen.com/library/>.

Resources

• Read about The Plant at Wikipedia
• Read about Creative Commons Licenses at Creative Commons
• Read Criticism of Creative Commons at Alex Bosworth’s Weblog
• Read Criticism of Creative Commons at PC Magazine

The current issue of Poets & Writers includes in its Trends section a short piece on the crisis in readership (“The Law of Diminishing Readership,” pp. 12-14). The article presents the following sobering ordered list:

1. Production of creative writing far exceeds consumer demand.
2. Accredited MFA programs in creative writing continue to proliferate, while the practice of literary reading is in steady decline.
3. Many publishers require underwriting to produce and distribute literary titles because sales do not support production costs.
4. Publishers can, with relative ease, attract a thousand manuscript submissions–plus reading fees–by sponsoring book contests.

Now, I have been able to make a go of it using the skills afforded by my BA and MA in Creative Writing, but I do not (yet–hope springs eternal) make money on fiction. I have to offer a variety of practical services to make ends meet. I am reminded of a grim newspaper interview with John Updike touching on the economics of fiction writing that I read in the past year. I will try to find that article for tomorrow’s entry.

Resources:

• Subscribe to Poets & Writers at Amazon.com
• Read about Poets & Writers at its official web site