For the past week I’ve been following sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow as he posts on BoingBoing. Here’s what I’ve learned: 1. Be prolific. Doctorow posts anywhere from eight to sixteen posts a day. 2. Use pictures. Doctorow almost always includes a picture and he’s meticulous about the attribution. 3. Quote the material. A fair use…
I am amazed, baffled and tremendously envious of people who can make even a fraction of their living by blogging. So I decided to do something about it. Starting this week I am going to try my hand at shadowing another blogger and learning what exactly it is that they do. What are their topics?…
In his book The Size of Thoughts, Nicholson Baker talks about some of the unexpected advantages of library card catalogs over databases: fingerprints for instance. Dark smudges of body oil can tell you at a glance which topics in the catalog are the most popular, something that would take a complex structured query to achieve…
As of 11 PM last night I became the proud owner of a 50,123 word steaming slag heap of a first draft novel. Yipee. So ends my NaNoWriMo adventure. What am I left with? Let’s call it the Winchester Mystery House of bad literature…hundreds of passages leading nowhere. I do have to say that this…
I’m on the road again. The road to hell, good intentions to blog my NaNoWriMo novel-writing experiment are lying like dead soldiers on the roadway. Early on I was going to post about Banging vs. Swooping. Kurt Vonnegut once said (and I swear I heard this on a public radio interview, though I can’t find…
Here it is, the eve before National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo,) sort of an ongoing joke started by Chris Baty where tens of thousands (150,000+ this year) of people line up like entrants of the Bay to Breakers marathon, and pound out 50,000 words of prose. This month I throw my hat in the ring,…
What kind of blog posts do you find the most compelling? A decade ago someone pointed out to me that the surest path to get on a best-seller list is to have “Ten Easy Ways to…” in your title. The Blog-o-sphere bears out this line of attack – list posts (ie “Merlin’s top 5 super-obvious,…
I think I’ve put together some nice little blog posts here at Wild Rye. Just nothing as FREAKIN’ AWESOME as it could be (at least in my head.) Why would that be? It reminds me of my GI Joe. I was seven years old when Hasbro’s action figure first hit the market. The Unique Selling…
