“In addition to watching the rhythm of his scene–the tempo or pace–the writer pays close attention, in constructing the scene, to the relationship, in each of its elements, of emphasis and function. By emphasis we mean the amount of time spent on a particular detail; by function we mean the work done by the detail [...]
Daniel Fischer has started a new online writing community called Writers Beat, which is a place for discussions of craft, publishing, books, etc. Interestingly, the site also hosts free online workshops in various genres, where participants read and critique one another’s work. A good spot for beginners to test the waters, get writing advice, and [...]
Here’s a great blog called Fluent. Here’s how the author describes her blog:
One of my favorite words in Japanese is an onomatapeia (pera pera) which describes what it sounds like when someone is speaking fluently. I like that fluency has a sound. I also like how fluency can refer to speaking a language, or just [...]
and why won’t she leave us all alone? I get this email from her a few times a week at all of my email addresses:
How are you, My name is Grace Khobe and me and my husband own a company that sells Chinese and African textile and fabric material in Hong Kong, I am looking [...]
Invisibility goes mainstream today, with the revelation that David Schurig and David R. Smith of Duke University have created a cloak that renders objects invisible to the eye. AP Science writer Randolphe Schmid reports:
Viewers can see things because objects scatter the light that strikes them, reflecting some of it back to the eye.
“The cloak reduces [...]
At first, the earth ceased to be the center of the universe; then the evolution of organisms became mutually accepted; and as the human fetus was shown to repeat at certain stages in its development aspects of the life cycles of other species–to possess in fact some of the features of fish and frog–it was [...]
House of Good Hope: A Promise for a Broken City, by Michael Downs, winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize. Forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press, March 2007. Downs is a journalism professor at the University of Montana and the recipient of a 2006 NEA Fellowship. You can read his short story, “At the [...]
I’ll be reading Sat night, Oct. 14, 8:00, at the Make-Out Room as part of Litquake’s Lit Crawl. Says Violet Blue in her column for SFGate
I’d wander on over to see if there’s any action at the The Make-Out Room (21 and over; 3225 22nd St.), where “The Brat Pack: Local Fiction From MacAdam/Cage” — [...]
And while we’re on the subject of awards, the finalists for the National Book Award were announced yesterday at City Lights. Pleased to see Ben Lerner, a colleague at California College of the Arts, on the poetry list for his book Angle of Yaw. Mark Pritchard at Metroblogging points out that three of the [...]
The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish author of Snow, Istanbul, My Name is Red, The Black Book, and other works. He is the first Turkish person to win the Nobel. FYI, the Wikipedia page on Pamuk loads much more quickly than his official site.
The Nobel Prize folks have [...]
