Advice for New Writers
My Lie-Lay Conundrum
I realize that one sign of impending codgerdom is the urge to rant – or even write a letter to the offending newspaper – when you spot an egregious grammatical error in print. Where have all the hawk-eyed copy editors … Read more
The Blog-to-Book Fantasy
When I teach introductory courses on blogging, sooner or later a student will always raise a version of this question: what about a book? Can’t you put together a bunch of your blog posts and make a book that publishers … Read more
Tips for Writers: Dialect
Writing broken English is harder than it looks. That’s one of the first lessons any writer who wants to jazz up her fiction with non-standard English learns. Dialects – that is, the vernacular language of a particular region of the … Read more
Four Ways Writing Novels Makes You a Better Person
If you took my friend Kaze’s sensibility and mine and charted us as a Venn diagram, I’m guessing there’d be about 80 percent overlap. That is, I seldom disagree when Kaze speaks out. And in a recent post, “Does Writing … Read more
Does Writing a Novel Make You a Better Person?
Ras posted here the other day with the question “Does Reading Novels Make You a Better Person?” My own question, considering how I’ve been spending my days lately, is “How About Writing a Novel? Does That Make You a Better … Read more
What’s Right and What’s Wrong with “The Sense of an Ending”
Julian Barnes’s novella The Sense of an Ending has been the hot book in High Lit circles for the past couple of months. It won the 2011 Booker Prize for the best novel in English, a reliable indicator of quality … Read more
TED THE CAT
Ted the Cat (1994-present) is a domestic shorthair blogger and vers libre poet. He also enjoys sleeping, eating, and lurking. Ted the Cat co-habits with Kaze,
also a blogger at 317am.net.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Kaze
Kaze is Washington DC area writing guru Steve Altman. The nickname is Japanese for “the wind.” Read more »
RasoirJ
Ras at Texas BBQ in DC, site of lunchtime chats with Kaze on the art and agony of writing. Ras is also known in some publishing circles as George Clack. Read more »