Grab Bag ‘O Links
I’m running a late for work this morning, so today we’ll just feature a bunch of interesting links.
Bookninja found this article in the L.A. Times by Roy Peter Clark. Mr. Clark suggests that publishers can eliminate future controversy by using his suggested ratings guide for memoirs. “Each memoir should be marked with a ratings code that describes just how well the story adheres to what most of us would recognize as practical truth: Either you own a dog or you don’t,” Clark writes. “So I offer this ratings code as a first step.”
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Syntax of Things came across this Barry Hannah essay in Paste magazine. It’s always a good day when you can work some King Barry into it.
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Dan over at Emerging Writers Network defends the honor of literary bloggers everywhere against the curmudgeonly attack of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette book editor Bob Hoover. Hoover’s complaint about blogs regurgitates the usual whine from newspaper types: we don’t have any fact checkers, we can do cool things, we’re not trustworthy, blah, blah, blah. Oh, and that it’s hard to figure out whom the lit blogs are targeting “outside of their mothers.”
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Karin at Southern Comfort has some interesting tips for trimming the fat out of a novel. Her radical dieting tips for high fat fiction might seem a little excessive to some of you, but she makes an interesting point and makes it well.
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Written Road pounts out an interesting website dedicated to all things pencil. I was never much of a pencil person, I always used pens. But Pencil Revolution looks cool enough to make me rethink my choice of manual writing implements.
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Thulani Davis appears at Square Books today in support of My Confederate Kinfolk. “Davis writes about her great-grandparents, a former slave and former slave-owner in the 19th century South, taking the time to give us a bit of autobiography and history along the way,” says the folks at the store. “This is a family history and much more.”
The signing is at 5pm with a reading at 5:30 for those of you in the Oxford, MS area.