On Writing: Don't Let the Web Kill Your Work

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     Daniel Brian is a long-time chum with an oft-sardonic writing style perfect for the many music, movie, and game reviews he's written over the years. He's a blogger, podcaster, practicing fictionista, and all-around good guy. He's so good, in fact, he offered this post-turkey guest post on fighting Internet distraction. Thanks, Dan. -rob

    Chances are if there's a keyboard under your fingertips, the interwebs are throwing several pieces of distracting fecal matter at your corneas every second. Tweetdeck may be one of the biggest productivity killers since television or masturbation, while Facebook is a hypnotizing abyss staring back at you.

     It's hard to escape the deluge if you enjoy using a computer. It’s even harder if you're using one to write.

Books for Writers: Down the 'Rabbit' Hole

I first ran into John Updike's Rabbit Run in high school, part of either a junior or senior advanced-placement English class. I can't recall if the teacher who walked us through it was the elegantly Mrs. Robinsonesque gymnastics coach (junior year) or our ribald headmaster, who rubbed his legs together like a cricket any time a book referenced sexual desire or activity (senior year). This was in the late 1980s, either '88 or '89, and I was likely more interested in whether I could get a girl to take her bra off in my Ford Escort than in the “classics.”

Before cracking the book for this critique I thought back to what I remembered of it. Only one thing stood out: Rabbit Angstrom was a bit of a prick. I vaguely remembered a scene wherein Rabbit attempts to achieve an orgasm with the crack of his wife's ass, whilst she was recovering from giving birth to their daughter. When the child later drowns in the bathtub, her mother drunk on booze and sorrow, Rabbit ducks any responsibility.

Books for Writers: "The Confidence Man"

 I am not generally a laugh-out-loud sort, but an audible chuckle did escape me when I figured out what was going on in Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade.

“What?” my wife Brenda said.

I looked over and smiled at her. “Nothing. Just admiring the cleverness.”

Clever Herman Melville. He made a career out of writing about places and things and killed it by writing about that other noun: people.

He may have ended his days as a shipping clerk, but the man had insight. Is the confidence-man God or the Devil as some have suggested, some Puck or other out to tweak our hubris on board our slow boat to oblivion? Maybe. I think it more likely that the confidence-man is us, all too human, ever-changing and always in need of a few bucks.

On Writing: A Cooperative Solution for Indie-Publishers

      Bringing up Israel and Palestine is likely the only way more sure to get people muttering/tapping the hilts of their daggers than talking to Internet full of writers about self-publishing vs. going with so-called legacy publishers. In this age of the Web, the debate is ever-more hot, with writers on either side biting their thumbs at the other. In this post, I'm going to look at the three biggest points of contention in the debate, and offer a solution. (Donations and thank-you gifts can be sent via PayPal.)