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writing

so long and thanks for all the fish

E.L. Konigsburg, From the Mixed Up Files… Author, Dies at 83

by Susana Polo | 2:03 pm, April 22nd, 2013

E. L. Konigsburg, Elaine Lobl Konigsburg, is probably remembered best as the long-named author of the even longer named From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, a book about a brother and sister who ran away to live at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in order to teach their parents a lesson about appreciating them and to live in comfort while doing it, and wind up uncovering the secret origins of an unattributed angel statue in the Met’s collection, a mystery as old as Michelangelo.

The author, not just of Mixed-Up Files but rahter a score of books and novels died this last Friday in Falls Church, Virginia.

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Not all that glitters is gold

Original Charlotte Brontë Manuscript Goes for $141,000

by Susana Polo | 1:58 pm, April 10th, 2013

One of the odd side effects of the digital age is the gradual loss of the acres and acres of handwritten or typed manuscripts that could be catalogued by archivists interested in following the career of an author. With “save” taking primacy over “save as,” those windows (no pun intended) into the process of an author stay shut. Probably there are a lot of writers who prefer it that way.

Like most smaller changes wrought by advancing technology these days, I find this more interesting than depressing or uplifting. However, it does mean that two hundred years from now, probably nobody is going to be bidding six figures for a copy of my Scrivener file.

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This Exists... Because of A Lady

Writer Creates Jane Austen Spellcheck List To Get Period Language Correct For Novel

by Jill Pantozzi | 4:17 pm, January 18th, 2013

Have you ever been reading a story, supposedly set in a past time period, and spotted words you just know don’t belong? Hugo-award winning author Mary Robinette Kowal has, and she’s determined to not let it happen in her books. So she did something ingenius. She compiled a huge list of words from the collected works of Jane Austen and hopes to apply them to her spellcheck dictionary in order to weed out inappropriate usage in her novels. She just needs a little help. 

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Our Adorable Past

World’s Most Prolific Novelist Still Had Time to be a Daredevil Aviator; Meet Barbara Cartland

by Susana Polo | 12:41 pm, May 24th, 2012

Barbara Cartland is best known for penning “risqué” (though they rarely contained anything of an, ah, suggestive nature) thrillers, plays, and romance novels with titles like The Bitter Winds of Love, and The Wicked Marquis, and penning a lot of them. She holds the world record for most books written in a single year (twenty-three, in 1983 when she was fifty-eight), and has been named the top selling author in the world by Guinness. She sold more than a billion books over her career, with a total of nearly nine hundred novels, one hundred and sixty of which were published posthumously.

But what she isn’t well known for, as io9 shows us today, is her contributions to aviation and, relatedly, the war effort in England during WWII.

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Imagine What You'll Know Tomorrow

Neil Gaiman Gives A Commencement Speech I Wish I’d Heard Ten Years Ago

by Jill Pantozzi | 5:45 pm, May 18th, 2012

Author Neil Gaiman recently gave the Commencement Address to the University of the Arts in Philadelphia chock-full of advice for aspiring artists of all kinds. He started his speech by admitting he never continued on to higher education and then talked about he simply started writing, wrote some more, and never stopped. Hit the jump to watch the speech in its entirety and find out why I’ll be directing aspiring writers to it in the future. 

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i'll just leave this here

Feel Good of the Day: First Grader Wins National Handwriting Award, Despite Being Born Without Hands

by Susana Polo | 11:57 am, April 20th, 2012

According to her mom, Annie Clark seemed overwhelmed when contest organizers from textbook publishers Zaner-Bloser announced that she was the winner of a national penmanship contest, but as the first grader received her trophy, things appeared to sink in, and a big smile made an appearance. Though Annie was born without hands, her adoptive parents say she’s determined to do pretty much anything the other kids can do, whether it’s bike riding, swimming, or even simply writing, and she’s succeeded on all fronts.

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Things We Saw Today

Things We Saw Today: She Will Destroy You

by Jamie Frevele | 5:28 pm, July 24th, 2011

From the Idle hands exhibit by artist Coop. (Hi Fructose via Diary of a Death Starlette)

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I See What They Did There

The Device Every Screenwriter Wishes Existed: The Plot Device [Video]

by Jamie Frevele | 1:43 pm, July 1st, 2011

Every writer’s nightmare is the blank page. Aaron Sorkin has an excellent quote about it: “I love writing but hate starting.” Well, what if there was a thing that put your script in motion at the push of a button? Well, that’s what this is about: a Plot Device. Get it?

(Geeks Are Sexy)

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