Writers and Editors - The Writing Life

Read these before you start a newsletter:

• The Five Types of Indie Newsletter Business Models (Alex Hazlett and Dan Oshinsky, Newsletter Monetization, Index Collective, 8-29-22) The Analyst, The Curator, The Expert, The Reporter, the Writer. What does each mean, how big is the audience, how do you grow the audience, how do they make money.

• AWeber, Beehiiv, ConvertKit, Ghost, Mailchimp, or Substack: Which Is The Right ESP For Your Indie Newsletter? (Dan Oshinsky, Index Collective, 12-31-22) Six options for email platforms (email service providers) worth a closer look. Matching the right newsletter to the right business model.

• How to Start Monetizing Your Indie Newsletter (Dan Oshinsky, Inbox Collective, 3-23-23) How do you know when it's time to start monetizing and how do you do so? Some options, explained:

Subscriptions. Advertisements. Donations. Selling ebooks, merchandise, or other products. Using affiliate links to recommend other products; Consulting, coaching, or teaching. Hosting events or workshops. Monetizing through indirect revenue (e.g., paid talks or freelance gigs).

Kids react to typewriters (delightful YouTube video)

"Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying." ~ Studs Terkel

Oh, My Hand: Complaints Medieval Monks Scribbled in the Margins of Illuminated Manuscripts (Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, on the writing life before typewriters). "Writing is excessive drudgery. It crooks your back, it dims your sight, it twists your stomach and your sides."

Top ten clues you may be a writer (buy a mug for your writing friends). Click on image for larger image, so you can read. This one hooked me: "Some of the letters on your keyboard are completely worn off."

"The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say." ~Anais Nin

“Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig”
~ Stephen Greenblatt

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” ~ Zora Neale Hurston

"To know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love, to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely THERE--where you are not. This is the beginning of writing." ~Roland Barthes

"The story — from Rumpelstiltskin to War and Peace — is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories."
~ Ursula K. LeGuin

"When I was first in Czechoslovakia, it occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters, while for the Czech writers I met in Prague, nothing goes and everything matters. This isn't to say I wished to change places. I didn't envy their persecution and the way in which it heightens their social importance. I didn't even envy them their seemingly more valuable and serious themes. The trivialization, in the West, of much that's deadly serious in the East is itself a subject, one requiring considerable imaginative ingenuity to transform into compelling fiction."
~ Philip Roth, Paris Review interview, 1986

"It's easier to murder someone else's darlings than your own."
~ Stephen King, On Writing

“A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new ideas he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.”
~William Stafford, poet

"I'm compelled by language, so there are days for instance where if it sounds flat and dry I try to find something else to do that will help the book. That often means going to poets and reading poetry. That's my fuel tank. Voice and language is primary, and everything comes out of that."
~ Alice Sebold

"Well begun is half done."
~Aristotle

In memory of John Jerome (and about being a certain kind of writer)

"If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic."
~ novelist Toni Morrison

Quick Links

E-mail Pat

(pat at patmcnees dot com)

About Pat (site host)

Pat McNees website

Dying: A Book of Comfort

This site built to support the book expanded into Illness and Recovery

Writers on Writing

(complete archive of the NY Times series, writers exploring literary themes. Requires free membership.)

Letters of Note

(fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos--that you were never expected to see)

Aha Moments

(from the brilliant Mutual of Omaha campaign to record people's stories about moments of clarity, defining moments when they gained the wisdom to change their life)

TED: Ideas worth sharing

Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world

PostSecret

Contemporary Latin American Short Stories

The Writing Life

Making a living

· Affiliate marketing (passive income)
· Can I make a living as a writer? (authors' income and earnings)
· Crowdfunding and other new forms of creative financing
· Crowdfunding sites
· Crowdfunding fraud
· Online payment systems
· Writers talk about money

The physical aspects of the writing life

· Active sitting
· Bookcases and bookshelves
· Computer security has moved here.

· Location independence
· Standing and adjustable-height desks and walkstations
· Tools of the trade (for writers and editors)
· Writers' offices, illustrated
· Writers sharing workspaces

The writing life

· Book coaches and book coaching
· Critique groups and writing workshops
· Cruise lecturing
· Developing a writing practice
· Famous literary hoaxes
· How to give helpful feedback
· The lives of writers and editors (articles)
· The lives of writers and editors (books)
· On writing and the writing life
· Rejection (including Rotten Rejections)
· Rules and tips for writers
· Some books to get you going
· Writer's block, procrastination, productivity, time and effort management
· Writers groups and communities (connecting with peers)

This category is kind of like "religion." Where do we start?

More to come. Suggestions welcome.

[Back to Top]

Tools of the trade
for writers and editors

(From Dropbox, Dragon Naturally, Evernote, Express Scribe, Google Drive, Livescribe Echo, Scrivener, etc. to Agent Ransack, Hootsuite, PDF Creator, Smartphones, and Storyboarding software, etc.)

Things change so fast that this list is constantly outdated. I try to keep up, but if a link doesn't work, just do a search for it in your preferred search engine and if the product/service still exists you can find it.

• Acronym Finder Learn what any acronym, abbreviation, or initialism stands for.
• Agent Ransack (Mythic Soft) A search tool for finding files on your PC or network drives. It has a Lite mode (free for both personal and commercial use) and a Professional mode with optional pay-for features. It can search entire drives or groups of folders (including not just Word docs but PDFs and some types of emails). A split screen shows you all the places your keyword appears in a document so you can tell without opening it if that passage is the one you're looking for. Good for searching through multiple interviews to find a particular quote. (H/T Stephanie Golden)
• The Anatomy of an Amazon 6-pager (Jesse Freeman, Writing Cooperative, 7-16-20) A deep dive into writing detailed planning docs from one of the most successful companies in the world.
• Ancestry.com, for tracing your family history but also packed with historical resources, including census records, military records, and the records of births, marriages, and deaths.
• Audacity A free open-source audio editing tool, useful if you're doing podcasts. (See more such tools on SPJ's Journalist's Toolbox .
• Audio Hijack A powerful audio recorder that enables you to record any audio heard on your Mac. Save web streams, create podcasts, preserve important voice chat conversations, and more. "If you can hear it, Audio Hijack can record it." Advice from one fan: "You can scrape the audio only from a video file and plug it into your AI transcribing device."

See Best Alternatives to Audio Hijack for Windows, macOS, and Linux (TunesKit Audio Capture for Mac & Windows) Audio Hijack can record system sound from Mac and edit the audio in real-time. It is a great internal sound recorder to record audio from Skype, radios, or other apps, but some users may want to find an alternative due to the price, the complexity, or other reasons. Those include Audacity (for Mac & Windows & Linux), Sound Siphon (Mac), and Piezo (Mac).
• AutoHotkey (with useful links at this Wikipedia entry) is a free, open-source software program that uses its own scripting language to automate daily Windows tasks. See AutoHotkey beginner tutorial (though it doesn't seem to me to be easy for beginners).

• Batteries. The Best Rechargeable AA and AAA Batteries (Sarah Witman, Wirecutter, NY Times, 5-6-24)
• BibMe (catch plagiarism and grammar mistakes)
• BkLnk Book category research and more.
• Blogger It's free, it's easy to use, and it's reliable. "I could be writing and composing using any platform capable of generating an RSS feed—WordPress, Medium, Tumblr, whatever. But I’m comfy with Blogger."~Charlie Meyerson,Chicago Public Square newsletter,

• Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology standard used for exchanging data between fixed and mobile devices over short distances and building personal area networks. It employs UHF radio waves in the ISM bands, from 2.402 GHz to 2.48 GHz.
---The Best Portable Bluetooth Speaker (Brent Butterworth, NY Times, 5-12-22) The "the easiest, most affordable way to spread the sound from your phone or tablet across a room, backyard, or beach blanket."
---The Best Bluetooth Kits for Every Car Stereo (Nick Guy and Thom Dunn, Wirecutter/NY Times, 9-23-19) "If you want to stream music or listen to phone conversations through your car’s speakers, but your vehicle didn’t come with Bluetooth, an add-on Bluetooth kit is an inexpensive and effective solution."

• BookFinder Find any book at the best price. An alternative to Amazon.
• Brevity, an editing gamesite, offers mini-games to help you become a more powerful writer. Each game gives you a lousy writing sample. Your job: to make it as concise as you can before the timer runs out. If your response is shorter than our benchmark, you win!

gram

• Browsers. The most popular Web browsers (via TechRadar reviews) for searching the Internet are Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Opera, Google Chrome, Vivaldi, and Safari (the latter for Apple users) Links are to Tech Radar's reviews in Best web browsers (Carrie Marshall, TechRadar). (Complaint: It drives me crazy that Mozilla Firefox prevents links from opening when I click on them in an email in my gmail. I've got to keep a more liberal browser also open so I can see where the link goes.) See also Virtual Private Networks (VPNs).

• Calendly A scheduling platform that allows teams to schedule meetings professionally and efficiently, without the hassle of back-and-forth emails for finding the right time.
• Canva A graphic design platform that provides tools for creating social media graphics, presentations, promotional merchandise and Web sites. Includes a Meme Generator (see sample meme templates).
• Caption Call Communicate more easily with advanced call captioning at no cost to people with hearing loss who need captions to use the phone. Using voice-to-text technology, assisted by captioning agents and automated speech recognition, CaptionCall phones transcribe your conversation so that other speakers' words appear on your CaptionCall screen. Federally funded as part of Title IV of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), so there's no cost for qualifying individuals.

• ChatGPT (OpenAI) A dialogue-based AI chat interface for OpenAI's GPT-3 family. For example, Why tech insiders are so excited about ChatGPT, a chatbot that answers questions and writes essays (Jonathan Vanian, CNBC, 12-13-22) See fuller entry here. Meet ChatGPT's new competitor: Version 3 of Claude.

Citation and BibliographyTools:
---EndNote (the industry standard software tool for publishing and managing bibliographies, citations and references on the Windows and Macintosh desktop--not to be confused with EverNote). See Endnote's quick reference guide.
---ZoteroBib A free service that helps you quickly create a bibliography in any citation style.
---Zotero & ZoteroBib (MacPhaidin Library) Zotero collects, manages, and cites research sources. It's easy to use and connects with your web browser to dowload citation information from books, journal articles, web pages, and other sources. Best of all it's free." ZoteroBib is a free, fast citation generator that is similar to (but in our experience, more accurate and reliable than) tools such as EasyBib and NoodleTools.

• Collaboration tools. See Online collaboration tools.

• Communication devices for elders (and younger) Some handy ideas.

Computers (personal computers)
---10 Differences Between Macs and PCs (Chris Pollette, How Stuff Works, 6-10-21)
---macOS vs. Windows: Which Operating System Is Really Better? (Michael Muchmore, PC Magazine, 11-29-22) Report from a Windows user who has plenty of experience with Macs and iPhones. For him, Windows comes out ahead, adding, "if gaming is everything to you, then Windows is a no-brainer. If you're a creative type, then you’re likely better off with a Mac."
---Mac vs. PC: The Pros and Cons (Crucial by Micron) Macs have been associated with high-powered graphic design for some time. PCs are more easily upgraded and have more options for different components. A Mac, if it's upgradeable, can upgrade only memory and the storage drive. Etc.
---Mac® vs. PC for Graphic Design (Crucial by Micron, an Apple source)

• Craiyon. Write a prompt for a certain type of image and get AI-generated art. More accessible than DALL-E, the A.I. That Draws Anything at Your Command. New technology that blends language and images to serve (or substitute for) graphic artists.

• Descript The AI-powered, fully featured, end-to-end video editor that you already know how to use.

• Default Tech Settings You Should Turn Off Right Away (Brian X. Chen, NY Times, 7-27-22) Certain settings on Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft are helpful to you; others are helpful to them, and you might want to turn them off.

Digital Notetaking
• Duck Writing, Thinking, Recording. Duck is a free, note-taking application via chat. Duck provides chat app features, not for collaboration, but for your writing, thinking, and recording.

• Digital Notebooks (Melanie Pinola, Consumer Reports, 12-28-22) CR put four popular e-ink tablets from Amazon, Boox, ReMarkable, and Supernote through the paces, scribbling and sketching on them over the course of two months. Digital tablets, also known as a e-ink tablets, are relatively new—"the first ReMarkable tablet launched in a crowdfunding campaign in late 2016—and feature the easy-on-the-eyes black-and-white screens found on popular e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle. They cost a bit more but can also do more than a traditional e-reader.
"When paired with a stylus, they can replace a paper notebook for almost all your writing, note-taking, drawing, and doodling needs, in addition to being a pleasing, lightweight way to read e-books." CR gave highest ratings (2021) to the Apple iPad Mini (5G, 64GB)-2021 and the Samsung Tab Active 3 (both "8-inch screen and smaller" category). Only subscribers can see the full ratings.
• DocumentCloud, an all-in-one platform for documents: upload, organize, analyze, annotate, search, and embed. Scraper add-on will optionally crawl a given site for documents to upload. + other add-ons. "Scraper is a magnificent beast. It monitors websites for new documents, saves them into DocumentCloud and searches for terms like "layoffs" or "mask mandate." When it finds that word (or an even more specific search), you get an email!" ~ Samantha Sunne, Top Tools for Reporters, 12-12-22) See DocumentCloud Tips and Tricks

• Dragon NaturallySpeaking Speech recognition software that converts the spoken word into written text, convenient when typing is inconvenient or impossible. Comes in multiple versions with different sets of features.

• Dropbox (cloud-based storage useful for syncing across devices, and for backup) Also useful, especially for sharing documents: Google Drive. For problems with either resource, simply search online for "Solving common problems with...."

• Editing Tools (Tech Tools for Writers)
---How to Use Editing Tools (C.K. MacLeod and Carla Douglas, 6-17-15)
---Consistency Checker
---Grammarly This cloud-based typing assistant "reviews spelling, grammar, punctuation, clarity, engagement, and delivery mistakes in English texts, detects plagiarism, and suggests replacements for the identified errors." Many writers feel it's worth paying for the Premium edition to use for final reviews of manuscripts. Use it to detect things like using "acknowledgement" instead of the preferred (in America, albeit illogical) "acknowledgment" (with no e after the g).
---Hemingway App This free tool highlights lengthy, complex sentences and common errors with colors coded to point out what needs doing--not perfect, but often helpful
---PerfectIt Pro
---Editors ToolKit Plus Editorium, for Word. Includes Editor's ToolKit, FileCleaner, QuarkConverter, and Note Stripper for word, all in one integrated program.
---How to Make Word Behave Like Scrivener Scrivener’s Binder or Word’s Navigation Pane for rearranging sections of text
---Using Split Screen for Editing (C.K. McLeod)
---Retrieving a Backup File in Scrivener (C.K.McLeod)

• Elliott Advocacy A nonprofit organization that offers free advice and advocacy for consumers. Sign up for free newsletter, Elliott Advocacy or follow on Facebook. See, for example, This PayPal invoice scam almost got me. Here’s how to spot it.

• Email encryption programs
---Top Rated Email Encryption Products (TrustRadius) DataMotion, Webroot, Microsoft Exchange, Proofpoint Email Protection, Twilio SendGrid, AppRiver from OpenText, and more.
---The Best Email Encryption Services (PC Magazine)
---OpenPGP The most widely used email encryption standard, originally derived from the PGP software created by Phil Zimmermann.
---Mailvelope a browser add-on you can use in Chrome, Edge, and Firefox to securely encrypt your emails with PGP using webmail providers. See FAQs

• EventBrite (a fairly robust way of selling tickets to, or scheduling attendance at, an event, a webinar, a seminar, etc.)

• Evernote (an application that allows you to take notes or capture anything from drawings to web clippings, which tou can then search for on your laptop, cell phone, smart phone, or other digital devices. Allows you to gather and share project notes, story ideas, images, text, favorite websites, and so on. See tutorials:

---Command & Control: Essential Evernote Shortcuts and Evernote Tutorial(David A. Cox, youTube video, 41 mins.) and

---Evernote Tips: The 11 Amazing Features That Make Using Evernote So Freaking Awesome (Scott Bradley video)

---How To Create Your Own Calendar In Evernote (also Scott Bradley),

---Work Smarter with Evernote. Mastering the Basics: Organizing with notebooks & tags (Joshua Zerkel, EverNote video 54 mins.) Search for more, as I won't keep updating this.

• Export Comments Easily exports all comments from your social media posts (from Facebook, Reddit, etc.) to Excel file, including commenter's name and identification. (H/T both Jane Friedman and Tools for Reporters))

• Filmora Video Editor Free video editing software for beginners and semi-pros
• Final Draft Commonly used script- and screenwriting software
• FollowUpThen A simple, amazing app: a way to schedule an email reminder-- to blind-copy yourself with a reminder to check in after a specific amount of time has passed. (H/T Jane Friedman)
• Freemium (Management Study Guide). The freemium model is based on a start-up company having two different offerings: free for new consumers, or premium, for a higher level of product or service (e.g., no advertising). Spotify, Dropbox, Hinge, Slack, and Asana use freemium models.

• Free Resources for Writers at the Public Library (Kate Stewart on Jane Friedman's blog, 6-25-24) Many research databases "are behind paywalls that are prohibitively expensive for individuals to access. They can be the key to finding the answers to questions that aren’t easily Google-able. The following databases (and many more) may be available free at your library, and you should be able to use them remotely via your library’s website and logging in with your library card." And she makes evident the rich details and story ideas that can be found or inspired by material found on Ancestry.com, newspaper databases like Newsbank and Newspapers.com, and NoveList, a database of "lists of what to read next when you’ve found a book you really like, also known as 'readers’ advisory'.”" like Amazon's “you may also like” lists, good for reading and research.

• Genially, a tool for creating interactive content. See You can even make videos interactive.
• GMap pedometer Mapping application (miler-meter) that helps record distances traveled walking or running.
• Google Alerts Monitor the web for interesting new content. For example, have them send you a daily alert of new uses of your name, or about a topic you are researching and writing about.
• Google Docs Create and collaborate on online documents in real-time and from any device.
• Google Drive A cloud-based storage service that allows you to store, share, and access files online (15 GB of storage for free and larger amounts at low rates). The service syncs stored documents, photos, and more across all of the user's devices, including mobile devices, tablets, and computers. For more on how to use it, read TechTarget (Erica Mixon and Ivy Wigmore).
• Google Earth and Google Earth Basics Tutorial (YouTube video explainer).
• Google Keep A note-keeping app (save useful links on various topics, for example)

• Google Ngram Viewer Great for viewing popular usage of a word, phrase, name, etc., over time--in particular for comparing which of two or more word choices is preferred usage over time. Culled from BOOKS.
---How to Use Google's Ngram Viewer as a Research Tool (Richard Byrne, video)
---How to use Google Ngram Viewer to select scientific words and phrases (YouTube video)
---What does the Ngram Viewer do? (Google).
---The Pitfalls of Using Google Ngram to Study Language (a Wired story) explains how it works and where its bias lies.
• Google News Initiative in partnership with the Society of Professional Journalists offers several teaching modules: Finding Data Stories in Google Trends; Creating a Story Dataset; Visualizing Data for Stories; Verification & Fact Checking; Safety & Security; Search & Data Acquisition.
• Google Pinpoint Explore and analyze large collections of documents. Samantha Sunne, on Pinpoint an audio tick (Tools for Reporters), writes "Similar to the all-time journalism heavyweight DocumentCloud, but with an added audio element. Pinpoint was originally meant for tagging, organizing and analyzing documents (like dcloud), but now it can transcribe audio and video files and turn those into documents. " Pinpoint finds the people, places and things named in a document, and spreads them out in a toolbar for you. It can also transcribe audio files, making for an interesting addition to DocumentCloud."
• Google Sheets Create and collaborate on online spreadsheets in real-time and from any device. Keep track of your assignments, bills and payments, etc. (Read https://www.theopennotebook.com/2021/07/27/finding-the-right-tools-for-organizing-assignments-and-reporting/ on how to use Google Sheets.

• Great and Unusual Online Shopping(Pat McNees site) Good online tips for finding unusual or hard to find food, clothing, travel, purses, travel bags, footwear, kitchen stuff, lamps and lighting, pest control, cleaning and laundry, garden tools, and, particularly, in the "odd and unusual category," such things as a transparent kayak, a hands-free dog poop bag-holder, a Roomba vacuum robot, a rain forest shower curtain, and a Microsun reading lamp that emits a full range of colors, in lighting that allows you to read longer without fatigue.

• GroundSource Use text messaging to develop more engaged audiences and more informed communities--and to help newsrooms become better at listening and engagement. One of two tools (the other is Hearken) with which the Community Listening and Engagement Fund (or CLEF, for short) helps newsrooms rebuild connections and deepen relationships with audiences, generate capacity and muscle for listening and engagement. "Using Hearken and GroundSource has allowed 1A to be less like a stranger speaking from on high, and more like a friend chatting with the audience like other friends, asking questions, and being genuinely curious to ask (and answer) questions in return."

• Headline Hero suggests headlines based on story copy you paste into its web-based interface (AI-powered).

• Hearken A tool to invite the audience to suggest ideas and then vote on them, useful for audience engagement. To see how newsrooms can use Hearken and GroundSource together, read the case study down this post: A fund to help newsrooms become better at listening and engagement.
• Hemingway App highlights lengthy, complex sentences and common errors, color coded to tell you how to fix them. AI-based.

• ifttt Multitasking your e-services with ifttt. This If-Then productivity software lets you double-task. For example, if you send an email, ifttt also saves it as a note in Evernote; if you tweet something, it saves the tweet in a tweet file. Here are some ifttt recipes
• Instapaper A "save it to read later" bookmarking service that allows web content to be saved so it can be "read later" on a different device, such as an e-reader, smartphone, or tablet. Saves you from ending up with dozens of browsers open at the same time, crashing the browser and losing track of what you wanted to read. Instapaper syncs the articles and videos you save so that they're waiting for you on all your devices - iPhone, iPad, Android, or Kindle. "If you're more of an audio “reader,” Pocket is the better choice. If you prefer to consume your content on screen, Instapaper is a better option as its focus is on allowing you to read comfortably on a screen. If you're a more price-conscious buyer, Instapaper provides a better deal than Pocket." See Instapaper vs. Pocket: Which read-it-later app is best? (Justin Pot, Zapier) " Instapaper lets you sort articles using folders; Pocket lets you sort articles using tags, similar to Gmail. Instapaper offers a speed reading feature; Pocket offers better text-to-speech features. Instapaper puts features like search and sending articles to a Kindle behind its paywall; Pocket offers a simple search in its free version. And overall, Pocket offers a better free version while Instapaper offers a slightly cheaper, albeit less robust, paid version."
• Issuu (pronounced "issue") is a Danish-founded American electronic publishing platform based in Palo Alto, California. Issuu converts PDFs and documents into an interactive flipbook and marketing assets. Embed flipbooks on your website and distribute online. Upload a document, watch it transform, and enhance it with interactive features like Videos and Links. Easily share the URL, Embed it onto your website, and sell content with Digital Sales."
---10 Best Issuu Alternatives to Switch to (FlippingBook blog) Issuu allows you to sell your digital magazines via subscription or as standalone issues. Here, compared to some of its competitors (FlippingBook, Juumag, FlippingBook, Calameo, Relayto, 3d Issue, Flipsnack, Marq, Publuu, and FlipHTML5)

• Journalist's Toolbox (Society of Professional Journalists) Step into this amazing stronghold of resources by clicking on one of many topics along the left side,
• Juxtapose (Knight Lab) Helps you tell a story comparing two images. It supports two different approaches; choose the one that works best for you: Interactive or GIF.

• keybr.com This touch-typing tutor keeps track of your speed, number of errors, and other stats while you learn to touch type by focusing on similar though randomly generated sets of letters. Import text from web pages or enter your own custom text for practice. Features a game with multiple users.

• Keyword search tools. The 6 best free keyword research tools in 2022 (Zapier) Read their explanations for the following:
---Moz Keyword Explorer (Web) for the best all-around free SEO keyword research tool
---Google Keyword Planner (Web) for researching paid keywords
---SemRush (Web) for advanced SEO professionals
---QuestionDB (Web) for finding question-based keywords
---Jaaxy (Web) for affiliate marketers
---Keywood Surfer (Google Chrome browser extension) The best free browser extension for lightweight SEO keyword research

• LifeMapping An interactive mapping application that lets you literally map the story, places, and events (plus photos and/or sound files) in a person's life, story by story, event by event, in your/their own words--all then available through a mouse-click on the map and easily sharable with family, friends. (Don't mental images of the places you lived bring back memories?)

• LiveScribe Echo (8 GB Echo Smartpen). There are also 2 GB, 4 GB, and 6 GB SmartPens.) A genuinely helpful recorder-pen-and-paper combination for capturing and reviewing notes from lectures and interviews, and, using those notes, to find a particular point in audio recording. Its special features (a microphone for recording audio, a speaker for playing back recording, and a camera in the tip of the ballpoint pen, which queues up with that point in audio. As you review your notes, tap one word from part of the interview you didn't catch and it plays back audio from that point.

Watch/listen to this C/Net review. It is smart enough to know when you start a new page. It's expensive, however. In addition to the basic equipment you must purchase special notebooks on which to write, plus cartridges that are smaller than usual (easy to lose and you must replace them more often); and you have to charge it daily. If you tend to lose pens, this could be an expensive proposition. (Great gift for a college student.) Alternatives to the LiveScribe SmartPen as note-taking devices include SoundNote (iPad's note-taking device), Notability, and AudioNote, a notepad and voice recorder you can download to your PC.

• Macro tools and editing software for editors and proofreaders
---20 Minute Macro Course (C.K. MacLeod, Tech Tools for Writers)
---Macros and software for references, citations, footnotes and endnotes (BibMe, EndNote, Mendeley, NoteStripper, QuickSite, ReferenceChecker, Zotero--see Editing Tools)

• Mailchimp, also known as Intuit Mailchimp, is a marketing automation platform and email marketing service.
• Mail Tester Test the spamminess of your newsletters and e-letters. "It can be pricey—especially as circulation grows—but... its customer service is solid; and its click map is best-in-class." ~Charlie Meyerson
• Matchmaking app with which to sign up for Frankfurt Book Fair, where many international/foreign rights sales are made. Register (free) here. "I sold foreign rights to Zahara and the Lost Books of Light through the Matchmaking App available from the Frankfurt Book Fair," Joyce Yarrow reported. "You can register on their website at no charge and then download the free App to your phone. After that, sign into the app, create a profile and look through the companies that are listed in the matchmaking section. Some are buying and some are selling so it's a little labor intensive. When you find a likely prospect, send them a contact request/ pitch at the bottom of their profile."
• Mendeley A free reference manager and an academic social network. A desktop and web program produced by Elsevier for managing and sharing research papers, discovering research data and collaborating online. It combines Mendeley Desktop, a PDF and reference management.
• Microsoft One-Note A digital notebook app. A cross-functional notebook for all your notetaking needs.
• Mural (Periwinkle Muse) A cloud-based application that is like a large, shared 'wall' for teams mapping out content and organizing an individual's or a group's thoughts spatially, working across locations, time zones, and disciplines. You can access MURAL across devices through its web-based application or native apps for Windows, iOS, and Android devices. See 5 Skills for Getting Started With MURAL (Jim Kalbach on the Mural blog).

• NewsDiffs archives changes in articles after publication. Tracks nytimes.com, cnn.com, politico.com, washingtonpost.com, and bbc.co.uk. (Dan Oshinsky, Inbox Collective, 3-23-23)
• Newsletter tools:

---The Five Types of Indie Newsletter Business Models (Alex Hazlett and Dan Oshinsky, Inbox Collective, 8-29-22) The Analyst. The Curator. The Expert. The Reporter. The Writer. Matching the right newsletter to the right business model. What does each type mean? How big is its audience? How does the newsletter grow? How does it make money? What happens if your newsletter or goals are a little different?
---AWeber, Beehiiv, ConvertKit, Ghost, Mailchimp, or Substack: Which Is The Right ESP For Your Indie Newsletter? From the many email platforms (service providers) to choose from, here are six options worth a closer look. This guide walks you through what makes each of these platforms so useful, what they cost, and why they might be right for you.
---Substack and competitors (with Substack, you get paid)
---How to Start Monetizing Your Indie Newsletter (Dan Oshinsky, Index Collective, 3-23-23) How do you know when it’s time to start monetizing? And what are the different ways newsletters like yours monetize? Some options, discussed in some detail: Selling a subscription or membership. Selling advertising in your newsletter. Asking readers for donations. Selling ebooks, merchandise, or other products. Using affiliate links to recommend other products. Consulting, coaching, or teaching. Hosting events or workshops. Monetizing through indirect revenue (paid talks or freelance gigs, for example).

• Nomorobo (Stop robocalls!) Works with smart phones, internet landlines, or traditional phones (copper wireline service) To follow instructions for an internet land line, when you receive robo generated phone calls, it will ring only once. When you hear the phone ring, you wait for the second ring before you go to the phone to see who is calling. The downside is that if you are wanting a robo call (for example from Amazon or any place you know will be placing a robo-generated call) you have to catch it during that first ring. Also, on rare occasions, a message is left; then it is just a matter of checking your voicemail messages. (H/T Jeanne B.)

• Ngram. See Google Ngram
• Notepad Helpful for grabbing text (copy & paste) or writing up notes without having to deal with a separate Word document.
• Notion, for organization and note-taking "Notion is my central hub for note-taking, content planning, and scratchpad-ing. The app allows you to create workspaces for managing tasks, projects, and workplace collaboration. I keep a backlog of ideas in a kanban board , sorting article concepts by production stage."~ Jeremy Kaplan

• NoveList (Ebsco), a database of "lists of what to read next when you’ve found a book you really like, also known as 'readers’ advisory'.” ~see description on Free resources at the library.

• OneLook searches multiple dictionaries for a particular word, using wildcard characters for some searches. Its thesaurus helps you find synonyms.

• Online collaboration tools
---Exploring the Top Tech Writing Collaboration Tools (Juliet Ofoegbu on Writing docs, Tools, 10-12-23) Collaborate with teams of classmates, colleagues, or friends anywhere in reviewing, annotating, and revising documents.
---Asana This project and task management tool shows how every task, project, discussion, and file maps out over time
---Etherpad A highly customizable open source online editor for collaborative editing in really real-time.
---Google Docs Create and collaborate on online documents in real-time and from any device
---Hypothesis Teams of classmates, colleagues, or friends annotate documents online by highlighting parts, adding comments and explanations of why to do X.
---Mural A cloud-based application: a large, shared 'wall' for teams mapping out content and organizing an individual's or a group's thoughts spatially, working across locations, time zones, and disciplines. You can access MURAL across Windows, iOS, and Android devices.
---Notion Turn any process into a step-by-step guide using built-in templates. Notion can integrate with other tools like Slack, GitHub, Asana, Jira, GitLab, Figma, Zoom, Calendly, and many more.
---Padlet An online bulletin board [“padlet”] on which students can upload, organize, and share content
---Quip helps sales teams document sales processes with embedded documents, live Salesforce data, and built-in collaboration.
---Scribe Good for creating user guides or manuals. Keeps track of version changes.
---Trello A digital whiteboard on which to brainstorm and visualize ideas and projects and organize tasks using boards, lists, and cards.

• Open Source Intelligence Tools (OSINT) Open-source intelligence (OSINT) is the practice of collecting information from published or otherwise publicly available sources. It is primarily used in national security, law enforcement, and business intelligence functions and is of value to analysts who use non-sensitive intelligence in answering classified, unclassified, or proprietary questions. [This section is less a guide to tools you might want to use, and more a heads-up on a tool/skill/practice you might not be aware of.]
---15 top open-source intelligence tools (Ax Sharma, John Breeden II and Josh Fruhlinger, CSO Online, 6-28-21) "OSINT operations, whether practiced by IT security pros, malicious hackers, or state-sanctioned intelligence operatives, use advanced techniques to search through the vast haystack of visible data to find the needles they're looking for to achieve their goals—and learn information that many don't realize is public. Open source in this context doesn't refer to the open-source software movement, although many OSINT tools are open source; instead, it describes the public nature of the data being analyzed." Discussed tools (in no particular order): Maltego, Mitaka, SpiderFoot, Spyse, BuiltWith, Intelligence X, DarkSearch.io, Grep.app, Recon-ng, theHarvester, Shodan, Metagoofil, Searchcode, SpiderFoot, Babel X. Source: CSO Online. Here's its Resource Library
---Drunken Rant About Killing Muslims (Jordan Wildon, Motherboard, Vice, 8-12-20) The removal of nearly 200 links from Google search in Germany about a princess’ drunken rampage in Scotland raises questions about who has the 'right to be forgotten.' Twice a year, Google shares data about how governments and corporations make requests to the company in its Transparency Report. One section of the report broadly summarizes content removal requests to “inform discussions about online content regulation.”
See
---GDPR and the 'Right to Be Forgotten' (Writers and Editors) The battle between 'right to privacy' and 'right to know'
---OSINT: What is open source intelligence and how is it used? (Stephen Pritchard, The Daily Swig: Cybersecurity News and Views, 11-19-20)

• PDF Creator. PDFCreator is a tool to create PDF files from nearly any Windows application: If you can print a document, you can use this tool--say you have a text that you want to send as a PDF instead of a Word file. See C-Net's writeup , and you can download the software there.
---Stamps for PDF proofreading (Louise Harnby's explanation and links) "If you have to edit a lot of PDFs in Windows, it will rock your editing world."
---Keyboard shortcuts for proofreading PDFs (Adrienne Montgomerie scieditor, 11-15-12)
• Cute PDF. Cute PDF Writer (convert any printable document into a PDF); Custom PDF converter; CutePDF Professional; and Cute PDFEditor (free).'

• Planner Pad, the Funnel of Focus (Christie Aschwanden on why it works, Open Notebook). On Amazon: Weekly list/checklist and simpler versions. Others to look at (video demos): Things and Workflowy as demonstrated See also Project Management Tools

• Pens for book signings. In an online discussion, several authors mentioned preferences in pins used for book signings.

Ink flow is important, and the size of the pen's barrel. Some authors find trying to sign a lot of books with a skinny pen hard on their hands. Some find fat-barreled uncomfortable and clumsy. Barrel size is definitely an individual preference.

There are also preferences for tip or nib types (the pointed part of the pen that delivers ink to paper). Different nibs can produce different line widths and writing styles, depending on their shape and size.

A few recommendations (try these in a good stationery store)

---Faber Castelle PITT artists pens in 1.5 diameter. They don't bleed or smudge, they dry fast, and they have very little friction on the page so if you're signing hundreds of books, they won't make your hand tired.

---Bic Gelocity 07 (.7mm). I had long used medium point black ballpoint pens for taking the exhaustive notes until I discovered the Bic.

---No Sharpies in books unless they are Sharpie Gels, which move pretty smoothly.

---People seem to prefer that I use my marking pen rather than ballpoints as it makes my signature and message more prominent.

• Pentel Twist-Erase III Mechanical Pencil. Said to be best instrument for doing crossword puzzles.
• Plottr Outline faster, plot smarter with visual book planning software for writers. Visualize your plot points. One novelist writes: "A while back, I subscribed to Plottr and have found it incredibly helpful. I always create an outline before starting a new project, but Plottr makes it so much more organized and flexible." And it's cheap.
• Project management tools (Mike Reilley, Journalist's Toolbox, 10-4-22) He discusses the merits of several tools: Slack (a long-time favorite), Google Jamboard (a digital whiteboard tool), FigJam (another online whiteboard tool), Miro (all of the whiteboard features and more), AirTable (a searchable database tool with smart templates for organizing calendars, product launches, YouTube projects etc.) See also Planner Pad.

• Roomba iRobot Roomba 614 Robot Vacuum. "This tried-and-true robot vacuum is much more durable and repairable than similar bots from other brands and is better at cleaning rugs too. It’s a nimble navigator that rarely gets stuck, though it works best when it only has to clean three or four rooms at a time." Let Roomba vacuum while you finish editing that chapter. Why We Love the Roomba 600 Series (Liam McCabe, Wirecutter, 8-11-22)

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• Scraper (Tools for Reporters, 8-4-22) MuckRock and the Associated Press’ Local News AI team created a whole new tool that monitors, scrapes and sends alerts based on documents! An add-on to Document Cloud. See Release notes for more about how it works. To superpower your sourcing, Register with MuckRock.
• Screen capture software tools. 10 Best Screen Capture Software Tools for Better Snapshots (Software Testing Help) Several screen capture tools help you take a screenshot of the entire desktop or screen. These tools may vary in features such as screenshot size, quality, supported operating system, file format types, etc. Read descriptions for #1) Scribe, #2) Snagit, #3) FonePaw Screen Recorder, #4) PassFab Screen Recorder, #5) Wondershare DemoCreator, #6) VideoProc, #7) Camtasia, #8) Aiseesoft Screen Recorder, #9) Screen Recorder, #10) Snipping Tool.

• Scribe Count All your sales reports, in one convenient place. Useful for self-published (but maybe not traditionally published) authors publishing wide, helping you keep track of sales on all platforms (Amazon KDP, Kobo, Apple, Google, etc.). If you upload wide, you can see all numbers quickly without having to download and aggregate numbers from multiple spreadsheets. If you are doing a lot of print book sales, Scribe Count doesn't report that, says author Maggie Lynch. "They could pull numbers from Amazon easily, but most print is distributed by Ingram and they have never mentioned any kind of link with Ingram. It can be beneficial for self-published books if you want a way to get data from several platforms combined and analyzed to help you determine what promotions are working or which platforms are doing best for you."

• Scrivener, a word processing program that is also a management system for documents, notes, and metadata. Scrivener has a steep learning curve, and you cannot save "Track Changes" within it, but it is useful for organizing a book or project. Abdullahi Tsanni's explanation: "Scrivener is a paid app ($49 for Mac version and $45 for Windows) that combines a word processor with file and folder organization—in other words, offering a one-stop shop in which to keep information about your projects as well as reporting materials and story drafts."
Some tips on using it:
---Literature & Latte (Scrivener's site)
---Scrivener and the Editorial Process (Jamie Todd Rubin, 10-26-12)
---An Everyday Guide to Scrivener 3 for Mac (software download at Amazon)
--- Scrivener for Windows
Scrivener lets you write text in small or large chunks, and in any order--and import images or research files that sit next to your text (as reference material), eliminating the need to switch back and forth between windows. Useful for writing books, say some authors. Possibly helpful:
---Scrivener Coach (on Facebook).
---Learn Scrivener Fast (Joseph Michael's quick tutorials in video)
---Joanne Penn's video tips for using Scrivener to write your book. You can download PDF slides from her Writing Tips presentation.. See also 8 Ways Scrivener Will Help You Become A Proficient Writer Overnight. "For my first book, I used MS Word and it was a nightmare to cut and paste everything, as I’m not a linear writer. When I discovered Scrivener, the world became a better place! Then I discovered I could use it to publish in Kindle and ePub formats. "
---Using Scrivener Collections to Organize Your Novel Project (and other takes on Scrivener, Well-Storied) [To which another novelist asks, "Have you used Plottr with Scrivener? I see you can export to Scrivener, which seems ideal to me. I love Scrivener, but there isn't a dedicated Timeline template that I know of, which I see Plottr does have. I'd be happy to hear more." Can someone answer that?
---Retrieving a Backup File in Scrivener (Tech Tools for Writers)
---"I wrote my book in Scrivener, which allowed me to keep all of my research and writing in one (big) file where I could easily search, organize and arrange it. I kept a spreadsheet of the people I interviewed, and used Mendeley to organize the hundreds of scientific papers I read....Scrivener also allows you to create footnotes or endnotes, and these features saved me time during the fact-checking. --Christie Aschwanden, Good to Go, Advance Copy, NASW.

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• Self-Editing Tools: (see also Editing Tools, above)

Author tools comparison How does Marlowe, the AI-powered analysis service from Authors A.I., stack up against other tools that help authors write better novels? In a chart, compares features of Marlowe, Grammarly, Pro Writing Aid, AutoCrit, and Sudowrite.

Pamela Kelley, in an online discussion (AG), wrote: "Authors.AI and the software Marlowe that does the analyzing has been around before AI was a thing. The software was developed by the same person who wrote the book The Bestseller Code, where they put 100 top selling books of all time into a database and had the software analyze the books, looking for patterns found in bestselling books that writers could also replicate in their own work. The way Marlowe works is you upload your manuscript and Marlowe analyzes it looking at pacing and a bunch of other metrics. It is not made public, so you don't have to worry about your work going anywhere. It's fairly inexpensive to run a report, like $29 or so. I loved the book The Bestseller Code, so when the opportunity was presented several years ago to invest in this company--and the author site, BingeBooks, which is similar to a Goodreads, I joined them.

---Comparing 5 top editing tools for authors (Authors.ai) The same chart, with explanations.

---Other such tools include authors.ai, isrdo.org, Sebago.com, and autocrit.com.

• Signal, a secure voice and messaging app, available for Android or Apple.
• Skitch (an Evernote add-on) A simple tool for pixelating bits of an image (to hide faces) or to blur out text (Tools for Reporters)

• Slack a cloud-based team communication platform that brings team communication and collaboration into one place so you can get more work done

• SlideShare. See Creator Tips and Tricks, including (under Tools & Resources) links to alternatives to PowerPoint for creating presentations.
• Smart Tools
---The Best Smart Home Devices (PC Magazine)
---When to Use a Smart Bulb, Switch, or Plug (Rachel Cericola, Wirecutter, NY Times, 1-26-22)
---Smartphones. 19 Things You Didn't Know Your Smartphone Could Do (Edward C. Baig, AARP, 12-1-21) The 'Swiss Army knife' of technology offers amazing tools. Use your smartphone as a battery tester for remote controls, calculator, document scanner, emergency broadcast system, flashlight, foreign language translator, GPS navigation system, kitchen timer, library, magnifying glass, metal detector, pedometer, QR code reader, radio, tape measure, video camera,voice recorder, weather forecaster, wallet (with versions of most of these for both iPhone and android).

• Social media marketing and analytics software, platforms (measuring performance etc.)

---Hootsuite (rated 8.2, 3139 votes) Social media marketing with advanced analytics, automated post scheduling, and multi-platform messaging capabilities from one interface. Easily manage all your social media. Save time by scheduling posts across all your social networks in just a few clicks. Automatically schedule your content and review posts in a simple calendar view.
---Crowdtangle (Meta) Social media analytics software (Facebook, Instagram, Reddit). Stay on top of the stories that matter. Benchmark yourself against competitors. Identify influencers. Track misinformation on social media -- but Meta to shut down misinformation tracker Crowdtangle (Ad Age, 6-24-22) The Facebook parent has kept its plans for the search tool a mystery
---Meltwater A media intelligence platform to track what current and potential customers are saying about your company brand online; simplifies scheduling content, engaging with your community, and measuring performance across all your social media channels
---Zoho Social (rated 9.2, 2167 votes) The easiest way to manage your brands on social media.
---Buffer (8.6, 836 votes) Grow your audience on social and beyond
---Tweetdeck (8.6, 566 votes) and so on, with several more.

• Sony ICD-UX570 Digital Voice Recorder
• Soundcite (Knight Lab) Seamless inline audio. A simple-to-use tool that lets you add inline audio to your story. The audio is not isolated; it plays right under the text.
• Standing and adjustable height desks
• Storyboard That (Chrome) See Best Storyboarding Software (Hubspot) Storyboarding is the process of sketching out the progression of a video, animation, or film project (for marketing or otherwise).
• Storyline (Knight Lab) This open-source tool enables anyone to build an annotated, interactive line chart. Tell the story behind the numbers.
• StoryMap (Knight Lab) Maps that tell stories. Use this free tool to help you tell stories on the web that highlight the locations of a series of events.

• Substack and competitors

• Survey tools:
---10 Best Poll Apps in 2022 (Athira Unnikrishnan, Survey Sparrow)
---You should be surveying your audience more (Simon Owens media newsletter) You basically have your own homegrown focus group just waiting to be unleashed.

• Tabula A tool for "liberating data tables locked inside PDF files," as one writer put it. Document Cloud "a similar tool, also boasts an open-source repository of public documents that have gone through this process." See also Clean those PDFs with Tabula (Tools for Reporters) Ditch the hassle of trying to copy rows from a table and paste them into Excel. Just upload your PDF to Tabula, click and drag to draw a box around the table you want to pull data from and, voilà, you can export your data as a CSV or Excel file.
• Talkwalker Alerts Like Google Alerts, Talkwalker will automatically send you new mentions of your name (or another topic) in a daily alert.
• Teams (Microsoft) Meat, chat, call, email and collaborate with everyone you work with, all in one space, even if you are global and scattered geographically. Teams can be created to be private to only invited users or public and discoverable to your entire organization. Select the three dots next to a team to access a team's settings. See Teams demo for more demonstrations of how it works.

• Threadable A free tool for having an ongoing conversation with yourself, in chat form, useful for when you are researching, writing, editing, revising. Useful also for making connections through books and people.

• Timeline (Knight Lab) Make beautiful timelines, easily.
• Tinderbox maps your notes as you make them. Build relationships by arranging notes, organizing them with shape and color, and linking them. Tinderbox lets you record ideas quickly and keep them where you'll find them again when you need them.

• Title Case Converter Systematically capitalize certain types of words (depending on which "style guide" you choose)

• Tomato Timer A web-based time management tool that follows the 25-minute work / 5-minute break rule. Do that four times, then take a longer break. You can set for pomodoro (25 minutes), short break (5 min.) or long break (10 hrs). There's a variation on this timer: The Marinara timer gives you an option of setting your own time. Both are free.

• Transcription software, apps.

---Otter.ai ("artificial intelligence") A good transcription app that handles audio recording and transcription simultaneously.
---Express Scribe Transcription Software A typist can install it on their computer and control audio playback using a transcription foot pedal or keyboard (with 'hot' keys). This transcribing software also offers valuable features for typists including variable speed playback, multi-channel control, playing video, file management, and more.

---The Best New Ways to Transcribe (Jeremy Caplan). An overview of 28 Tools for efficiently turning audio into text. Includes Otter (which many journalists prefer) as a postscript.
   Option #1: Transcribe Audio or Video Yourself: oTranscribe, Transcribe, transcribe.wreally.com
   Option #2: Use an Automated Transcription Service: Trint.com (transribes video), Happy Scribe, Rev.com (good but more expensive per minute), Temi, Spext.co, Pop Up Archive (many professional podcasters and radio stations use it)
   Option #3: Use an App to Generate a Quick Transcription: Cassette, Anchor (allows you to create videos out of the text in your audio recordings), Steno ( an iOS app that you can use to record a lecture, interview, meeting), Cogi,
   Option #4: Record Calls, Transcribe Afterwards: NoNotes.com, Google Voice, TapeaCall.com
   Option #5: Use Simple Dictation Tools: Google Docs, Speech Notes, Speechlogger, Dragon Dictation, Active Voice
   Option #6: Hire a Freelancer: Mechanical Turk (Amazon), Fivver's transcription section, Upwork
   Other Resources: Olympus TP-8, AutoEdit 2, Auto Transcription API by Scale 27, PodcasterPro, IBM Watson’s Transcription Demo
    New Services: Otter, Deepgram, Sonix.ai, Jog.ai and Voicera

• Trello (free and paid platforms) Search for "Playing Your Cards Right with Trello" or read Tsanni's excellent explanation of how to use "cards" on a "board" to organize different projects or to maintain a topdown view of all your work (with due dates and delivery schedules). See also Beginners Guide: How To Rock Your Blog With Trello (Gemma Church, Medium)

• Two-factor authentication for beginners (Martin Shelton, Freedom of the Press Foundation) Two-factor authentication (or 2FA, for short) strengthens login security by requiring a second piece of information — a layer of security beyond a password that can be stolen.
• Two-factor authentication with a security key (Wonder Tools) After entering your username and password, a site (such as your email service) will prompt you to tap the key that’s inserted into your computer’s USB slot. That’s it! Security keys are inexpensive. Yubico and Feitian both have $25 models. Students and teachers with a .edu address can save 20% on Yubico keys.

• Typewriters. See especially The Typewriter Revolution: A Typist's Companion for the 21st Century by Richard Polt (five stars!) Illustrated history, how to find and fix a machine, users guide, etc. and it provided links to these guides:
---Users manuals for most typewriters
---Service manuals
---Typing instruction manuals
---Manuals for a few electronic typewriters

• Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), reviewed by TechRadar
---Express VPN (the best VPN service for your browser)
---SurfShark (the best cheap VPN option)
---NordVPN (a leading VPN)

• Windows Explorer (aka File Explorer, from Microsoft) If you have a Windows machine you can use this tool to search an entire folder for a keyword or phrase.
• WordCounter Find the word count of an article or passage. WordCounter also shows you the top 10 keywords and keyword density of the article you're writing.
• Word's Quick Access Toolbar, Edit Efficiently with (C.K. MacLeod, Tech Tools for Writers)
• Work Productivity Tools (Robert Thorpe)

• Zoom, the platform that helped us get through the pandemic by helping friends and family hold online conversations and lengthy meetings, journalists and authors to conduct interviews and coach clients, and webinar leaders and online speakers to sign up dozens, even hundreds, of participants--a whole new type of audience. You can get a 40-minute session for free (and start it all over again if you want to keep talking), but with subscriptions at $150 a year it may be worth paying for the Pro version and talk as long as you need to. If you record the session, and turn transcription on, it makes interviews easier to capture, although the transcription is rough enough that it might be worth recording an interview on a good external recorder and dropping it into Otter to transcribe.
• Zotero Your personal research assistant. A free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share research.

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Round-ups of tips about tools for writers and editors

• Tools for Reporters Top Tools of 2023!
• Cool Tools for Journalists (short video, with use of tools illustrated by Mike Reilley, Journalist's Toolbox.ai, 11-14-23) A short video worth watching, and check out Reilly's book (especially if the price goes down or there's a used copy for sale): The Journalist’s Toolbox: A Guide to Digital Reporting and AI

• Finding the Right Tools for Organizing Assignments and Reporting (Abdullahi Tsanni, Open Notebook, 7-27-21) These tips for science writers will work for all journalists. He's particularly helpful on pointing out the difference between analog tools (like whiteboards and notebooks) and digital tools (Tech Tools Journalists Use to Work Smarter). In a brilliant chart he describes and gives prices for Airtable, Asana, Binfire, Evernote, Google Drive, Google Keep, Google Sheets, Notion, OneNote, Scrivener, Text Expander, Trello, Weava, Zapier, and Zotello. Other Sets of Recommendations
• The products that Charlie Meyerson, founder of the Chicago Public Square newsletter, can’t do without (Simon Owens, The Entrepreneur's Tech Stack, 4-27-23)
• How to Back Up Your Social Media Content (Kristi Hines, Social Media Examiner, 1-5-17) How to download copies of your social media content and profiles.
• Tools for Reporters. Excellent resource. Check out its archive. See also Top Tools for Reporters 2022 (Samantha Sunne)
• The 22 Best Writing Tools: A Guide for Writers (Reedsy)
• Everything You Need to Work From Home Like a Pro (Julian Chokkattu, Wired, 5-1-21) Gear can make or break your home office setup. Here’s Wired's ultimate list of the best monitors, desks, webcams, headphones, and more.
• Robert Thorpe's Work Productivity Tools Very useful!
• Wonder Tools recommended by Jeremy Caplan.
• Trusting News: Resources (a project of RJI and API) Free resources for your newsroom or classroom.
• UX Tools (Artem Komarov) UX=usability experience.
• Become a better writer with these online tools (Harry Guinness, Popular Science, 10-20-2020) Grammarly, Hemingway, Freedom ("Block distracting websites and apps. Stay focused on what matters most."), Scrivener, dictionaries and thesauruses.
• My Must-Have Digital Media Tools: 2020 Edition (Jane Friedman,12-31-19)
• 60+ Awesome, Free Tools for Modern Storytellers (Medium.com). For example, NewsDiffs tracks changes in articles after publication (in digital formats)
• Google Alerts. See Molly Ives Brower, Use Google Alerts to keep up with your titles and authors
• Online Tools and Web 2.0 Applications (Kathy Schrock's Guide to Everything)
• AI for Local Newsrooms (Journalist's Toolbox).
• Overcoming procrastination. Resources on getting things done.
• 100+ Author Tools: The Best Tools for Writing, Publishing, and Marketing Your Book (Tom Corson-Knowles, TCK Publishing)
• 25 Thinking Styles (Based on Occupation) (Scott Young, The Startup, 9-7-19) The types of problems people in various professions try to solve and how they try to solve them. The thinking tools that are often abstract enough to apply outside the work in that field. By the author of Ultralearning (understand how learning works).
• The best apps, communities & tools for writers and journalists (The Next Web, 9-29-12)
• The 80 Best Tools for Writers in 2016 (GlobalEnglishEditing)
• Great and Unusual Online Shopping (Pat McNees site) Good for gift shopping.

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· Active sitting
· Affiliate marketing (passive income)
· Book coaches and book coaching
· Bookcases and bookshelves
· Can I make a living as a writer? (authors' income and earnings)
· Computer security has moved here.
· Critique groups and writing workshops
· Crowdfunding and other new forms of creative financing
· Crowdfunding sites
· Crowdfunding fraud
· Cruise lecturing
· Developing a writing practice
· Famous literary hoaxes
· The lives of writers and editors (articles)
· The lives of writers and editors (books)
· Location independence
· Online payment systems
· On writing and the writing life
· Rejection (including Rotten Rejections)
· Rules and tips for writers
· Some books to get you going
· Standing and adjustable-height desks and walkstations
· Tools for writers and editors (Scrivener, Dragon Naturally, Evernote, Express Scribe, Livescribe Echo, etc.)
· Writer's block, procrastination, productivity, time and effort management
· Writers talk about money
· Writers groups and communities (connecting with peers)
· Writers' offices, illustrated
· Writers sharing workspaces

Check out
Artificial intelligence. Will it replace human writers and editors?

This category is kind of like "religion." Where do we start?

More to come. Suggestions welcome.

Developing a writing practice

The type of business you develop may place more emphasis on one factor than another.

Passion, pay, prestige, or people

(thanks for the first 3 P's to Katherine Reynolds Lewis)

or you may prefer a project that is mostly
Important, lucrative, interesting, or fun

A homily for the independent writer:

“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle: when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”~ securities analyst Dan Montano

• Tracking your why, your how, your money, and your time (Katherine Reynolds Lewis, Episode 170, the #AmWriting Podcast: #YourFreelanceBusiness). "Passion, pay, or prestige."

• 3 Critical Things You Won’t Learn in an MFA Program (Susan DeFreitas on Jane Friedman's blog, 1-15-2020) Writing takes grit and so does publishing, but your odds are better if you understand what you’re up against. In this guest post, author and educator Susan DeFreitas shares some “secrets” everyone should know, about how agents and editors read a manuscript, where and how often to submit, and learning about "comps."
• How to Get Back to Writing (Matthew Duffus on Jane Friedman's blog,11-21-22) When completing a readable draft left one author exhausted and overwhelmed, these three steps helped him start writing again.
• The Craft of Writing Effectively (YouTube video, 1hr22min) Larry McEnerney, Director of the University of Chicago's Writing Program, leading an excellent and persuasive session on skills and resources available to graduate students interested in developing a better, more persuasive (and less academic) writing style.
• Developing a Writing Practice, Part 1: Stepladders (Susan DeFreitas on Jane Friedman's blog, 3-31-2020) Studies show that making meaningful progress toward big goals is best served by focusing on the small steps that will get us there. Based on Sean D. Young’s bestselling book Stick with It: A Scientifically Proven Process for Changing Your Life—for Good. This series of blog posts mostly by Susan DeFreitas deserves a section of its own.
• Developing a Writing Practice, Part 2: Community (Susan DeFreitas on Jane Friedman's blog, 4-7-2020) Don’t feel like you have to go it alone—others are on the same journey, ready to offer encouragement and applaud your hard-earned victories.
• Developing a Writing Practice, Part 3: Important (Susan DeFreitas on Jane Friedman's blog, 4-14-2020) A lot of the people who genuinely want to write a book never do so, because they never find a reason to prioritize their writing practice. (See also Instead of Setting a Goal, Try a Writing Dare (Susann Cokal on Jane F's blog, 4-9-2020) Too much free time can actually hinder momentum. That’s why it can be useful to focus on small challenges, always aiming just beyond your comfort level.
• Developing a Writing Practice, Part 4: Easy (Susan DeFreitas on Jane Friedman's blog, 4-21-2020) Many dream of publishing a book, but actually sitting down to write one seems hard. Preparation and limiting your choices can make writing feel easier.
• Developing a Writing Practice, Part 5: Neurohacks (Susan DeFreitas on Jane Friedman's blog, 4-28-2020) In some ways, the idea behind neurohacks is simple: Fake it till you make it. re about building cOr, fake it until it feels real, because your brain can’t tell the difference.
• Developing a Writing Practice, Part 6: Captivating (Susan DeFreitas on Jane Friedman's blog, 5-6-2020) Both the casino industry and mobile phone designers make use of two principles--the Quick Fix and the Trick Fix--to provide a big payout often enough to keep you coming back. Figure out what motivates you to get up and writing and design one you give yourself.
• Four small business mistakes (Christopher Schwarz, 4-10-23) The co-founder of Lost Art Press describes four small business mistakes he suggests avoiding:
1. Saying on your website: "We aommunity."
2. Saying “Without your support, we will go out of business.”
3. Overdoing superlatives. Let the customer apply them. When you do it, it’s like a prostitute telling you that you’re good in bed.
4. Tease vaguely about a new product. "Instead, when discussing new products, tell the customer what you are doing in real time. The ups and downs."
• How to Tell If You Have What It Takes to Succeed as a Writer (Susan DeFreitas on Jane Friedman's blog, 1-15-2020) "I’ve worked with enough clients over the years to know that the best indication of a writer’s promise is not in the manuscript they first send me. It’s in their ability (or inability) to revise, based on my feedback."
• When Your Query Reveals a Story-Level Problem (Susan DeFreitas on Jane Friedman's blog, 3-6-19) When novelists struggle to pitch their work, it may have more to do with the book itself than the query letter. Why to consider using a developmental editor to help with story structure and why intuition alone is probably not enough.
• What It Really Takes to Break Through with Your First Book Deal (Susan DeFreitas on Jane Friedman's blog, 5-8-18) In many ways, it’s never been harder to get a traditional book deal. At the same time, there have never been more ways to establish a career as an author. Among the nuggets of practical wisdom for fiction writers: "Publishing credits are crucial for short story collections, and not just because they get the attention of publishers but because the process itself tends to put a high level of polish on each piece." "A serious, consistent submissions strategy is key to getting short fiction published." Read them all.
• How to Spot Toxic Feedback: 7 Signs That the Writing Advice You’re Getting May Do More Harm Than Good (Susan DeFreitas on Jane Friedman's blog, 5-8-18) If you recognize certain characteristics in the critiques of your work, it may not just be inept—it may, in fact, be toxic.

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Can I make a living as a writer?

As a poet, generally, no. You'll have better luck as a novelist as people more likely to pay good money for a novel than for a poem, but fiction is very much a crap shoot. With nonfiction, you're more likely to be able to pay the rent and put food on the table, and if you choose a field like technical writing, business writing, or speechwriting, and you're good at it, have expertise in fields with few experts, have credentials and a good track record, and live in an area where there's high demand for writing, you can make a very good living. If what you want is to be rich, your odds are better if you choose another field. But if writing comes at all easy to you, and you develop marketable skills, it's a very interesting way to spend a life and some writers do very well indeed.

As is probably true in any line of work, the most satisfying jobs are not always the ones that pay well, and it's very hard to predict what will satisfy and what will pay well! Once when I was giving a talk to a writer's group about writing and editing in the Washington DC area, I got a big laugh of acknowledgement when I said that "the more boring the work, the more you can charge," because that is generally true. (Food and travel writing and book reviewing tend to pay little and technical writing tends to pay more, for example.) But as a result of that talk, I got one of the least boring, most interesting, most lucrative projects of my career.

Mind you, after working eight years in book publishing, and except for one year working as an editor for an energy consulting firm in DC in the 1970s, when energy was a hot topic, I have worked freelance fulltime for several decades. Is it easy? Not always, but for someone who has trouble getting up early it was a natural path. The one thing you MUST do if you choose to write freelance is to start a retirement fund early and invest in it regularly, as you must create your own pension fund. I also formed many friendships with other freelance journalists by joining the American Society of Journalists & Authors (ASJA) and other writers groups. Novelists I have known have typically taken on gigs in nonwriting-related areas so that their creative writing juices aren't burnt out at the end of the day -- plus which working for a detective agency or an animal shelter etc. provides richer material for the fiction.

As any writer will tell you, sometimes we take on projects just because we love them, and know the psychic satisfaction will be high. Sometimes we take on work because we like who we will be working with or for. Sometimes we take on a project because we are curious about the topic or think the message (or audience) is important. Occasionally everything comes together and we get paid well for work that is satisfying, for publishers or clients who are a dream to work with, writing for an audience we really care about. May you all find such work! May all your editors know what they are doing and do it respectfully, may all your writers turn in compelling and clean copy, and may we all play well in the sandbox!

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Writers talk about money
How much do authors earn?

“The truth is that I do what I want to do,” novelist Walter Mosley told Clayton Moore, Mystery Strumpet on Bookslut. “If I want to write a political monograph, I write a political monograph and someone publishes it. No, it doesn’t sell like a traditional mystery, but I don’t care. I don’t write for that reason. If you want to make money, you should go into real estate, you know what I mean? If your love is writing books, that’s a passion that’s way outside of the umbrella of income.”

Note: Writers vary greatly in their opinions about money and money-making and -owing.
• How Much Do Authors Earn? Here’s the Answer No One Likes. (Jane Friedman, 5-19-21) "The majority of writers don’t earn a living from book sales alone." Find the business model that works best for you and enables you to do work you enjoy. Read her book: The Business of Being a Writer and Where My Money Comes From (7-2-21, breaking down the sources of her income)
• Bad waitress, Dying on your feet. (Dirt, 6-5-23) Becca Schuh on being both a writer and a server.
• How to Make Money As a Freelance Writer or Editor (Freelancing, Writers and Editors)
• How much money does a children's book author make? (Laura Salas) One kidlit author's earnings (in detail) over several years.
• Why Is It So Goddamned Hard to Make a Living as a Writer Today? (Douglas Preston, Keynote Speech at inaugural New Mexico Writers Dinner, 3-2-17, reprinted by Authors Guild)
• How Much Do Authors Make Per Book? (Sarah Nicolas, Book Riot, 5-11-21)
• Six Figure Authors is the podcast that helps you take your writing career to the next level (especially if you write romance novels). The second-largest fiction market, after romance, is mystery/thriller.
• How Much Money Do Authors Actually Earn? (Lincoln Michel, Countercraft, 5-18-21) Generalizations about relative income from book advances, royalties, foreign rights, audio book rights, short story sales, TV/film options, awards and grants, speaker fees/lectures/university visits, Patreon/Substack/Micropayments, mitigating factors. "For 99% of writers, your creative work is always going to be a side hustle. Something you do not primarily for money....just because few authors live entirely off writing income doesn’t make the side income irrelevant."
• Why Authors Are Earning Less Even As Book Sales Rise (Adam Rowe, Forbes, 8-11-18) The disparity between book sales and author salaries isn’t news. But seeing the statistics laid out simply on the page can help develop an understanding of where the money is going.Overall, revenues appear to be holding steady, as traditional publishers double down on the latest trend or format (which are political tell-alls and digital audiobooks, respectively, if anyone's wondering).The "traditional industry's numbers don't represent the entire book-publishing world: In the famously murky world of book statistics, there's little data available on self-published authors and their sales."
• Six Takeaways from the Authors Guild 2018 Author Income Survey (5-6-21) Mostly bad news, including this: Publishers' blockbuster mentality, 25% ebook royalty rate and increase in deep discounting adversely impacts author incomes. Self-published writers have seen incomes rise, but they still earn less than traditionally published authors. Full-time mid-list and literary writers are on the verge of extinction. Amazon dominates the book industry, both as a seller of books and as a publishing house. For thoughtful commentary on the results, read How Much Do Authors Make Per Book? (Sarah Nicolas, Book Riot, 5-11-21) The numbers, frankly, from several authors.
• Author Income Surveys Are Misleading and Flawed—And Focus on the Wrong Message for Writers (Jane Friedman, 7-2-18) The main problem with the AG survey is that "a large number of respondents reported little or no income. Once you filter out these people, there is no longer a decline in author incomes....As Publishers Marketplace reports, “Median income for full-time published authors, once you remove the people reporting nothing at all, was $20,857. In fact, despite the focus of the study conclusions, full-time authors saw their median income rise 13 percent since 2013, and romance/romantic suspense authors also saw gains. For the 63 percent of authors who reported receiving book related income in 2017, the average total income was $43,247, which paints a very different picture [than the Authors Guild headline of $6,080]. … Three-sevenths of full-time authors with any earnings were making over $50,000.”
• Elle Griffin's The Novelleist (Substack newsletter 5-9-21) Could the creator economy work for fiction authors? Profitable trash, the serial novel (think "Game of Thrones"), crowdfunding on Kickstarter, and which platform is best for fiction writers: Wattpad, Patreon, Substack, or Amazon Vella?
• Your Freelance Business Katherine Reynolds Lewis talks about how she manages her life as a freelancer, on Jessica Lahey's Am Writing podcast. She accepts an assignment if it matches one or more of her criteria. Any assignment she takes must satisfy one of her "Passion, Pay, or Prestige" (to which others might add "People," because sometimes we take an assignment because we love working with a particular editor). In other words, it has to be important, lucrative, interesting, or fun. Lewis is the author of The Good News About Bad Behavior: Why Kids Are Less Disciplined Than Ever And What to Do About It. She relies on toggl to track how she spends her writing time and be accountable to herself. She talks about how to balance book work and shorter assignments.
• How to Tell If You Have What It Takes to Succeed as a Writer (book coach Susan DeFreitas on Jane Friedman's blog, 1-15-2020) "The truth is, I’ve worked with enough clients over the years to know that the best indication of a writer’s promise is not in the manuscript they first send me. It’s in their ability (or inability) to revise, based on my feedback."
• Day Job: How I paid the bills while I wrote the book. (Medium, 2-19-19) Private investigator. Subway conductor. Building superintendent. In Medium’s Day Job series, 12 accomplished authors discuss the years of income-producing work they did to support their writing. From slicing soap in a luxury bath store to directing air strikes in Afghanistan, these authors discuss not only the jobs themselves, but also the ways they protected their time and creativity from the demands of their full-time careers (and still do!). Pieces by Mike Gardner, Elizabeth Strout, Andy Weir, Carmen Maria Machado, Mitchell S. Jackson, Amy Bloom, Nicole Dennis-Benn, Will Mackin, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Karan Majahan, Sujatha Gidla, Xhenet Aliu, Camille Perri. Scrounging for money: how the world’s great writers made a living (Camilla Nelson, The Conversation, 5-16-17) Paying the bills through day jobs as postal clerk, janitor, doctor, lawyer, clergyman, advertising copywriter, etc.
• How to Be a Writer and Still Get Really, Really Rich (Maggie Bullock, The Cut, 3-21-19) In 2013, Jessica Knoll was a mid-tier editor at Self magazine, toiling away at night on the thriller that she was determined to make into a New York Times best seller. And it paid off: Luckiest Girl Alive spent four months on that list, sold 450,000 copies, and was optioned by Lionsgate, with Reese Witherspoon signed on to produce. Her positive expectations may seem excessive to some. Part of a series about how women feel about their bank balances.
• Most Authors Don’t Make Money From Writing Alone (Jennifer Baker, Billfold, 10-14-16) Many pursue other avenues of financial support when it comes to a decline in revenue from writing. According to Mary Rasenberger of the Authors Guild, Amazon in the retail market setting the price of books below cost “has the effect of lowering consumer expectations about what a book is actually worth, and an increase in digital piracy."..The demands from the industry have also taken time away from writing and pushed authors to put more effort into marketing and communicating with readers. This time has gone up by 59% since 2009 with “many publishing contracts now requiring authors to maintain a web and social media presence.” Factor this in with the closing of more brick-and-mortar bookstores, the low price of ebooks, and the increase in piracy have made it less profitable to be an author.'
• Power to the writers (Mark Stenberg, Medialyte, 5-12-21) A massive realignment of human capital is coming for the media industry.
• The Next Big News Disruption (Jessica E. Lessin, The Takeaway, The Information, 5-8-21) "The Athletic, like The Information, is often credited as an early believer in subscription news....But I’ve always been impressed with The Athletic for an additional reason: how they managed to lure and retain such great sports-writing talent. From day one that often overlooked fact has defined their success as much as their business model has. They saw an opportunity to disrupt how the talent market worked by giving top writers more freedom, excellent deals and more....This is not a passing fad. It’s been developing steadily for a long time, and it amounts to a major human capital realignment in the news business that will ruin many news organizations and propel those smart enough to realize what to do about it.”
• How to Lose a Third of a Million Dollars Without Really Trying (Heather Demetrios, Forge, 8-17-19) "As a young writer, my naiveté about the publishing process nearly led me to financial ruin. Here’s how to avoid my mistakes....I make sure [aspiring writers] internalize that their fate in this industry isn’t entirely in their own hands, no matter how good they are, or how much they hustle....Did anyone working with me — agency, publishing team — tell me that a sumptuous advance was not something I should depend on or get used to? Or that, in fact, it's extraordinarily common in the publishing industry for untested debut writers to be paid large sums that they may never see again?
• Donation, Patron Services Help Fans Support Their Favorite Authors (Dena Levitz, MediaShift, 9-9-13) Donation models help creators get paid by their fans. Search for stories about Patreon ("provides a mean to tip someone who’s constantly putting out new material and, therefore, to earn a steady stream of revenue") and Canada-based Wattpad (connecting "a global community of 70 million readers and writers through the power of story"). These are different from "Kickstarter or Indiegogo ... Crowdfunding assists in allowing a writer or artist to begin a single pursuit like a book or album in a one-time gathering of money."
• Using Patreon and YouTube to Grow a Writing Career: Q&A with Jay Swanson (Jane Friedman, 10-30-17) In 2015, Jay Swanson he successfully crowdfunded his fantasy series, Into the Nanten.
• Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living, edited by Manjula Martin. A collection of essays from today’s most acclaimed authors—from Cheryl Strayed to Roxane Gay to Jennifer Weiner, Alexander Chee, Nick Hornby, Susan Orlean, and Jonathan Franzen—on the realities of making a living in the writing world. See Q&A here: Why More Writers Should Talk About Money (Joseph Frankel, The Atlantic, 1-15-17) and see You Can Write a Best-Seller and Still Go Broke (Laura Miller, Slate, 1-10-17) Why is it so hard for writers to talk candidly about how much money they make?
• Why Writers Are Opening Up About Money (or the Lack Thereof) (Anna North, OpTalk, NY Times 7-21-14). Many items below came from links in that interesting article.
• What I Bought With My Oprah’s Book Club Money (Tayari Jones as told to Kaitlin Menza, The Cut, 3-4-19) First, an account of the difficult years, and then what happened when Oprah chose An American Marriage for her book club ("a moving portrayal of the effects of a wrongful conviction on a young African-American couple").
• Getting Paid to Write as Myself: How a Freelance Writer Makes a Living (Nicole Dieker, The Billfold, 7-10-14) "It turns out that when you get paid to write as yourself, instead of as 'anonymous copywriter #5972,' you get a lot more money. . . .'Being Nicole Dieker' also means spending more time working with editors and invoices and building relationships and the sorts of things that an anonymous person doesn’t have to deal with." See also her advice to new freelance writers.
• Why Authors Are Earning Less Even As Book Sales Rise (Adam Rowe, Forbes, 8-11-18) "Overall, revenues appear to be holding steady, as traditional publishers double down on the latest trend or format (which are political tell-alls and digital audiobooks, respectively, if anyone's wondering)....In the famously murky world of book statistics, there's little data available on self-published authors and their sales. As much as 80% of online dollars spent on ebooks likely go to Amazon, by one data watchdog's 2017 report. A small group of self-published Amazon authors are doing quite well and going uncounted. Over a thousand indie Amazon authors earned more than $100,000 in royalties in 2017, and over 2,000 earned $50,000 that year....But thanks to the effects of price points set by the largest publishers in response to Amazon, industry corner-cutting, and book piracy, those authors behind the stories that power the publishing industry are earning increasingly less for their efforts.
• The Struggling Writer: Gissing Had It Right (George Packer, NY Times, 10-13-91) "In fact the notion of literature as a steady livelihood now seems pretty absurd. We don't have millions of people grubbing a living as writers (though someone has to fill the magazine racks and produce the 48,000 books churned out every year). Instead, every 25th American is writing a novel in his spare time. Instead of "New Grub Street" 's hacks and mercenaries, we have a huge population of workshop attenders and "Writer's Market" readers who send stories to magazines read exclusively by other would-be writers and once every few years see one accepted. We have graphomania. But far from being producers of a commodity, this population is utterly cut off from the commercial life of the country. Writing has become one of the higher forms of recreation in a leisure society."
• The Price of Writing (Jennifer Niesslein, Between the Lines, Creative Nonfiction, Issue #57, Fall 2015) There are three $ realms in the publishing industry. On the "lowest rung" are people don't get paid, are often published on the web, and may produce wonderful material. On the second rung are pubs "with honest-to-god print issues," often nonprofits, with modest salaries for editors and modest pay for writers. "On the top rung, advertisers pay most of the magazine’s bills. This is where you’ll find the glossies—ranging from The New Yorker to O—as well as websites with corporate backing, where the editors and writers both get paid. Not as much as they used to—print advertising is the first budget cut a lot of businesses make when money gets tight—but still....Each writer, it seems to me, has to cobble together her own moral code of which rung or rungs she’s willing to work with."
• The Writing Class (Jaswinder Bolina, Poetry Magazine, 11-12-14) On privilege, the AWP-industrial complex, and why poetry doesn’t seem to matter. "Economists and accountants might make raw distinctions between the classes based on objective metrics such as net worth or income—the 1 percent versus the 99 percent, for instance—but class consciousness might be better defined by the kinds of choices we feel permitted to make. Where the working classes are regularly forced to take pragmatic action out of necessity, the privileged are allowed to act on desire. My parents’ money, modest as it was and still is, did more than pay for the things I needed. It allowed me to want things they couldn’t afford to want themselves."
• The Business of Being a Writer by Jane Friedman
• The Billfold (honest conversations about money--how we earn, save, spend, repay our debts, etc.)
• Let's get honest about our money problems (Tammy Lally, TED@Orlando, June 2017) Why do we hide our problems around money? In this thoughtful, personal talk, author Tammy Lally encourages us to break free of "money shame" and shows us how to stop equating our bank accounts with our self-worth.
• How Much My Novel Cost Me by Emily Gould (Medium.com 2-24-14) After getting an advance of $200,000 for her yet-to-be-written novel, which sold 8,000 copies, she began running out of money. "So much of the money we spend—or I spend, anyway—is predicated on decisions made once and then forgotten, payments that are automated or habits so ingrained they may as well be automated. You think you’ll tackle the habits first—'I’ll stop buying bottled water and fancy cups of coffee'—but actually the habits are the last to go." Delightfully frank and self-revealing writing, excerpted from MFA vs NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction, edited by Chad Harbach
• Edgar Allan Poe’s letter pleading for $40 from a Philadelphia editor sells 173 years later for $125,000 (Stephanie Farr, Philadelphia Inquirer, 10-21-2020)
• Money Changes Everything: Twenty-Two Writers Tackle the Last Taboo with Tales of Sudden Windfalls, Staggering Debts, and Other Surprising Turns of Fortune by Jenny Offill and Elissa Schappel
• Authors' incomes collapse to 'abject' levels (Alison Flood, The Guardian, 7-8-14) ALCS survey finds median annual earnings for professional writers have fallen to £11,000, 29% down since 2005
• How much should I charge? (various authors, on Writers and Editors)
• Who Pays Writers? We Asked the Editors (Jane Friedman & Manjula Martin, Scratch magazine, talk with Nicole Cliffe, Dan Kois, Alexis Madrigal) "What do web editors actually do? How do they set writers’ fees? What are they looking for in a pitch and an editorial relationship? Scratch invited web editors from Slate, The Atlantic, and The Toast to talk openly about fees, pitching, and other controversial issues in online journalism (including how to pronounce 'gif')."
• “Sponsored” by my husband: Why it’s a problem that writers never talk about where their money comes from (Ann Bauer, Salon, 1-25-15) The truth is, my husband’s hefty salary makes my life as a writer easy. Pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone.
• Scratch, a digital magazine for writers, about Writing + money + life. (Subscription $20 and worth it.)
• How much to charge as a publishing professional and how to calculate effective hourly rate, your productivity rate (various authors, Writers and Editors)
• When People Write for Free, Who Pays? (Cord Jefferson, Gawker, 3-8-13)
• The Secret Life of an Obsessive Airbnb Host (George Tzortzis, Narratively, 5-22-14). Determined to quit his tired government job, one D.C. office drone saves $25,000 by renting his apartment nightly and secretly sleeping on the office floor. Things don't go quite as planned but he is able to quit his job and try the life of a freelance copywriter and copy editor.
• How the Recession Reshaped the Economy, in 255 Charts (The Upshot)

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Affiliate marketing for passive income

• Affiliate Marketing: What It Is and How You Can Get Started (Adam Enfroy, Big Commerce) How do affiliate marketers get paid, common types of affiliate marketing channels, tips for successfully using source of income, etc. Do not underestimate the power of SEO.
• Affiliate Income For Authors (Joanne Penn, Creative Penn, 4-30-21) Making a living from your writing is not just about book sales. There are many ways to turn your words into multiple streams of income, and ethical affiliate marketing can be effective — if you have an audience and a clear niche. Affiliate income is commission on sales that you make for someone else's product or service. Start with your book links to the online vendors (described, H/T Joanne Penn):
---Amazon Associates (which has greatly reduced the % affiliate programs get)
---Apple's affiliate program
---Rakuten advertising (Kobo's affiliate program)
---Bookshop.org's affiliate program (for those who want to support independent bookstores)
• As Amazon Slashes Affiliate Referral Rates, Publishers Consider Alternatives (Adam Rowe, Forbes, 4-19-21)
• How to Find High-Paying Programs and Start Your Affiliate Business (Shopify blog) Excellent graphics.
• Warning: “Thin Affiliate Sites (Lynn Terry, Click Newz, 2-19-09) "Thin Affiliate Sites are basically doorway pages, or web pages/sites created solely for the purpose of being the go-between from the visitor to the merchant with no real other value added to the visitor experience.
Perry Marshall calls them illegitimate businesses, Allan Gardyne talks about why 'thin affiliate sites' are offensive to Google, and Michelle MacPhearson recently put out a video about a Social Media Slap. I put out a series last Fall on the Social Media Marketing Warning myself as well."

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Online payment systems

• Check fraud has gotten so rampant that postal officials are warning Americans to avoid mailing checks (Ken Sweet and Associated Press, Fortune, 6-13-23) Banks issued roughly 680,000 reports of check fraud in 2022. That’s up from 350,000 reports in 2021. Today’s check fraud criminals are sophisticated criminal operations, with participants infiltrating post office distribution centers, setting up fake businesses or creating fake IDs to deposit the checks. The most common type of check fraud is what’s known as check washing, where a criminal steals the check from the mail and proceeds to change the payee’s name on the check and, additionally, the amount of money.

• Is PayPal Safe? Tips for Buying, Selling, and Sending Online (Justin Pritchard, The Balance, 1-18-19)
• Popmoney vs. PayPal
• Popmoney Sends Money From Bank to Bank (The Balance) Inexpensive, but not perfect.
• 10 Excellent Online Payment Systems (WebFX) Evaluations of Authorize.Net, PayPal, Google Checkout, Amazon Payments, Dwolla, Stripe, Braintree, Samurai (FeeFighters), WePay, and CheckOut. See also The 15 Most Popular Online Payment Solutions (Adam Toren, Wired, 12-6-16) Due, Stripe, Dwolla, Apple Pay,Payoneer, 2Checkout, Amazon, Square, Payza, Skrill, Venmo, Google Wallet, WePay, Intuit GoPayment, Authorize.net.
• Sent money to the wrong person through Zelle? Here’s how to get it back (Christopher Elliott, The Elliott Report, 5-29-23) Brown thought he was sending $850 to a truck driver delivering his car from Florida to Minnesota. Instead, he missed the number by a digit and sent the payment to someone who took the money and then was heard from no more. I'd think twice about using Zelle based on this story.
• Square.In a book authors' discussion group, several writers said that Square is the easiest and cheapest device/service to set up and use (more user-friendly and well-supported than PayPal), although you do need WiFi access to put through charges directly (without WiFi you have to enter info manually, which costs a little more). There's a little attachment, you download an app, the app keeps track of your sales, and you can have the money directly deposited to your bank account. The fees (per transaction -- no set-up or monthly fee) are reasonable and their help desk is helpful. If you need one immediately, you can buy it at Target and Square will refund the cost. I don't guarantee all of this information, but the comments were pretty enthusiastic and specific. (What I don't understand is whether using a device on WiFi exposes you to any dangers.)
• Square Cash Review (Justin Pritchard, The Balance, 4-11-17) Pros and cons of sending money (or getting paid) with Square Cash.
• Using Zelle for P2P Payments (Justin Pritchard, The Balance, 2-1-19) Pay friends and family, but steer clear of scams. Top competitors: Venmo, Paypal, Square Cash."Several peer-to-peer (P2P) services allow you to make personal payments, but you may have to set up a new account and download a specialized app to your phone. "Several peer-to-peer (P2P) services allow you to make personal payments, but you may have to set up a new account and download a specialized app to your phone. Zelle, on the other hand, is a service that you might already have access to through your bank's mobile app."

• Venmo Scams - Tips for Selling and Buying (Justin Pritchard, The Balance, 1-20-19) Venmo is safest with well-known people and brands. The safest way to use Venmo is to use a credit card as your primary funding method.
• Online Banking and Bill Pay (The Balance)
• Protection From Electronic Banking Fraud and Errors (Justin Pritchard, The Balance, 12-20-18) Your job is to monitor your accounts and report any problems to your bank or credit union quickly.
• How to Use Western Union (Justin Pritchard, The Balance, 11-16-18) When Western Union works best--and when to look elsewhere.
• Western Union Scams (Justin Pritchard, The Balance, 1-24-19) How they work, how to avoid them.
• Understanding Online Payment Services: The Complete Guide (Wild Apricot)
• Have Online Payments Become Safer Than Offline? (Marc Summe, Wired, 12-14)
• ScamTracker (BBB, Better Business Bureau) Check out a payment service.

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Crowdfunding and other forms of creative financing

Crowdfunding sites

• Kickstarter helps fund creative projects. Has strong community of Super Backers and Creators. See Kickstarting your indie publication
• GoFundMe, a "fundraising site for personal causes and life-events," which I found through this fundraising video and story about achild with a rare disease.

• Patreon (recurring funding for artists and creators) Creators receive millions of dollars each month in support from their patrons
• PubSlush.com (crowdfunding for the literary world). Read My Pubslush Experience (How one author got to NY Comic Con with the help of Pubslush) About Claribel Ortega. “Pubslush is more than just a crowdfunding platform,” said Amanda, “it’s a community of readers, writers and publishers and it can really help get books in the hands of readers at an earlier phase.”
• Spot.us (community-funded reporting--"not accepting pitches at this time, July 2014)
• Indiegogo
• Fundable (crowdfunding for small businesses)
• Razoo (online fundraising for nonprofits and causes)
• EquityNet (business funding through investors)
See Merchant Maverick's evaluations of these and other crowdfunding sites.
• Crowdfunding platforms for journalists (Catalina Albeanu, Journalism.co.uk, 11-21-14) Journalism.co.uk's list of crowdfunding platforms with independent journalists, writers, photographers and filmmakers in mind, especially in UK: Uncoverage, Beacon, Contributoria, Sponsume, Patreon, TubeStart, CrowdNews, Newspryng.
• Beacon (crowdfunding journalism) Y Combinator-Backed Beacon Offers A New Approach To Crowdfunding Journalism (Anthony Ha, TechCrunch, 2-12-14)
• Fresh from Ferguson Fellowship, Beacon eyes new projects ( Benjamin Mullin, Poynter, 2-12-14)
•GiveSendGo, a Christian crowdfunding website (see stories, above)
• Indiegogo
• When should you use Kickstarter, Indiegogo, or Crowdtilt?
• CauseVox.com
• Fundly.com
• Fundraise.com (social cause and event fundraising)
• Patreon. Be a patron of the arts. Support and engage with the creators you love.
• Uncoverage. Back a journalist. Make news.
• RocketHub.com
• Crowdfunding etiquette: How to give wisely (Kate Dailey, BBC News Magazine, 12-28-12)
• Crowdtilt
• Retrospective collection of Kal cartoons from The Economist (the goal was $20,000, to self-publish the collection; they collected $100,219, from 1,462 backers)
• Tiny Spark . Kickstarter funded this investigative radio initiative.
• Beacon Reader (fund one writer for $5 a month; get access to every story on Beacon)
• Writing and Publishing Horror: Q&A with Todd Keisling (Kristen Tsetsi on Jane Friedman's blog, 10-7-2020) "I’ve seen a lot of crowdfunding campaigns not take costs into account, like shipping, production, etc....If I had to give advice to anyone thinking of crowdfunding, it would be not to jump into it until you’ve absolutely mapped out every expense."
• Banyan Project (news co-op structure--a new business model for web journalism), described by Tom Stites (Spot.us)
• Tanja Aitamurto on crowdfunding and the future of narrative journalism (Andrea Pitzer, Nieman Storyboard 1-16-10).
• Crowdfunding Authors' Books Could Save Publishing (Jason Hesse, Forbes, 9-30-14)
• Unbound (UK) Authors pitch their books. You choose which books get written. (How it works.)
• Students turn to crowdfunding to pay tuition (Korah Addo, St. Louis Post-Dispatch 8-11-14) "GoFundMe charges all donors 5 percent and payment processing fees....Other sites, such as GradSave and GiveCollege.com, are set up as online savings accounts where extended family can contribute to a child’s future college costs, sometimes taking advantage of tax benefits reserved for donations."
• Bobsourcing (Seth Godin). "When we rely on the crowd, we get deniability. The organizer doesn't have to ask anyone specifically, and the individual is easily off the hook. "

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Crowdfunding Fraud and Scams

• Fund Me or Fraud Me? Crowdfunding Scams Are on the Rise (ConsumerReports)
• Crowdfunding Fraud: How Big Is the Threat? (CJ Cornell and Charles Luzar , Crowdfund Insider, 3-20-14)
• Crowdfunding Scams: Common Schemes & How to Avoid Them (Okta)
• 16 Biggest Crowdfunding Scams and Failures of All Time (Faiq Zafar, Yahoo Finance, 11-16-23)
• The Feds Take Action Against Crowdfunding Fraud, and It's About Time (Rick Cohen, Nonprofit Quarterly, 7-2-15) Crowdfunding is largely the unregulated Wild West, requiring donors to protect themselves from fraud and deception, but the Federal Trade Commission landed hard on the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform. It may be just what the doctor ordered to protect people donating to odd and sundry products and companies pitched on Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and others.

"As Jack Karsten and Darrell West note in a Brookings blog posting, a crowdfunding platform for raising capital 'allows an entrepreneur to bypass traditional financing, which benefits small projects that would not otherwise qualify for a loan or venture capital investment.' That is partly the theory behind the Obama Administration’s endorsement of the equity crowdfunding provisions in the JOBS Act, providing capital to entrepreneurs for products that may not turn a profit for a very long time, but capital in which the investors simply want and expect a reward such as a trinket or copy of the product rather than an equity ownership stake in the company."

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Writers groups and communities

Connect with other writers and editors (online and off)See also Critiquing groups (for fiction)

• Absolute Write (MacAllister Stone's Water Cooler, where writers exchange tips, share experiences)
• AuthorNation.com (online community for authors, writers, poets, and their readers)
• Backspace, The Writer's Place (writers helping writers navigate the often confusing world of Big Publishing)
• The Best Time I Went To E.R. Without Insurance While Attending A Conference Inspired By A Facebook Group I Started (Anna Fitzpatrick, The Hairpin, 3-31-15). Indirectly about Binders Full of Women Writers (a not-so-secret, but closed, Facebook group).
• Beyond the Margins (online sounding board for writers who met, taught, workshopped or otherwise communicated through Grub Street, a nonprofit creative writing center in Boston)
• Black Writers Reunion & Conference
• Conferences, workshops, and other learning places
• Crime fiction organizations and conventions (Overbooked)
• CrimeOnline.net (Breaking crime news, cold cases, missing people, and more from Nancy Grace)
• Crime Writers of Color 300+ established or emerging crime writers of color
• CrimeThruTime (Yahoo discussion group on historical mysteries, authors and readers)
• Critique groups and writing workshops
• Editors and copyeditors
• 11 Top Writing Communities You Should Join and Why (NY Book Editors) Explains what's great about Absolute Write Water Cooler, AgentQuery Connect (online social networking community for the publishing industry), Bookrix, Critique Circle, Critters Writers Workshop, Figment, Hatrack River Writers Workshop, MIBBA, NaNoWriMo, The Next Big Writer, The Reddit Writer's Group (or rather, two subreddits).
• Fiction writers
• Fiction Factor forum
• Field Report (this is a writing contest, for "true life" stories, which some of my life-story writing students find addictive)
• The Guild Digital Village (International Women's Writing Guild)
• How to Visit the Graves of 75 Famous Writers (Emily Temple, Lit Hub, 3-26-18)
• Illustrators and media professionals
• JacketFlap (social networking community for published authors and illustrators of books for children and young adults)
• Journalists' organizations
• Local and regional U.S. groups for writers and editors
• Mastermind groups, represented as Find Support and Accountability with Mastermind Groups (Laura Poole, Mel Edits #130, Deliberate Freelancer)
• Meetup groups for writers(check out those near your zip code) and the Meetup HQ Blog (to learn about other meetup groups with your special interests)
• Murder Must Advertise (online discussions on best ways to promote mysteries)
• Mystery Readers International, reading groups
• Nothing Binding (social networking for writers, authors, and readers)
• Online writing communities--blogs, forums, conferences, and other groups (about.com)
• Open Salon (a social content site for writers, photographers, and artists, where everyone blogs or comments on what others blog)
• Poets
• Red Room (a social media site that connects readers with authors)
• Science and medical writers
• Screenwriters
• Scribophile (a social writing workshop and writer's community, with online critique groups)
• Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI), regional groups and gatherings
• Sisters in Crime (Internet chapter) (sniff: disbanding in December 2010)
• Specialty writing(network with fellow automotive writers, cat writers, dog writers, horse writers, food writers, outdoor writers, songwriters, sportswriters, travel writers, Web writers, wine writers)
• StackExchange.com (a Q&A site for authors, editors, reviewers, professional writers, and aspiring writers -- with a http://writers.stackexchange.com/faq
•The Stiletto Gang. Women writers on a mission to bring mystery, humor, and high heels to the world)
• Therapists Wired to Write (Sarah Kershaw, NY Times, 6-3-09, on a group of therapists who form a creative writing group to help each other write about themselves, their work, and their patients -- and the last is the tricky part)
• Today's Writing Community(appears to emphasize poems and stories, with discussion groups and an archive of many articles and author interviews)
• Washington Biography Group (WBG), meets Monday evenings, in Washington DC or online
• My Writers Circle(online community)
• The Well (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), one of the oldest virtual communities still in operation. See Wikipedia description and history and Katie Hafner's piece, The Epic Saga of The Well (Wired, 5-1-97) and Salon sells The WELL to its members (Wendy M. Grossman, The Guardian, 9-27-12). Online community will not need a marketing plan – it already has more than 2,500 subscribers.
• What Women Write. See, for example, this blog and conversation about writing retreats and critique groups: Writing Retreats Aren't Just for Writing
• Women's National Book Association (WNBA) (national organization, with chapters in major cities, of people who work with and value books, including writers, editors, librarians, teachers, and publishing professionals)
• Writer-L (a paid-subscription listserv for writers of narrative nonfiction). After many years of activity this listserv finally ceased publication.
• The Writer's Block (Scriptorium's message board)
• WritersCafe.org, an online writing community where writers can post their work, get reviews, befriend other writers, etc.
• The Writer's Chat Room
• The Writers Circle (connect with other writers, on Facebook)
• Writers Guild of America East (Wikipedia entry), headquartered in New York City and affiliated with the AFL–CIO
• Writers Guild of America West See Wikipedia entry, The WGA screenwriting credit system is used to determine who receives credit for writing a film, television, theatrical, or other media work written under the WGA's jurisdiction.
• Writer Unboxed (blog about the craft and business of genre fiction)
• Writing Communities (Writer's Digest's best websites for 2008)
• WritingWorld.com has, among other things, an impressive set of Links to Online Resources for Writers, including Links to Critique Groups and Discussion Groups
• Young Writers Online (a community forum)

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• My Dear Kabul – inspirational resilience in an Afghan women’s writing group (Hephzibah Anderson, The Guardian, 8-13-24) The collective diary of 21 women, compiled using WhatsApp messages, is an intimate, courageous chronicle of life as it unfolds under Taliban rule. Bravery takes the form of lipstick as well as spray-painted graffiti, of going to the office knowing there are checkpoints ahead. The Kindle ebook: My Dear Kabul

• Schmoozing for Introverts: How to Network Like a Pro (Lisa Cooper Ellison, on Jane Friedman's blog, 3-19-19) Tricks to use to schmooze like a pro, or at least operate like a less awkward version of yourself. Remember: "These are your best opportunities to connect with fellow writers."
• How to Find a Writing Group and 6 Benefits of Joining One (Master Class)
• Still Stuck at Home? It Might Be Time to Work on That Novel. (Sophia June, NY Times, 3-8-21) Online writing groups have thrived during the pandemic, with membership fueled by more time at home and fewer to no social obligations.
• Conversations With Friends (Who Are Also Writers) (Concepción de León, NY Times, 12-19-19) Long after their days in workshops and graduate seminars have ended, some authors still find support and inspiration in writing groups.
• A deliciously cautionary tale about writing groups (Amy Wallen, Orange County Register, 6-15-20) Full of useful insights and suggestions.
• How to Gracefully Leave Your Writing Group (Lisa Cooper Ellison on Jane Friedman's blog, 4-14-22) Wanting to leave your writing group doesn’t make you a jerk. Departing with grace is an act of kindness that furthers your development and the friendships you cherish.
• Why Your Amazing Writing Group Might Be Failing You (Lisa Cooper Ellison on Jane Friedman's blog, 4-6-22) The real reason writing groups sometimes fail us has nothing to do with the lovely people in them. The failure is due to a mismatch between what you need and what the group offers. The opposite of the critique group is the generativity group where writers respond to prompts and then share their freshly created works. When you’re in the throes of heavy revision and you know where you’re going, what you need is an accountability group or occasional course-corrective feedback from one or two highly skilled writers.
• The 4 Hidden Dangers of Writing Groups (Jennie Nash on Jane Friedman's blog, 11-9-16) Struggling writers are not often the best judges of struggling writing. In some groups, no one tells the truth and no one really wants to hear it. Failure is not an option in a writer’s group, but failure is a part of the writing process.
• In pain and with nowhere to go, homeless patients find respite in a writing group (Megan Thielking, STAT, 7-7-17) At a respite house for the homeless, a creative writing group gives patients a chance to tell their stories with dignity and humanity. "There is surprising evidence that reflective writing can reduce pain," tweets Atul Gawande.
• 15 of the Best Online Writing Communities for Aspiring Authors (Reedsy, 11-19-18) Writing groups that focus on perfecting your craft or understanding publishing: Absolute Write, AgentQuery Connect, Camp NaNoWriMo, Critique Circle, Chronicles (for science fictiona and fantasy), a few specific Facebook Groups, Insecure Writer's Support Group,The Next Big Writer, Reddit (links to quite a few subreddits), Scribophile, She Writes, Talentville, Underlind, Writers Helping Writers, and #WritingCommunity, described. Plus a comments section.
• You Can't Create Alone: On Fostering Literary Community (Chris Mackenzie Jones, The Millions, 3-26-18) How do you find and establish literary community and connection? There seem to be four common pieces of advice: Be active, be present, be kind, and be giving. Jones is author of Behind the Book: Eleven Authors on Their Path to Publication
• Your No. 1 Secret Weapon: Writing Communities (Katrin Schumann on Jane Friedman's blog, 1-2-19) How to connect with other writers in critique groups, professional programs ("more costly and expensive"), writers residencies, community events, volunteering, writers festivals and conferences (her top recommendation).
• Writers conferences, workshops, residencies, and retreats plus book fairs, festivals, and writers colonies.

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Book coaches and book coaching

• Complete Guide to Book Coaches: How To Get the Best Professional Help with Your Writing (Kate Sullivan, TCK Publishing)
• What Is a Book Coach & Why Should You Hire One? (Sharon Brandwein, Your Tango Experts)
• What Is a Book Coach? A Guide to Seeking and Becoming One (Enobong Essien, Book Riot, 10-4-19)
• How a Book Coach Can Jumpstart Your Writing Career (story coach Lisa Cron Q&A with book coach Jennie Nash, on Writer Unboxed, 9-11-14) “Let’s go back to the very beginning and nail the story before you begin to spin a plot.” “One of the biggest mistakes writers make is waiting too long to seek help.” “A coach helps a writer to understand her idea, execute it, and get it out into the world. What this means in practice can vary wildly. A book coach can be many things – a cheerleader, a whip cracker, a sounding board, a strategist, a story analyst, a project manager, a publishing consultant, a marketing guide, even a shoulder to cry on.”
• How to Tell If You Have What It Takes to Succeed as a Writer (book coach Susan DeFreitas on Jane Friedman's blog,1-15-2020) "The truth is, I’ve worked with enough clients over the years to know that the best indication of a writer’s promise is not in the manuscript they first send me. It’s in their ability (or inability) to revise, based on my feedback."
• Confessions of a Story Coach (story coach Larry Brooks, Writers Digest, 9-4-13) "A successful story is more than simply putting a great character, or a killer premise, or a powerful theme onto the page, followed by a few cycles of stir, rinse, repeat. Because even when you nail all the requisite story elements you may still end up unpublished. Success is ultimately the nuanced sum of a story’s parts, with a little secret sauce thrown in."

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How to give (and receive) helpful feedback

• How to Give Helpful Writing Feedback (Shawn Coyne, StoryGrid) Listen to the video; read the article. Very helpful basic advice.
• The Writing & Critique Group: How to Make Revisions, Self-Edit, and Give and Receive Feedback by Becky Levine
• Providing Feedback to Writers (The Writing Center, George Mason University) #1: Focus on higher-order concerns (main points, etc.) before lower-order concerns (grammar, sentence structure, etc.)
• 5 Tips for Giving Constructive Feedback to a Writer (Braden Becker, 3-7-18) Start with the good parts, so they're receptive to your suggestions about how to improve the writing.
• First Draft Feedback: 3 Editors Give Honest Writing Analysis – Part 1 (StoryGrid podcast, Episode 266, Shawn Coyne and others, 6-30-22, 1 hour)
• Story Grid Plotting Part 2 (spoiler alert: I hated it) (JP Writes, 32 minutes) She rants a bit about the parts of the "book" (The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know, a collection of blog posts by Shawn Coyne) that didn't work for her as well as those that did. Her problem: the StoryGrid process starts at Step 5, it's predominantly an editing method rather than a plotting method, and she had trouble with the spreadsheet, an editing tool. If you had trouble with the StoryGrid approach, what she says may be helpful.
• Instructor's Guide for Giving Feedback (Purdue Owl)
• How to Tell If You Have What It Takes to Succeed as a Writer(Susan DeFreitas on Jane Friedman's blog, 1-15-2020) "I’ve worked with enough clients over the years to know that the best indication of a writer’s promise is not in the manuscript they first send me. It’s in their ability (or inability) to revise, based on my feedback."
• How to Spot Toxic Feedback: 7 Signs That the Writing Advice You’re Getting May Do More Harm Than Good (Susan DeFreitas on Jane Friedman's blog, 5-8-18) If you recognize certain characteristics in the critiques of your work, it may not just be inept—it may, in fact, be toxic.
• Why Your Amazing Writing Group Might Be Failing You (Lisa Cooper Ellison on Jane Friedman's blog, 4-6-22) The opposite of the critique group is the generativity group where writers respond to prompts and then share their freshly created works. When you’re in the throes of heavy revision and you know where you’re going, what you need is an accountability group or occasional course-corrective feedback from one or two highly skilled writers.

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Critique and discussion groups and writing workshops

• Getting pecked to death:Are critique groups worth it? (P.J. Parrish, Kill Zone, 5-14-13)
• Students Learn From People They Love (David Brooks, Opinion, NY Times, 1-17-19) "...emotion is not the opposite of reason; it’s essential to reason. Emotions assign value to things...emotions tell you what to pay attention to, care about and remember....Information is plentiful, but motivation is scarce....what teachers really teach is themselves — their contagious passion for their subjects and students."
• What Makes a Critique Group Work? (Jordan Dane, Kill Zone, 11-7-13)
• How to use beta readers
• Why Join a Writer's Group? (PDF, Jim Beane, The Writer's Center Magazine, p. 25) A reflection on 25 years of writing together. [Click on link then type 26 for page number}
"A deadline to present work to the group felt more immutable than a work deadline. There’s no bargaining your way out of finishing your story." ~Kathleen Wheaton

"On a personal level, I was concerned my work and my comments on their work would not be up to the others’ standards. But after a few meetings, those personal doubts disappeared. We delivered constructive critiques and offered thoughtful suggestions. My fears vanished. I was accepted and acknowledged by a group of fellow writers. Beyond getting constructive — and much needed feedback — on my own work, the group allowed me to hone my critiquing skills, to recognize and understand what effective writing is and to highlight and recognize bad habits that I would often overlook in my own work. In essence, critiquing others — both their good work and bad — made my own work better and proved equally important as the feedback on my own work." ~ James Mathews

"Reading and critiquing the work of other writers helps you develop your own vision and voice. But being
open to a writers' group's criticism gives you the confidence to send your work out into the world. Plus,
the meetings are fun." ~Christina Kovac

• Embarking Together on Solitary Journeys (Hilma Wolitzer, NY Times, 1-31-2000) The proliferation of writers' workshops in this country raises that old question: Can creative writing be taught? The best answer I've ever heard is Wallace Stegner's two-parter:

"1. It can be done.

2. It can't be done to everybody."

"But there's a place in the classroom for other interested parties who, in their ardent analysis of one another's writing, become much better readers. And God knows we can always use more of them."

• In Praise of Writing Workshops [delete: and Editing Tips] (Necee Regis, Beyond the Margins,, 9-18-12) -- on the value of just listening, when it's your turn to have your novel critiqued. Illustrates a way of showing what you've deleted, which is sometimes interesting--and a way used sometimes to comment ironically on the thoughts you've censored.

• Why a writing workshop did more for my preaching than a preaching conference (Teri McDowell Ott, The Christian Century, 11-5-13)
• Amherst Writers & Artists (WRA) Method , Pat Schneider's popular approach to running a writers workshop. Read more about it in her book Writing Alone and with Others
• The Writing Workshop Glossary (Amy Klein, Opinionator, NY Times 6-2-14) So when you are asked, “What does the character want?” what your workshop means is, “Your story is boring.”
• The Writing & Critique Group Survival Guide: How to Make Revisions, Self-Edit, and Give and Receive Feedback by Becky Levine
• A Beginner’s Guide to Critique Groups (Macy Lane, The Writing Barn, 3-26-23) "A critique group is a small group of writers who gather regularly to share their writing with others. It is an organized, structured way to receive, as well as give, feedback on writing. The thought of sharing my writing with others to evaluate terrified me. Finally, I realized that if I ever wanted to share my words with the whole world, I definitely needed to be able to share them with a group of writers whose main goal was to celebrate growth."
"In a critique group, everyone deserves a fair share of the attention. Essentially, you want to give as good as you get, and being prepared is what makes that work."
• Review of online writers groups, critique groups, and communities. Squidoo comments on such sites as Scribophile (an online critique group), WritersCafe.org (a community for sharing), The Write Idea (Helen Whittaker's forum), Authonomy (see Squidoo member Rikleigh's guide to using Authonomy), and Inkpop (for teen writers).
• The Nature of Writer Group Critique on Author Salon (AuthorSalon.com). An excellent set of guidelines for critiquing. See also Four categories that define "coverage" (aspects of market value, structure, characters, and narrative development).
• How to Cope with Critiquing (Rich Hamper, including advice on how to critique)
• How to Respond to a Request for a Writing Critique (Mark Nichol, DailyWritingTips 6-4-11)
• Critique and Discussion Groups (several helpful articles and links, Writing-World.com)
• Scribophile (a social writing workshop and writers' community, with online critique groups)
• Writing Retreats Aren't Just for Writing (Kim, What Women Write, 11-12-10)
• The Writing & Critique Group Survival Guide: How to Make Revisions, Self-Edit, and Give and Receive Feedback by Becky Levine (Writers Digest Books)
• Can Critique Groups Do More Harm than Good? (Kristen Lamb's blog)
• Critique rules (Fiction Writers of Central Arkansas)
• Critique Circle (a site for writers to meet and work--listed on Preditors & Editors page on Writing Workshops
• Forward Motion for Writers, where you can sign up for Critique Circles or Roving Crits. First, read Fiction and Critiques How-To
• Preditors & Editors page on Writing Workshops
• Online Writing Workshops for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror (OWW) , highly recommended by P&E.
• Critters Workshop (Critique.org Workshops, a large, well-organized online writers' workshop for serious writers of science fiction, fantasy, or horror). Here are pages on Crittering novels (getting a novel critiqued) and on Formatting for Critters. Recommended by P&E.
• The Internet Writing Workshop (a critique group for many genres and a discussion list for writing related topics)
• Critique and discussion groups (Writing-World.com)
• Critique Circle
• Local and regional U.S. writers organizations (including critique groups)

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Rules and tips for writers

• Elmore Leonard's rules for writers (The Guardian, 2-24-10)
• Six Questions and Six Rules (George Orwell,Gotham Writers)
• V. S. Naipaul’s Rules for Beginners (from Amitava Kumar’s essay collection Lunch with a Bigot, on LitHub)
• Billy Wilder's 10 Screenwriting Tips (Gotham Writers, and the tips are on the right)
• 5 Techniques for Good Craftsmanship (Gotham Writers)
• 5 Essentials for the Betterment of a Story (as if by Edgar Allan Poe, Gotham Writers)
• 5 Techniques for Good Craftsmanship (Annie Proulx, Gotham Writers)
• 30 Cool Tips (Jack Kerouac, Gotham Writers)
• Tips from the Masters (Writer's Toolbox, Gotham Writers). There are pages of these tips and rules and techniques!

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Writers' offices and workspaces

On many of these, click on the image to enlarge it

• Inside the Writer's Studio (Kevin Nance, Chicago Tribune). Photogallery of workspace of Audrey Niffenegger,
• 150+ Famous Authors in Their Writing Spaces (Jared A. Brock, Writing Cooperative, 12-4-2020-) In alphabetical order with quotes and pictures, too.
• Where Writers Write: Inside The Workspaces of 9 Famous Authors (Writing Routines) Words from Michael Pollan, Austin Kleon, Cal Newport, Chuck Wendig, Danielle Steel, Tim Ferriss, Neil Gaiman, Will Self, Julian Barnes.
• As Office Workers Make Their Return, So Does the Lowly Cubicle (Ellen Rosen, NY Times, 12-19-23) Once derided as symbols of a commodified work force, cubicles are making a comeback, and workers are personalizing them and posting photos on social media. Just as companies are trying to juggle remote work and in-office mandates, they are also deliberating the right mix of collaborative areas, conference rooms and individual spaces.
• Corner Offices Are Out; Collaboration Is In. Say Hello to the New Law Firm. (Ellen Rosen, NY Times, 2-27-24) The resiliency of remote work has prompted large law firms to rethink their real estate footprint, shedding space even as they bulk up their head count.
• The Envy Office: Can Instagrammable Design Lure Young Workers Back? (Emma Goldberg and Anna Kodé, NY Times, 11-26-23) Colorful walls. Upholstered furniture. Carefully curated coffee table books. If your feed makes the corporate life look stylish, it’s just another evolution in the long history of the American workplace.
• The Writer’s Room (NY Times series). See, for example, Inside Yann Martel’s Backyard Writing Studio
• Forget folding. This desk expands (Facebook reel) A fantasy? It looks real, and wonderful for small spaces.
• Robin Marantz Henig's office (Natural Habitat, produced by The Open Notebook). Do the video tour of Robin's office in NYC. A great place for small gatherings, and Robin introduced many of us to the standing desk.
• Writer's workspace (Pinterest images) See also Author's Desks

• Artist's Studios and Writing Workspace Inspiration. Oldies but goodies.
• How a Coworking Space for Writers Is Different From the Rest (Wanda Lafond, Andcards, 9-24-21) See especially The Writers Room in New York City.
• The Writer’s Room (NY Times Magazine, 2-14-14).Five writers (Colson Whitehead, Douglas Coupland, Mona Simpson, Joyce Carol Oates, and Roddy Doyle) explain how the right space can unlock the mind and let the words flow.
• Mary Caperton Morton's Natural habitat (a mobile home-made teardrop trailer--do watch the video!)
• 100+ Famous Authors and Their Writing Spaces (Jared A. Brock, The Writers Cooperative, 1-8-18, with photos)
• Writers' rooms (The Guardian-- a series to make you weep with envy)
• Rooms where writers write (Authors' rooms, b&w images on Pinterest) Those look pretty realistic. These look a little more posed.
• Nat Hentoff's office as he leaves the Voice, after 50 years , as shown in Clyde Haberman's story about Hentoff (THIS is an office I can identify with)
• Meanwhile, back at the ranch: Larry McMurtry's Private Library (Nieman Storyboard, scroll down, and salivate, especially about the bookshelves!)
• TinyCat (LibraryThing) A web-based cataloging system useful for small public libraries and home libraries. (H/T writer Marie Monteagudo)
• Andrew Curry's Natural Habitat (a standup desk with a great view). Go here for more Natural Habitat features.
• An orderly office? That's personal (Sara Rimer on custom solutions to office clutter, NY Times, 3-25-09)
• Downsizing, decluttering, moving, and other hard-to-face realities (section on a Pat McNees website)
• Natural Habitat: Cassandra Willyard Video of the office of this Brooklyn-based freelancer after a makeover (The Open Notebook, a site for science writers). Not enough? Check out before-and-after photos of her office makeover.
• The Rooms Where Writers Work (Kate Guadagnino, NY Times Magazine, 8-16-17)
• Space of the Week: A Life in the Stacks (Wendy Goodman, a slideshow that makes me feel much less guilty, 6-23-11)
• Romance writer Brenda Coulter's office
• Typewriter sculpture (Jeremy Mayer)
• Where I Write: Fantasy & Science Fiction Authors in Their Creative Spaces
• Inspiration Lives on Where Writers Dwelled (Pamela Redmond Safran, NY Times, 2-22-08)
• Home Office (HuffPost series on the techie part).
• Home offices (Apartment Therapy)
• Pinterest on Home Offices
• Cabin Porn (scroll down for photos)
• Tokyo: A Certain Style by Kyoichi Tsuzuki. That's the book: here are some images "depicting the living spaces of Tokyoites in a raw, unfiltered context."
• Space: Japanese Design Solutions for Compact Living by Michael Freeman. Check out illustrations..

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Bookcases and bookshelves

• 40 Inspiring Workspaces of the Famously Creative (BuzzFeedDIY). Go Alexander Calder! And OH how I envy Nigella Lawson's bookshelves (and yet, look at the stacks on the floor)
• Wonderfully imaginative bookcases (images on The Good Will Librarian's Facebook page, which you can easily spend an hour or more on, there are so many wonderful images), including a comfie home library, a cozy reading corner, the stupendous Tianjin Binhai Library ("The Eye") in China,Tianjin, a more elaborate reading corner, an over-the-top array of bookshelves, a booklover's library, a loft library, the Szabo Ervin Library in Budapest, Hungary, a Book fountain (Cincinnati Public Library), the Word on the Water bookshop in London, the Libreria Acqua Alta in Venice, Italy (also over the top!), the Livraria Lello in Porto, Portugal, a richly dark wood library a full-wall library (withTV tucked in place), a millionaire hoarder's library (I can identify).
• These Books Spark Joy (Amanda Long, Washington Post Magazine, 4-8-19) Amid the decluttering craze, we asked famous bibliophiles (Jason Reynolds, Andrew Sean Greer, Carla D. Hayden, José Andrés, Martellus Bennett, Jane Green) how they live with their collections. Illustrations feature people and their bookshelves. Jane Green said: "A home needs a bit of curated clutter, and that curated clutter has to include things that tell the story of your life, of what you love. For me, that’s books." José Andrés: "I like the smell of old books — especially old books that have a dried flower, a piece of paper, a note on the edge. It’s fascinating. For a guy like me who left his country young, it’s almost like my cape. I’m more powerful with them around." Martellus Bennett: "Whenever I start a project, I start with books. I don't go to the Internet. On the Internet, algorithms are the new librarian. And you can pay the algorithm to offer up certain content. That's why everything starts to feel the same, because we're all going to the same source. I want to find my own result."
• TinyCat (LibraryThing) A web-based cataloging system useful for small public libraries and home libraries. (H/T writer Marie Monteagudo)
• "The KonMari Method, as it is called, asks you to hold each possession and ask yourself whether it sparks joy, and if it doesn’t, thank it for its service and let it go." ~The tidying tide: Marie Kondo effect hits sock drawers and consignment stores
• Images of some nifty, non-ordinary bookshelves (Pinterest) and some more, a bit more staged, and how on earth does Booklover get to books on the higher shelves along the stairwell?
• 20 unusually brilliant bookcase and bookshelf designs: creative, modular, and unique designs (WebUrbanist) Plus Shelve It! 15 More Creative & Unique Bookcases & Bookshelves.
• 24 Pieces Of Bookshelf That Are Just Masterpieces (Bookish Buzz)
• How 11 Writers Organize Their Personal Libraries (Emily Temple, LitHub,11-21-17) You can't put Pynchon next to Plato (Unless They're Both Pink)
• Bookshelf Fantasies (Jody Hedlund, Pinterest)
• Bookshelf Porn (and you think you have gone overboard!) The archive.
• Bookshelf etiquette. How to arrange your books (Sarah Crown and John Crace, The Guardian, 7-20-09) James Purnell has been using his time to rearrange his bookshelves alphabetically. Bad mistake. Alternative models.
• You Are What You Read: Bookshelves of Famous People (Mhanski, Visual.ly, 4-24-14). As picked by them.
• Bookshelf furniture seek 'n' find (Kristin Gorski, Write Now Is Good, 8-29-08)
• Suzanne Palmer's Book Alley (Absolute Write, 3-21-19) Scroll down for photos of a room with absolutely enough bookshelves.
• They see plants. I see books. (Kristin Gorski again)
• First, own a massive wall (Kristin Gorski again). Plus Bookshelves bench (1-19-08)
• 30 of the Most Creative Bookshelves Designs (Mihai, Freshome, 2-25-18)
• Shopping Guide: Bookcases (New York Times) You have to click to see the examples of various styles.
• From Modular to Minimal: Trendy Bookcases for the Bibliophile in You! (Sherry Nothingam, Decoist) Contemporary style.
• Built In Bookshelves (On Sutton Place) , great on its own and it refers us to A Drake's DIY bookshelf ideas (Pinterest)
• Floating bookshelves (Book Riot, 6-25-18)
• On My Shelves (Charles-Adam Foster-Simard, The Millions, 7-23-10)
• How do you organize your books? 9 authors share their favorite shelves. (Nora Krug, WaPo,7-28-22) I go with the author's approach.

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Procrastination (aka writer's block),
post-publication malaise, creativity, and time and effort management

"Time is fleeting. Now is eternal." ~Rabbi Tarfon in Pirke Avot

"Writing is thinking" ~Rabbi Tarfon in Pirke Avot

“. . . anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.” — Robert Benchley, in Chips Off the Old Benchley, 1949

"When you have no inspiration, follow curiosity."~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Writing is thinking," said William Zinsser, so "writer's block" may simply be "thinker's block." Whichever, the brain may be sorting but isn't ready yet to share. The thinking is as valuable as the writing, but at some point you also need to start writing. To rev the engine, just start writing and do not expect perfect sentences and paragraphs to emerge. Writing is re-writing. Just start laying down track and don't feel discouraged if you throw out whole pages. Sometimes it takes a while to get on the right track or to decide what track you want to be on.

• Julia Cameron Says You Can Get Creative Indoors (Rachel Syme, New Yorker, 1-23-22) The author of The Artist’s Way (which has sold 4 million copies) talks about her path to self-help stardom and the “spiritual crisis” brought on by the pandemic. A great Q&A to read when you're feeling stuck. Try "Morning Pages." See also ; ‘The Artist’s Way’ Is Better Than My Way (Swan Huntley, Catapult, 2-7-22) One writer's week-by-week experience of the 12-week program. Persuasive.
• Banish Writer’s Block in 5 Minutes Flat (April Davila on Jane Friedman's blog, 3-30-23) Writer's block is just a catch-all phrase we use to describe the thoughts (conscious or unconscious) that keep us from writing. These thoughts can be simple (is there a writer alive who hasn’t sat down to write and suddenly realized the dishwasher needs to be emptied?) or complex (our fears and anxieties around writing can be formidable), Mindfulness meditation is one approach to banishing them.
• How to Overcome Writer’s Block (Kawandeep Virdee, Medium, 3-9-21) Tips from Medium writers on getting that creativity flowing again
• Freeing Your Muse: Overcoming Writer’s Block (video recording of lecture, Dr. Linda Sonna, Indie Author Project Expert Session, 8-26-21) Psychologist Dr. Sonna has authored 10 self-help books, a memoir, a nationally self-syndicated column, and countless freelance articles. Her poems have appeared in literary journals and anthologies.
• The Value of Percolation (Jyotsna Sreenivasan on Jane Friedman's blog, 3-8-22) Setting an idea or draft aside for “percolation” allows the brain’s subconscious to arrive at insights while we’re busy with something else. It is important when setting aside unfinished work to keep your mind open to solutions. Chapter 7 of How We Learn by Benedict Carey details how the brain approaches long-term projects (such as writing a novel).
• Don’t Despair: How to Handle Writer’s Block (Pedro Márquez-Zacarías, Open Notebook, 10-25-22) The inspiration you need to get past writer’s block can strike at any moment, but “it does not come from heaven. It’s your conscious and subconscious working,” Jar says. Excellent piece on ways to write yourself out of a block (to sort through information and determine what might be useful), talk it out (get distance and expose your ideas to scrutiny beyond your own), take breaks to reset your mind and body.
• Writing from the Bottom Rung: How to Sustain Your Creativity During a Pandemic (Lisa Cooper Ellison on Jane Friedman's blog, 4-3-2020) The bottom two rungs of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs include our physical needs for food, water, warmth and rest as well as security. The top rung—self-actualization—is where creativity happens. Many of us are just not there, yet.

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• Things That May Be Causing Your Writer's Block- and How to Beat Them (BurntOutDayDreamer, Tumblr) Perfectionism (most common); Lack of Inspiration; Boredom/Understimulation (lost the flow); Intimidation/Procrastination (often related to perfectionism, but not always);The Problem's Not You, It's Your Story (or Outline (or Process)); Executive Dysfunction, Usually From ADHD/Autism; And Lastly, Burnout, Depression, or Other Mental Illness.
• A Writer's Time: Making the Time to Write by Kenneth Atchity. Applies time-management principles to the specific needs of writers of fiction, nonfiction, and drama. Among the most useful sections "were the ones that dealt with attention span, procrastination, checklists, index cards and using a stopwatch," writes one reader.
• Writer’s Block? Maybe You’re Writing in the Wrong Format (April Davila on Jane Friedman's blog, 5-3-23) Maybe you're writing a short story, but it’s really meant to be a poem. Or you're writing an essay that really should be a memoir.
• On Writer’s Block: Advice from Twelve Writers (Writers at Work, Paris Review, 3-19-18)
• How a bigshot writing coach beats writer’s block (Roy Peter Clark on the Zero Draft, Poynter, 5-16-22) “Don’t wait till you have done all the reporting or all the research before you write. Instead, go to your keyboard and very quickly and uncritically write — without reference to your notes. Write what you think you already know. It’s not even a first draft. It’s a zero draft. It will teach you what you still need to learn, saving you time and focusing your reporting.”
• Remedies to cure writer's block? (From Spotlight on Glenda Burgess, Authors Guild, 1-15-21): "I encounter writer's block when a project feels overwhelming in some way to me, either in its scope or significance. I have learned over the course of five books to nibble away at the edges of this block by taking up some light editing on other work, finishing a review, perhaps reading poetry. Letting the mechanics of routine editing or the voices of others carry me forward until I've rubbed off the edges of my fear or worry, finally ready to work on the project I was avoiding."
• Dorothea Brande, in On becoming a writer, published in the 1930s, stressed the importance of sitting down as part of developing a writing habit. "Writing calls on unused muscles and involves solitude and immobility."
• I Just Published a Book: Why Am I Depressed? (Jessica Berger Gross, Poets & Writers, 11-4-19) Post-publication malaise takes many forms. “People think you should be unmitigatedly happy that your book is being published. Like you won the lottery. So you’re being churlish if you have any response other than joy,” says Emily Gould, author of the forthcoming novel Perfect Tunes.
• Developing a Writing Practice, Part 1: Stepladders (Susan DeFreitas on Jane Friedman's blog,3-31-2020) A seven-part series based on Sean D. Young's SCIENCE method.
• Silences by Tillie Olsen "As much as I learned from Tell Me a Riddle, I learned even more from Tillie's landmark classic and original essay 'Silences: When Writers Don't Write,' which I read while living in Cambridge in the early '70's, raising a small daughter alone and struggling to write myself." ~Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple
• Facing Writers Block (David Alan Lucas, Melanie Lucas, and others, Write Pack Radio podcast, 9-9-18) Some writers say it doesn’t exist, others do, and even psychologist have looked into it and show that it can take a long time to break through. An excellent discussion of what writer's block is and how to deal with it. Here's a book they talk about in passing: The Chunky Method Handbook: Your Step-by-Step Plan to WRITE THAT BOOK Even When Life Gets in the Way by Allie Pleiter.
• Make Your Writing Anxiety Disappear By Thinking Small (Jane Anne Staw on Jane Friedman's blog, 4-10-18) "[T]hinking about the entire book, or even the whole essay, caused a surge of anxiety. So I learned to think small and focus on the current sentence I was composing, or at most, on the current paragraph....Later, when I was writing more fluidly, I moved from one paragraph to one whole page before I allowed myself to read over what I had written and revise."
• What’s the “practice” of writing? (Stephanie Golden, Medium, 10-20-19) Practice grounds inspiration in skill. The practice is to do it even when you don’t feel like it, you’re too tired, you’re bored, you’re not really sure you know what you’re doing, you’re afraid that you can’t produce what the editor wants… and so on. You may be anxious, but you do it anyway.

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• How to Get Out of the Writing Doldrums (Mathina Calliope on Jane Friedman's blog, 8-22-19) Wondering what distraction would best lift her out of the doldrums, this writing coach struck on "writer candy"—literary distractions that nourish the muse.
• The Writer Files "Kelton Reid studies the habits, habitats, and brains of a wide spectrum of writers to learn their secrets of productivity and creativity. Tune in each week to learn how great writers keep the ink flowing, the cursor moving, and avoid block." Listen, for example, to How NY Times Bestselling Memoirist Lisa Brennan-Jobs Writes: Part One or Secrets for Beating Writer’s Block with TV Writer & Comedian Jorjeana Marie: Part One.
• Writers Block: 13 Strategies That Work (Freewrite, 6-14-18)
• The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain by Alice Weaver Flaherty. Why is it that some writers struggle for months to come up with the perfect sentence or phrase while others, hunched over a keyboard deep into the night, seem unable to stop writing? In The Midnight Disease, neurologist Alice W. Flaherty explores the mysteries of literary creativity: the drive to write, what sparks it, and what extinguishes it. She draws on intriguing examples from medical case studies and from the lives of writers, from Franz Kafka to Anne Lamott, from Sylvia Plath to Stephen King. Flaherty herself has grappled with episodes of compulsive writing (hypergraphia) followed by writer's block. As one reader writes,"It's not only about the disorder; it uses the disorder to explain a process."
• Overcoming Writer’s Block Brought On By Childhood Trauma: Q&A with Marc Jampole (Kristen Tsetsi on Jane Friedman's blog, 5-12-21) Jampole wrote about the trauma that affected his brother and him in the literary The Brothers Silver.
• Creative People Say No (Kevin Ashton, Medium, 3-18-13) '“No” makes us aloof, boring, impolite, unfriendly, selfish, anti-social, uncaring, lonely and an arsenal of other insults. But “no” is the button that keeps us on.' From How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery. “[How to Fly a Horse] takes on creation’s most pernicious clichés. . . . [Ashton] arrives at his theories by dint of his own hard work. . . . Being a genius is hard work. But that spark is in all of us.” —The Washington Post
• Writer’s Block Is a Gift. Here’s Why. (Julia Roberts on Jane Friedman's blog, 6-17-19) Use writer’s block as a way to gain insight into your own relationship to the creative process. Are you a Clarifier, an Ideator, a Developer, or an Implementer?
• How to combat procrastination, based on your personality type (Anisa Purbasari Horton, Fast Company, 8-8-19) The six types in this case: The perfectionist, the dreamer, the worrier, the crisis-maker, the defier, the pleaser.

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• How I Wrote My Novel in Two Years and Other Accounting Tricks (Rachel Heng, Glimmer Train). Some of us count only time spent at the computer to be writing. Heng realized, after the fact: "Many of my creative breakthroughs happened on my evening commute home or while sitting in a meeting room or walking through the fifteenth overpriced wedding venue that week. All those other commitments took time away from the actual writing, but what I'm realising now is they also gave my subconscious the room to figure out characters and worlds and plot problems. All the time I thought of as 'wasted' had never been wasted after all. Everything goes into writing, everything is writing."
• 12 key steps for getting unstuck as a writer (Susan Breen, The Writer, 9-4-18) Trapped in the middle of your manuscript? Here’s how to move forward.
• How setting a schedule can make you less productive (Selin A Malkoc, The Conversation, 6-19-18) The presence of an upcoming activity seems to have shrunk how much time people felt they had to do something. Scheduling can backfire.
• The Secret to My Productivity, Or: Thoughts About Luxury and Privilege (Jane Friedman, 12-7-15) "There’s one big reason I’m productive. I have the luxury of time, to do exactly what I please, with little or no responsibility to anything (or anyone) except to myself and my own self-fulfillment."
• The Neuroscience & Psychology of Procrastination, and How to Overcome It (Josh Jones, Open Culture, Aug. 2016)
• 10 Books That Were Written on a Bet (Patricja Okuniewska, Electric Lit, 9-11-17) These unforgettable books and stories wouldn’t have existed without a wager. No. 4: "The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. "We can’t help but think that Dostoyevsky was referring to himself in the title of this novel. Ironically enough, the prolific Russian writer used the writing of this book to dig his way out of some steep gambling debts. The terms of the wager were that if he didn’t finish the novel within a few months, he would have to hand over the publishing rights and royalties for all of his other novels — which as you can imagine, is a lot. Thankfully, Dostoyevsky completed the book in time, appropriately reflecting the dangers of compulsive gambling."
• Writing Your Way Out of Writer’s Block (NY Book Editors) Ten tips for getting out of the weeds and back to your writing.
• On Not Writing a Book Right Now (Chandra Manning, Chronicle of Higher Education, 5-14-17)
• How long did it take to write the world's most famous books?< (PrinterInks) "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" took Stevenson 6 days. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy took 16 years. In between here's a range to make yourself feel more normal--or not.
How Long Did it Take to Write the World’s Most Famous Books?
• The Art of Structured Procrastination. Do Less, Deceive Yourself, and Succeed Long Term. by John Perry. As described on Open Culture: "Perry’s approach is unorthodox. It involves creating a to-do list with theoretically important tasks at the top, and less important tasks at the bottom. The trick is to procrastinate by avoiding the theoretically important tasks (that’s what procrastinators do) but at least knock off many secondary and tertiary tasks in the process. The approach involves “constantly perpetrating a pyramid scheme on oneself” and essentially “using one character flaw to offset the bad effects of another.” It’s unconventional, to be sure. But Andreesen seems to think it’s a great way to get things done. " "Do less. Think more." "Procrastination is the thief of time."

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• The Messy Minds of Creative People (Scott Barry Kaufman, Beautiful Minds, Scientific American, 12-24-14) Three superfactors -- elasticity, divergence, and convergence --differ in importance depending on the stage of the creative process. And while it’s true that the creative process is messy, ...two broad classes of processes work in cooperation to lead to high levels of creativity: Generation and Selection. Check out other pieces in the Beautiful Minds blog for "insights into intelligence, creativity, and the mind."
• The 7 Secrets of the Prolific: The Definitive Guide to Overcoming Procrastination, Perfectionism, and Writer's Block by Hillary Rettig. Check out her website.
• To do great work, embrace your limits (Dan Blank, pitching a mastermind group, but thoughtful comments about procrastination.
• Do You Manage Your “To-Do” List, Or Does It Manage You? (Daphne Gray-Grant's improved system for to-do lists, on The Well-Fed Writer blog, 5-1-14)
• 15 Ways to Overcome Procrastination and Get Stuff Done (infographic, Catherine Clifford, Entrepreneur, 12-6-14)
• Hit the Reset Button in Your Brain (Daniel J. Levitin, Opinion, NY Times, 8-9-14) "Our brains have two dominant modes of attention: the task-positive network and the task-negative network....The task-positive network is active when you’re actively engaged in a task, focused on it, and undistracted; neuroscientists have taken to calling it the central executive. The task-negative network is active when your mind is wandering; this is the daydreaming mode. These two attentional networks operate like a seesaw in the brain: when one is active the other is not.....A third component of the attentional system, the attentional filter, helps to orient our attention, to tell us what to pay attention to and what we can safely ignore. This undoubtedly evolved to alert us to predators and other dangerous situations. The constant flow of information from Twitter, Facebook, Vine, Instagram, text messages and the like engages that system, and we find ourselves not sustaining attention on any one thing for very long — the curse of the information age."
• Around the Writer's Block: Using Brain Science to Solve Writer's Resistance by Rosanne Bane
• Understanding Writing Blocks by Keith Hjortshoj
• Is Your Writer’s Block Really Writer’s Indecision? (Louise Tondeur on Jane Friedman's blog, 12-16-2020) Learn to categorize the questions slowing you down. Are they crucial, artificial, consistency questions, decisions disguised as questions, masks for indecision, questions about problems (often of plot or structure), or questions about process, research, or techniques.
• The real reasons you procrastinate — and how to stop (Ana Swanson, Wonkblog, WaPo, 4-27-16)

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• Procrastinating? Try This Trick (Jennifer Polk) "Halve it, then halve it again"
• Procrastination Research Group (Tim Pychyl)
• Reporter turns in article about procrastination on time Rebecca Jacobson, PBS News, 2-26-14) Why we procrastinate (is it genes or environment, including distractions like the Internet?) and what to do about it, if we do so chronically.
• Holy procrastinating pigeons! (Robin Abrahams, Social behavior in all its guises, 8-11-11). Here's a link to her talk on "The Emily Rooney Show"
• The Dutch-Elm Disease of Creative Minds (Mark O'Connell, NY Times, 12-6-13) "Self-doubt can be a powerful ally in the battle against bad writing. It can also be a powerful obstacle to writing anything at all."
• More on beating procrastination (Robin Abrahams, Social behavior in all its guises, 8-12-11)
• The Holy Trinity of Inactivity: How Boredom, Distraction, and Procrastination Are Vital to Healthy Living (Thorin Klosowski, Lifehacker, 7-19-12)
• A Successful Daily Practice Requires Honesty (Eric Maisel on Jane Friedman's blog, 9-17-2020) Honesty of practice requires that we face many hard truths, not just one or two.
• "It's All in My Head" (Jessica Winter, Slate, 5-14-08). Did Truman Capote and Ralph Ellison have writer's block—or were they just chronic procrastinators? Some writers have trouble getting started; some just "can't finish the job to their satisfaction."
• Miranda July's short video on avoiding the pitfalls of procrastination
• Even in the Gathering Darkness (Bret Anthony Johnston, author of the novel Remember Me Like This, on Glimmer Train, Oct. 2019) "To see characters animate on the page—let alone to have put them there—is to know that they will be remembered, and to be remembered is to survive." Don't let loss keep you from writing.
• Avoiding Writing Paralysis Due To Over-Analysis (James Scott Bell, Kill Zone, 8-2-15)

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• Got Writer’s Block? Read This Poem (LitHub, 7-25-19) Nick Ripatrazone Close Reads Gerard Manley Hopkins' "To R.B."
• Feeling Creatively Blocked? Try Consciously Procrastinating (Trina Rimmer, 9-21-11)
• 15 Techniques for Efficient Time-Management (Custom Writing)
• Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen. For overview, see A Guide to Getting Things Done (Robert Andrews, Wired, 7-12-05) "A call to arms for webheads who want to accomplish more tasks in less time."
• Productivity Tips from the Experts (Stephanie Chandler, Nonfiction Authors Association, 5-23-18) See also her infographic: 19 Actionable Writing Tips (11-28-17)
• Getting Things Done: A Massive GTD Resource List (Zen Habits)
• 43Folders.com (Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work)

"Reading how-to books is a good procrastinating technique."~Dee R.

“From now on I hope always to stay alert, to educate myself as best I can. But lacking this, in Future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out. We never sit anything out. We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out. ” ~ novelist Ray Bradbury

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Those Who Write, Teach (David Gessner, New York Times Magazine, 9-9-08)

"I believe in not quite knowing. A writer needs to be doubtful, questioning. I write out of curiosity and bewilderment...I've learned a lot I could not have learned if I were not a writer."
~ William Trevor

Computer security

• What Journalists Need to Know About Password Managers (Yael Grauer, Business Journalism, 6-13-18) Reporters should view password management software and tools marketing themselves as next-generation solutions with skepticism, and dig in deeper to see how these new technologies will address any drawbacks that have been documented and exposed.
• How to Change the Default Password on a Network Router (Bradley Mitchell, Lifewire, 9-13-17)

• A 9-step guide to prepare for GDPR compliance (Javvad Malik, Information Management, 9-21-17) n May 2018, the General Data Privacy Regulation will take effect, significantly altering the way organizations handle and store data. GDPR applies to all organizations that control or process data within the EU as well as those that control or process data related to EU residents. The comprehensive regulation is primarily intended to strengthen security and privacy protections around individual data, which it enforces by subjecting organizations to stricter requirements, adding new requirements – such as breach notification – and increasing fines on organizations that fail to comply.
• The Best Online Backup Services for 2016 (Michael Muchmore, PC Magazine, 2-24-16)
• How protected is your online privacy and what steps can you take for data protection (elsewhere on this site)
• The Difference Between Antivirus and Anti-Malware (and Which to Use) (Alan Henry, Lifehacker, 8-21-13) "Antivirus is a confusing matter: it's called antivirus, but there are tons of other types of malware out there. So...do those programs also scan for spyware, adware, and other threats? Here's how to make heads or tails of it all, and which tools you can trust to keep your PC clean."
• What’s the Difference Between Viruses, Trojans, Worms, and Other Malware? (How-to Geek, Lifehacker, 6-10-10) Viruses wreak havoc on your files. Spyware steals your information without your knowledge, scareware holds your PC hostage until you pay a ransom, trojan horses install a backdoor, and computer worms use the network to send copies of themselves to other PCs.
• What is Malware and How to Defend Against It? (Kaspersky) Malware, short for "malicious software," refers to a type of computer program designed to infect a legitimate user's computer and inflict harm on it in multiple ways. Malware can infect computers and devices in several ways and comes in a number of forms, just a few of which include viruses, worms, Trojans, spyware and more. It's vital that all users know how to recognize and protect themselves from malware in all of its forms.
• Baseline publications produced by the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) ) Documents to help you with everything from setting up your first computer to understanding the nuances of emerging threats.
• Security Primers published by the MS-ISAC (Center for Internt Security)
• How to avoid getting hacked when shopping online (Seth Rosenblatt, C/Net, 12-16-14)
• Malware: what it is and how to prevent it (Adam Baratz, Ars Technica 11-11-04)
• How to Stay Safe on Public Wi-Fi Networks (Whitson Gordon, Lifehacker, 11-14-14)
• Online privacy (many resources, including the next two)
• What Is VPN For? VPN Benefits Explained (Claudio R., Anonymster, 1-18-17) A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is basically a series of computers networked together over the Internet, so you bypass the server of your ISP (internet service provider), so that nobody can snoop into your personal affairs. Explains how VPN encryption and protocols work and how they can protect your internet connection. Reviews best VPN systems.
• KeePassX (a free, open source, cross-platform password manager)
• Cheap Tricks: The Low Cost of Internet Harassment (Julie Angwin, Pro Publica, 11-9-17) Most tech companies have policies against working with hate websites. Yet a ProPublica survey found that PayPal, Stripe, Newsmax and others help keep more than half of the most-visited extremist sites in business.
• How to Stay Safe While Online (Chiron, Gizmo, 6-9-14)
• 5 online backup services keep your data clean (Brian Nadel, Computerworld, 2-6-12)
• Top 10 Simple Things Every Computer User Should Know How to Do (Whitson Gordon. Lifehacker, 9-8-12)
• Big-name sites hit by rash of malicious ads spreading crypto ransomware (Dan Goodin, Ars Technica, 3-15-16)
• URLs, Authors, & Viruses (Rich Adin, The Business of Editing, An American Editor, 11-13-13)
• Backing Up Is Easy to Do (Rich Adin, An American Editor, 5-7-14).
• Free CyberCrime Resources for the Justice Professional: An Interview with Ben Spear (Justice Clearinghouse,
• Playing It Safe (Rich Adin, on Sandboxie, Cryptlocker (Crilock) Ransomware, and Startpage).
Soaring price of Bitcoin prompts CryptoLocker ransomware price break
You’re infected—if you want to see your data again, pay us $300 in Bitcoins (Dan Goodin, Ars Technica 10-17-13)
• How to Harden Your Browser Against Malware and Privacy Concerns (Chiron, Gizmo, 11-26-14)
• Top 10 iPhone Security Tips (PDF, Kunjan Shah, White Paper, McAfee)
• Hack Your Life in One Day: A Beginner's Guide to Enhanced Productivity (Whitson Gordon, Lifehacker, 12-18-12). [Back to Top]

Writers sharing workspaces

Writers working alone, together

• Writing Alone, Together (Bonnie Tsui, Draft, Opinionator, NY Times, 7-7-14) What does it mean to write in fellowship? "An unheralded plus of the shared writing space is the joy of not talking about writing."
• For Writers, Silence Might Not Be Golden After All (Donald M. Rattner on Jane Friedman's blog, 10-28-19) Why do contemporary creatives cluster so willingly in noisy coffee shops? "According to research data from 2012, most people reach peak performance under moderately noisy conditions—70dB (decibels), to be precise. It just so happens that this is roughly equivalent to the chatter in a typical coffee shop or restaurant on a relatively busy day. It also approximates the crash of ocean waves breaking on the shore, the study thrum of crickets, and wind rustling tree leaves."
• A Cubicle for You and Your Muse (Liesl Schillinger, NY Times, 10-9-05)
• Workspace of the Week (Erin Doland on a wonderful site called Unclutterer. Check out the categories along the lower right column. Inspiring.
• In a D.C. writers room, scribes find motivation (Emily Wax, Washington Post, 12-25-12)
• CoworkingBoston (coworking space, but not just writers)
• The Grotto (the San Francisco Writers' Grotto, an office for the creative, self-employed people who by definition don’t need to punch a clock. From its beginnings, it’s been a place where narrative artists–writers, filmmakers and the like–welcome the discipline of structure in their work lives, and build a community of peers)
• Toronto Writers Centre
• Writers Junction (an affordable shared workspace for writers in Santa Monica, CA)
• The Writers WorkSpace (a membership-based work and meeting space for writers of all genres in Chicago)

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Location independence

• Life Remotely – Redefining Travel While Living and Working Anywhere (Martha Retallick, FreelanceSwitch, 8-1-12). Ever dreamed of hitting the road and picking up interesting freelancing gigs along the way? Imagine it. Finishing a client project in Rio. Or landing one in Paris.
• The Realities of a Location Independent Life (Jennifer Miller, BootsnAll, 12-11-13)
• 6 Things You Can Start Today to Build A Life Working from Anywhere (Lea Woodward, Location Independent
• Guide to Working on the Road (BootsnAll)

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Cruise lecturing

• So You Want to Be a Cruise Ship Lecturer? (Cruise Critic's practical advice)
• Enrichment lecturers (Princess Cruises)
• The Secret Life of a Cruise Ship Lecturer (Peter Mandel, HuffPost, 9-11-12) on misadventures in this line of work
• Is This the World's Best Job? (William Romey, WSJ, 3-19-01) Life as a cruise-ship lecturer can indeed be a fantasy -- if you don't mind a few surprises and lots of work
• Cruising Through Retirement (PDF, Sixth Star, pitch to those in career transition from being in the Foreign Service)
• Cruise Ships Troll for Lecturers Who'll Keep Passengers Hooked (Andrea Sachs, Washington Post, 1-18-09)
• Cruise ship lectures: The confessions of a professional on the high seas (John Carter, Daily Mail, 1-20-10 on offering light entertainment rather than erudition)
• The Complete Guide To Conducting Seminars At Sea by Mary Long (published in 1999, a guide to getting free cruises, not a guide to paid lecturing)
• SpeakerNet News compilation of response to query "Have you spoken on cruises?
• Lauretta Blake's links (The Working Vacation, Inc.)
• Sixth Star (agency for cruise ship enrichment programs)[Back to Top]

Active sitting

(dealing with slouching and other problems of sitting too much)

• The Posture Guru of Silicon Valley (Amy Schoenfeld, NY Times, 5-11-13). Soothing back pain by learning how to sit again. (Click here for illustration of proper and improper posture.)
• 4 exercises that can prevent (and relieve!) pain from computer slouching and more (Frank Festa and Andee Tagle, Life Kit, NPR, 9-1-22) Listen or read. "Exercises to future-proof your body against chronic pain.
• Ask Well: Help for the Deskbound (Tara Parker-Pope, 1-15-13). Provides links to purveyors of ergonomic chairs.
• FitDesk X1 Folding Exercise Bike with Sliding Desk Platform
• FitDesk v2.0 Desk Exercise Bike with Massage Bar (get V2.0, not the original version) You assemble this bike desk; the table holds laptop up to 14 inches.
• Reasons Not to Stretch (Gretchen Reynolds, Well, NY Times, 4-3-13). Dynamic warmups (like leg kicking) before your fitness training is better than static pre-workout stretching. (The rules have changed!)
• Gel seat cushion (for the "numb bum" problem)
• Vari Active Seat (aka "perching chair" or "wobble office chair" with "dynamic range of motion") to take some of the load off your back at a standing desk.
• Active sitting vs. static sitting (Ingrid Holm, Varier)
• How Sitting All Day Is Damaging Your Body and How You Can Counteract It (Thorin Klosowski, Lifehacker, 1-26-12)
• 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back: Natural Posture Solutions for Pain in the Back, Neck, Shoulder, Hip, Knee, and Foot by Esther Gokhale and Susan Adams
• Ergonomic chairs (Sitbetter, who we have no experience with -- but you can see a big selection of types and prices here)
• Esther Gokhale talk at Google (YouTube video, includes tips on seated techniques) Click along right on other videos of her demonstrating and explaining ways of preventing back pain. She's a gifted presenter.
• Desk chairs recommended in a survey on Copyediting-L (7-4-23)

(price range $200-$500, with one exception, and well-reviewed), and "available from the usual big box office supply folks and online near-monopolies," include the following:
---Herman Miller Aereon ("starts above $500 and goes into the low four figures. The pricey one, it starts above $500 and goes into the low four figures, but is heavenly and lasts a lifetime," which so far is true of the one I bought 30 years ago)
---Emerge Vertex
---Steelcase Leap V2
---Beauty Rest Duo
---Workpro Quantum 9000
---Hon Ignition 2.0

• Mesh vs Cushion Chairs (Lawrence Bonk, Gadget Review, 12-7-22) "A mesh chair tends to be more breathable, and therefore cooler, than a cushioned chair made from Memory Foam or another type of office chair. Cushioned chairs may be more immediately comfortable no matter the body weight, but could lack certain ergonomic adjustment options. Both chairs face specific difficulties when it comes to the cleaning process."

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Standing and Adjustable-Height Desks and Walkstations

"Sitting is the new smoking."
Standing for long periods is not an instant fix, if you're not doing it ergonomically, says a colleague. It takes some getting used to, even some coaching. You have to have proper posture, shift your weight as needed, and engage your core in a new way. You can't slump

• My Standing Desk Experience, One Week Later (Jamie Todd Rubin, 8-21-12)
• 17 Great Authors Who Wrote While Standing (Jared A. Brock, The Writing Cooperative, 1-15-18)
• Standing Desks Are on the Rise (Jim Carlton, WSJ, 8-31-11)
• Workplace interventions for reducing sitting time at work (Cochrane Review) "The quality of evidence was very low to low for most interventions mainly because studies were very poorly designed and because they had very few participants. We conclude that at present there is very low quality evidence that sit-stand desks can reduce sitting at work at the short term."
• Improving My Health with A Standing Desk (Mary, A Merry Life, 6-29-11). A counter can work!
• Experts: Sitting All Day Is Dangerous CBS 2's Dr. Max Gomez reports: "Doctors say sitting all day could be as risky as smoking."
• Who Made That Standing Desk? (Daniel Engber, NY Times, 3-20-14) "While the dangers of sitting are well documented, says Alan Hedge, professor of human factors and ergonomics at Cornell University, too much time on your feet may cause a different set of health problems..."
• Varidesk. "The Varidesk," says colleague Kathy Evans, “is sturdy, well balanced, well engineered, and easy to use. It’s heavy, as in 50 pounds, and this gives it stability. No installation; it just sits on your desk. Very little effort to put the thing up and down. To change position, I just stand up and squeeze two levers on the outsides of the desk, and it comes right up. It’s sort of spring loaded, and it pops up gently, with 11 possible positions to click it into. Since I literally sit all day, this has been a godsend. (I also recommend a rubber mat to stand on, which you can buy from them or elsewhere.)"
• Treadmill Desks And The Benefits Of 'Walking Alive' (Susan Orlean, New Yorker, 5-15-13). Orlean spent years trying to find the right desk chair. She considered a pricy museum-worthy chair, a kneeling chair and a yoga ball before ditching the seat altogether for a treadmill desk — and discovering the health benefits of moving at work. Read also: The Walking Alive (Susan Orlean, New Yorker, 5-10-13)
• The Steelcase Walkstation . In a story for CMA Magazine ("Let Your People Move"), Jane Langille writes: "Invented by the Mayo Clinic’s James A. Levine, MD, PhD, in collaboration with Steelcase, a walkstation can help burn up to 2,100 calories a week. It can also cut fatigue by two-thirds and improve mental clarity." (Cost: $4,000 to $4500.)
• The Best Standing Desks (Mark Lucach, The Wirecutter, 8-29-13) The best full-sized standing desk is Terra by NextDesk. Excellent explanations of what to look for and why. "Adjustable-height desks are best, because the antidote to sitting is not standing, it’s moving."
• The Stir Kinetic Smart Desk, from veterans of Apple, Ideo, NASA, and Disney, adjusts heights and tracks your habits in an effort to help you work smarter and healthier. Watch the video, or read Christina Chaey's story (9-26-13). The Stir Kinetic, not yet available for pre-order, is expected to sell for $3,890.
• Wallsprout (Adjust-to-your-Height Standing Desk Converters). At $275 to $350, these are a good deal. My friend Steve Taravella wrote his book about character actress Mary Wickes on a Wallsprout 1200; he has used it for 4 years and "can't imagine returning to a conventional sitting position."
• The Two Best Standing Desks for Any Budget (Whitson Gordon, Lifehacker, 9-4-13)
• Ditch Your Office Chair for a New Standing Desk (Mark Lukach, The Wirecutter, Wired, 5-31-12, featuring The Kangaroo Pro Junior)
• Build Your Own Sturdy, Good-Looking Standing Desk for Less Than $25 (Alan Henry, Lifehacker, 6-20-12).
• Ergo Desktop (home of the Kangaroo Adjustable Height Desk)
• How Can I Convince My Boss to Let Me Try a Standing Desk? (Alan Henry, Lifehacker, 7-16-12)
• Standing Desks (Uncaged Ergonomics), of which they say this is the best version ($125). Affordably convert any table to an ergonomic sit-stand desk.
• 6 Desks to Save You from Death By Sitting, slide show on how six different desks lined up, price-wise and otherwise, part of Get Up, Stand Up, For Your Life: Can Standing Desks Fight Sitting Disease?, part of "" by Kate Tayler, Forbeswoman, 8-2-12
• Become a Stand-Up Guy: The History, Benefits, and Use of Standing Desks (Brett and Kate McKay, The Art of Manliness, 7-5-11). From Thomas Jefferson to Ernest Hemingway and more (illustrated).
• Safco Muv Stand-up Adjustable Height Workstation (solid and inexpensive--reviewed in Wired article )
• Safco Muv 35-Inch Workstation Adjustable Height
• Signature Executive 2.0 Treadmill Desk (on sale for only $3290)
• TreadDesk (another treadmill desk, this one under $3,000 and praised on a writers' Facebook discussion of staying healthy while overworked)
• Sit and Stand Height Adjustable Desk (Ergo, elegant in cherry, and expensive)
• Geek Desks
• My $47 collapsible standing desk (Josh Earl)
• NewHeights Electric Sit to Stand Desk w/ Push Button Height Adjustment
• Desktop Elevator (place it on top of your desk) from OIC Innovations
• Kangaroo Junior (Ergo Desktop)
• Cassandra Willyard's Natural Habitat
• Anthro Height Adjustable Solutions (electric and manual lift desks-- see especially Steve's Station Sit-Stand Desk, elegant, expensive, several models
• Herman Miller's Up-and-Down Desk (Apartment Therapy)
• Pro-Line Elecric Height-Adjustable Workstation (ZooStores.com)
• sitbetter (ergonomic chairs of all types)
• These Cycling Desks Charge Your Phone--And Your Muscles--While You Work (Adele Peters, Fast Company, 8-4-14) At the office or airport, 30 minutes of easy pedaling on a WeBike will get you a full iPhone charge and keep you fit. Cost: $13,000+
• A computer to use lying down (from Japan, the Super Gorone desk). I link to it but have no idea if it's any good--it's just a great idea for certain situations!

And on a similar note, consider these for elevating your laptop:
• mStand Laptop Stand (raises your notebook screen height 5.9 inches for better ergonomics and tilts it to bring the screen closer and improve airflow around laptop)
• Griffin Technology GC16034 Elevator Laptop Stand (holds your portable computer safely at just the right height to match external monitors and to save your aching neck). Says designer Robin B., "lifted my MacBook up in the air so I could push it back and have the full extended keyboard out in front on my desk. This helped my wrists and back."

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On writing and the writing life

• Nonfiction Writers: Find Your External and Internal Why (Jennie Nash on Jane Friedman's blog, 5-18-22) Does my story matter? Is it good enough? The way to answer these questions and combat the doubt that comes with them is to connect to your why. Tap into your motivation, the reason you care, your rage, and your passion. That is how you find your voice and how you finish your book.
• Abraham Verghese, author of ‘Cutting for Stone,’ describes his writing life (Washington Post 12-9-11). Do read his novel Cutting for Stone
• Inspiration, Obsession, the Artist's Life (Joyce Carol Oates: A Writer's Journal, 8-9-24)
• Two Acclaimed Writers on the Art of Revising Your Life Kiese Laymon and Tressie McMillan Cottom on vulnerability, revision and love. (NY Times, The Ezra Klein Show, 11-9-21. Read the transcript.) 'Kiese is author of the essay collection, “How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America” and the award-winning memoir “Heavy.” His nonfiction tackles race, gender, sports, popular culture, the politics of literary publishing and, above all, his relationship with his home state of Mississippi....In 2020, Kiese did something that shocked the publishing world. He bought back the rights to his first two books for about 10 times the price he was originally paid to write them. Looking back on “How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America” and his novel, “Long Division,” Kiese realized there were parts of the books he wanted to change....not so surprising when you consider the way Kiese approaches his entire life, as an act of revision.' Powerful interviews.
• For some authors, inspiration arrives in high definition. Others see nothing at all. (Mikaella Clements, Washington Post, 1-2-22) 'The question of what writers “see” as they write is both fascinating and abstract. Research has found that some people, including authors, have no mind’s eye at all...How do authors picture their work as they write?" Not every writer is guided by a visual imagination.
• ADHD, Journalism, and the Nightmare of Finding Manna in the Desert (William Gray, Talking Writing, 4-11-11)
• The Agony and the Ecstasy of Taking Author Photos (Tom Rachman, Literary Hub, 3-19-18) "Stressing about an author photo isn’t just vanity. It’s also about career survival, given that the spoils of fiction are meager, and accrue to the few. Writing novels is often a business of lionized old lions and bright young debutants, with prairies of middle-aged mid-listers between. An author’s image—not beautiful necessarily, but of striking looks—helps the sales package."
• Alone, With Words. Why writers can’t live to please their readers. (Jed Perl, The New Republic,6-9-10)
• An Easy Way to Increase Creativity. Why thinking about distant things can make us more creative. (Oren Shapira and Nira Liberman, Scientific American 7-21-09)

As Good as It Gets: Nominations for Best Film About a Writer (Roger Rosenblatt, Sunday Book Review, NY Times, 2-22-13). His nominations (read the article to get his rationale): “The Third Man” (1949), “Starting Out in the Evening” (2007), and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (1961). His sentimental favorite: “Bullets Over Broadway” (1994). His runners-up: “The Front,” about Hollywood blacklisting; Woody Allen’s “Deconstructing Harry”; “Stranger Than Fiction"; “Shadowlands”; “Barton Fink”; “Adaptation”; the creepy “Secret Window”; the scary “Misery”; and “Limitless,” starring Bradley Cooper.
"Writers, with the exception of that movie I saw as a kid," writes Rosenblatt, 'are variously crazy (Jack Nicholson in “The Shining”), reckless (Michael Douglas in “Wonder Boys”), cranky (Van Johnson in “23 Paces to Baker Street”), self-destructive (Ray Milland in “The Lost Weekend”), without principle (William Holden in “Sunset Boulevard”) and/or flailing (Paul Giamatti in “Sideways”). Rosenblatt doesn't include films about journalists, because they are tethered to institutions, but does list these films as best in that subgenre: “Citizen Kane,” “The Year of Living Dangerously,” “It Happened One Night,” “Foreign Correspondent.” Any good movies about writers missing from this list? One I can think of: Jay Parini's "The Last Station," about the last year of Tolstoy's life.

• Baird Harper, Writing Advice (Glimmer Train). How writing is like fishing, and the importance of bringing a sandwich.
• The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered. Clive James' classic poem about about literary schadenfreude, as posted by Dwight Garner on the NY Times Paper Cuts blog about books.
• Boxers, Briefs and Books. John Grisham's op-ed piece on what hard work writing is, one theme of the forthcoming collection Don’t Quit Your Day Job: Acclaimed Authors and the Day Jobs They Quit, ed. by Sonny Brewer (with stories by Grisham, Pat Conroy, Rick Bragg, and many other authors).
• Breaking In: Debut Author Jacob Tobia on the Memoir Process and More (Cassandra Lipp, Writer's Digest, 2-4-19) In this interview, Jacob Tobia, author of the memoir Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story, discusses making the leap from writing personal essays and op-eds to a full memoir as well as the importance of building a platform to promote your work.

• The Crisis That Nearly Cost Charles Dickens His Career ( Louis Menand, New Yorker, 3-7-22) Yes, it involved "another woman," but this is also an interesting overview of Dickens' career, with a focus on the year 1851 when he first began to write Bleak House. See also obert Douglas-Fairhurst wrote two books on Dickens, The Turning Point: 1851--A Year That Changed Charles Dickens and the World (Knopf, a “slow biography”) and Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist, a study of the early years.
• Daily Rituals: How Artists Create (and Avoid Creating) Their Art (Michelle Aldredge, Gwarlingo, 9-25-13)
• Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey.
Willard Spiegelman reviews the book, "Habit Their Way" (WSJ, 6-7-13): This guide to artists' and writers' daily regimens explains how, where and with what pen to create a masterpiece. Examples: "The painter Chuck Close says, 'Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.' " John Cheever's is surely one of the strangest rituals. This book started as the blog Daily Routines.
• Diaries and letters. Yours Ever: People and Their Letters , edited by Thomas Mallon (which Carolyn See calls a "crazy quilt" collection with no discernible organizing principle, but "one of those perfect Christmas gifts to give to bachelor uncles or friends who aimlessly hang around.") By the man who published A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries. Writers well-represented in both volumes.
• Don’t Poke the Editor: Six Deadly Don’ts (and Dos) for Dealing with Editors (Susan J. Morris, Omnivoracious, 8-20-12)

• Edmund Wilson Regrets (delightful "no thanks" postcard on William Landay's site)
• The Elaine's That I Knew by Brian McDonald (Opinion, NY Times, 5-26-11, Elaine's last day in business), author of Last Call at Elaine's: A Journey from One Side of the Bar to the Other. (Not the only book about Elaine Kaufman's famed night spot. See also Everyone Comes to Elaine's: Forty Years of Movie Stars, All-Stars, Literary Lions, Financial Scions, Top Cops, Politicians, and Power Brokers at the Legendary Hot Spot by A.E. Hotchner.

• Elizabeth Gilbert: Your elusive creative genius (a TED Talk, 2-9-09, as muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses) . She shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius.
• Examined Lives by Phyllis Rose (American Scholar, Autumn 2013). "You cannot be a good writer if you have not been a good reader, and I would say that a writer’s responsiveness to other writers, whether discussed or held private, is the thing without which literary merit cannot exist."
Famous writers' keynote addresses at Whiting Awards Examples from the transcripts: "People consume a diet of novelty that would have driven their ancestors into the madhouse."--Saul Bellow
"You're a lucky girl, you know, that these books are in the living room, more on the table than on the shelf like in some people's houses."--Grace Paley
"In Shakespeare’s day, seeing emotions carried to the extreme helped audiences find the proper limits for their own lives."--John Guare

• The Fear Never Gets Any Easier (Chuck Wendig talking about the fear all authors experience)
• From punishing to pleasurable: How cursive writing is looping back into our hearts (Karen Heller, Washington Post, 9-5-18) Cursive "was declared moribund, if not dead, after it was shredded from the Common Core in most states, including Connecticut....By the mid-aughts, only 15 percent of SAT essays were submitted in script. Today, many adults utilize a mash-up of cursive and print that often can be deciphered only by the author." Frustrated that interns who could decipher handwriting on museum documents, Brigid Guertin launched "cursive camp." Children and parents flocked to it. Now "experts are finding more to recommend about pencil and ink. Handwriting - print or cursive - increases development in three areas of the brain, according to a 2012 study, and "may facilitate reading acquisition in young children." "Where is cursive really, really big? Christian home schooling and places like Louisiana." But also the New York City schools, which last year encouraged, but didn’t mandate, teaching script.
• 50 Things I Know About Making Stuff (Eric Maierson, Medium)

• The Golden Age for Writers . . . is right now (Stephen Marche, Esquire, 11-26-12). I can think of several ways in which the opposite might be argued (it's easier to get published, but not to make a living at it), but this is food for thought. See other opinions under comments on Abigail Kunitz's post on the Gotham Ghostwriters blogg [sic], Writer Poll: Are We in a Golden Age of Writing?
• Good Writing Habits Novelist Lydia Davis's advice for writers on editing, revising, and taking notes. (Crime Reads, Lit Hub, 11-12-19). Adapted from the essay “Thirty Recommendations for Good Writing Habits” in Essays One.

• Health insurance, freelancers, and the Affordable Care Act (Writers and Editors blog, 8-22-13). Includes links to information about health and liability insurance for freelancers and writers.

• HOW I PAID THE BILLS WHILE I WROTE THE BOOK (Medium series, Mike Gardner, 2-19-19)
---How Amy Bloom Paid the Bills While She Wrote the Books (Mike Gardner, Medium, 2-19-19) “I’m a big believer in making a living, so I wrote at night or when nobody needed anything from me.”
---How Karan Mahajan Paid the Bills While He Wrote the Books “I was still being a responsible Indian kid getting a monetizable degree from an American university.”
---How Elizabeth Strout Paid the Bills While She Wrote the Books “I went back to law school because I could get more writing done during law school than I could when I had to support myself.”
---How Andy Weir Paid the Bills While He Wrote the Books “At no point did I ever risk my financial security to become a writer.”
---How Carmen Maria Machado Paid the Bills While She Wrote the Book “I wrote in my email browser so it looked like I was writing an email.”
---How Camille Perri Paid the Bills While She Wrote the Books “I worked as the super in exchange for cheap rent on a crappy little ground-floor apartment.”
---How Will Mackin Paid the Bills While He Wrote the Book “My teacher told me, ‘Don’t go right to a graduate program. Join the Navy so that you have something to write about.’”
---How Sujatha Gidla Paid the Bills While She Wrote the Book “I would work on the memoir on my commute and in the crew room on my breaks.”

• How's work going? Erin Griffith's chart on Twitter for when a nonwriter asks How's Work Golng? @eringriffith

• How the Literary Class System Is Impoverishing Literature (LorraineBerry, LitHub, 12-4-15) On the Systemic Economic Barriers to Being a Writer. '...very little has been explicitly articulated about the exclusion of the great American underclass, that perpetually poor group on the bottom tier of society that includes all races/genders/creeds. And as we winnow out opportunities for art about poverty, we lose so much potential for change. [It is] not so much about money as it is about class, about being born into a system that tells you it is all right to do something artistic. But for those on the outside of that system “being artistic” is seen as throwing away your one chance to make something of yourself. And even when you make something of yourself, there can be a stigma about being “disloyal” to your class.'
• How to Be a Second-Time Author (Kathi Lipp, guest post on Rachelle Gardner's blog, 2-18-09)
• How to Do a Close Read (Siri Carpenter, The Open Notebook, 3-13-18) Part of sharpening one’s craft as a reporter and writer involves understanding what makes notable nonfiction stories tick. One way to do that is to closely read stories that you’ve admired (or for that matter, stories that have irked you) or that have racked up awards, been included in anthologies, or otherwise gotten attention. A superb collections of questions to ask, as you study what makes a piece work or not.
• How to Succeed as an Author: Give Up on Writing. The rancid smell of 21st century literary success. (Lionel Shriver, author of We Need to Talk About Kevin, essay for The New Republic, 10-24-13) "When does a novelist write novels? Writing the books themselves gets fit in here and there, like making time for taking out the trash before bed. I have grown perversely nostalgic for my previous commercial failure—when my focus was pure, and the books were still fun to write, even if nobody read them."
• How to Write a Great Novel (Alexandra Alter, WSJ, 11-13-09). From writing in the bathroom (Junot Díaz) to dressing in character (Nicholson Baker), 11 top authors share their methods for getting the story on the page.

Health insurance, freelancers, and the Affordable Care Act (Writers and Editors blog, 8-22-13). Includes links to information about health and liability insurance for freelancers and writers.

• Is the Bohemian Dead? (Katie Roiphe, Slate, 5-8-13). In her new memoir, Country Girl, Edna O’Brien recalls when writers were drunk, brawling, and fabulous. Facebook: Once, writers were drunken brawlers. Now they are married and cook a lovely risotto.
• Juggling Act: How I Work on Multiple Manuscripts at Once (Dea Poirier, Writer's Digest, 5-6-19) WD editors were impressed to hear that Next Girl to Die author Dea Poirier was working on four manuscripts simultaneously, all after completing her debut novel. We asked Poirier to share a few tips with you on how she manages multiple manuscripts at once.

• Letters of Note an attempt to gather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos. Scans/photos where possible. Fakes will be sneered at. Updated as often as possible; usually each weekday.
• Lifehacker (practical tips and downloads for getting things done in life)
• Literati.net (a community of readers and writers)
• Local and regional writers organizations

• Midwest Book Reviews Resources for Writers Excellent links.
• "My writing is a combination of three elements. The first is travel, travel as exploration, as concentration, as a purpose. The second is reading literature on the subject. The third is reflection, which comes from travel and reading." ~Ryszard Kapuscinski (ceremonial speaker, Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage, 2003)

• Roy Peter Clark's gems on writing
---The Short Sentence as Gospel Truth (Roy Peter Clark, Opinionator, NY Times, 9-7-13). "Express your most powerful thought in the shortest sentence." The "short sentence gains power from its proximity to longer sentences," as an example from Orwell illustrates. Look at all the comments he gets!
---How to Write Short: Word Craft for Fast Times
---Thirty Tools for Writers (Clark, Poynter, 6-18-02)
---Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer (the book)
---Five oddest places (real, not virtual) where I’ve found story ideas (guest post on Words by Webb, 9-19-11)
---Skepticism: The Antidote to ‘Truthiness’ in American Government and Media
---Roy Peter Clark on “the power of the parts” for storytelling (Andrea Pitzer, Nieman Storyboard, 11-9-10). A summary of something you can watch on video here. He's an entertaining lecturer, accordion and all.
---The Glamour of Grammar (Poynter, the article that gradually became the book) Followed by What the Big Bopper Taught Me About Grammar (5-1-08)
---The Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English. You can get a sense of it from this review (Ammon Shea, NY Times Book Review 8-20-10) A “grammar of purpose, a grammar of effect, a grammar of intent.”

• Seven Varieties of Stupid (Ian Leslie, Ruffian, 5-21-22) and what to do about them. #3: Fish out of water stupidity: "The bankers who screwed up in the 2008 crash thought they were in the domain of risk when in reality they were in the domain of uncertainty. Regulators who were flat-footed during during the pandemic (more of a problem for the US than the UK) failed to clock that they were now in the domain of crisis management."
• 7 Things We Can Learn From Jerry Seinfeld About Writing (Justin Cox, Writing Cooperative, 4-19-18) "I consumed all 59 episodes of "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee in three weeks. Throughout the show, a theme emerged: Comedians are writers at the core....The best writing advice we can learn from Jerry Seinfeld is to write often. About nothing, if necessary."
• The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative by Vivian Gornick: "Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say."

• Those Who Write, Teach (David Gessner, In Captivity, NY Times, 9-19-08) "Five years ago I gave up the full-time writing life and became the kind of domesticated writer known as a professor. I was not shot with a tranquilizer gun, tagged and shipped off to a university. I underwent this conversion more or less of my own free will, drawn by the lure of health insurance, salary and security...."
• The Three-Step Process From Isolation to Publication (Joanne Ramos, Writer's Digest, 3-18-19) Debut author Joanne Ramos talks about letting herself get lost in the world of her book, when she knew to let others in and when to let The Farm out into the world.
• The Truth About Writers (J. Robert Lennon, LA Times, 6-21-09) What do they really do with all that time?
• 12 Lessons on Writing by Stephen King (N.A. Turner, Medium, 9-3-18) What I learned from reading the master of suspense's memoir.

• Unclutterer. Q&As. For example: Ask Unclutterer: What should I do with old journals? (Erin Doland, 2-15-19)
• Under the Literary Influence by Brian McDonald ( (Proof blog, Alcohol and American Life, NY Times 2-20-09) On Raymond Chandler, writers who drink, Elaine's, and the night Hunter Thompson set himself on fire.

• Vladimir Nabokov on Writing, Reading, and the Three Qualities a Great Storyteller Must Have (Maria Popova, Brain Pickings) "There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three — storyteller, teacher, enchanter — but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer."

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• Web-Based Creativity: Can Working in Virtual Communities Be More Effective Than Face-to-Face Cooperation? (Science News, Science Daily, 10-5-2010)
• Well-designed authors' websites (look at column along left side)
• What do bad writers and toddlers have in common? (Megan Sharma, PR Daily, 5-15-18) Self-absorption, resistance to change.
• What Famous Writers Had to Say About Writing (Annika Neklason, Books Briefing, The Atlantic)
• What Writers Must Do: 'Love People' (Joe Fassler, The Atlantic, 6-3-14). Author Rupert Thomson says a Yevgeny Yevtushenko poem taught him the value of risk. "You can’t choose who to love, or how—but if you remain open to experience, love will teach you a great deal about yourself, and can help lead you in the right direction."
• Someone said to W. H. Auden, “Is it true that you can only write what you know? And he said, “Yes, but you can only know what you know once you’ve written it.”
• When I broke down at work, I realised I was responsible for my own wellbeing (Jess Phillips, The Guardian, 3-30-16) Previously, I had allowed everything to leak into everything else....Before my burnout, I felt time management was somehow inapplicable to me. Now my attitude has changed, and I have developed a daily question for myself: “What matters most today and how am I going to realise my priorities?” ... Wellbeing demands time, although we often tell ourselves we just don’t have it. I now try to establish with others what I’m not prepared to make time for. "
• When Writers Speak: Why Good Writers Can Be Bad Conversationalists (Arthur Krystal, New York Times Book Review, 9-27-09)
• Where Do Sentences Come From? (Verlyn Klinkenborg, NY Times, 8-13-12)
• Why Writers Should Embrace Their Weird Side (Sarah Sover, Writer's Digest, 6-19-19) Debut author Sarah Sover shares how embracing her weird side led to the publication of her first book (Double-Crossing The Bridge).
• Work geography is dead. Long live Life geography. (Peter Shankman, 2-14-10)
• Writers on Writing (New York Times), a complete archive of the Writers on Writing column, a series in which writers explore literary themes. (Membership may be required but is free.)
• Writer's Toolbox (Gotham Writers). See especially
Tips from the Masters , Author Q&As with illustrious writers, and Faculty Articles.
Writing Rules! Advice From The Times on Writing Well (Amanda Christy Brown and Katherine Schulten, The Learning Network, NY Times, 9-20-12)
• Writing, Typing, and Economics (John Kenneth Galbraith, The Atlantic, March 1978) Marshall McLuhan once said, or is said to have said, that clarity of expression betrays an absence of thought. Not necessarily so says the author of more than twenty books, innumerable essays and reviews, and the recent television series "The Age of Uncertainty." His advice to would-be writers combines considerable thought with laudable clarity. “The writer who seeks to be intelligible needs to be right; he must be challenged if his argument leads to an erroneous conclusion and especially if it leads to the wrong action. But he can safely dismiss the charge that he has made the subject too easy. The truth is not difficult.”

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Writers groups and communities (some online)

Connect with other writers and editors (some online)
• In pain and with nowhere to go, homeless patients find respite in a writing group (Megan Thielking, STAT, 7-7-17) At a respite house for the homeless, a creative writing group gives patients a chance to tell their stories with dignity and humanity. "There is surprising evidence that reflective writing can reduce pain," tweets Atul Gawande.
• You Can't Create Alone: On Fostering Literary Community (Chris Mackenzie Jones, The Millions, 3-26-18) How do you find and establish literary community and connection? There seem to be four common pieces of advice: Be active, be present, be kind, and be giving. Jones is author of Behind the Book: Eleven Authors on Their Path to Publication
• Your No. 1 Secret Weapon: Writing Communities (Katrin Schumann on Jane Friedman's blog, 1-2-19) How to connect with other writers in critique groups, professional programs ("more costly and expensive"), writers residencies, community events, volunteering, writers festivals and conferences (her top recommendation).
• Writers conferences, workshops, residencies, and retreats plus book fairs, festivals, and writers colonies.
• Absolute Write (MacAllister Stone's Water Cooler, where writers exchange tips, share experiences)
• AuthorNation.com (online community for authors, writers, poets, and their readers)
• Backspace, The Writer's Place (writers helping writers navigate the often confusing world of Big Publishing)
• The Best Time I Went To E.R. Without Insurance While Attending A Conference Inspired By A Facebook Group I Started (Anna Fitzpatrick, The Hairpin, 3-31-15). Indirectly about Binders Full of Women Writers (a not-so-secret, but closed, Facebook group).
• Beyond the Margins (online sounding board for writers who met, taught, workshopped or otherwise communicated through Grub Street, a nonprofit creative writing center in Boston)
• Black Writers Reunion & Conference
• Conferences, workshops, and other learning places
• Crime fiction organizations and conventions (Overbooked)
• CrimeOnline.net (Breaking crime news, cold cases, missing people, and more from Nancy Grace)
• CrimeThruTime (Yahoo discussion group on historical mysteries, authors and readers)
• Critique groups and writing workshops
• Editors and copyeditors
• 11 Top Writing Communities You Should Join and Why (NY Book Editors) Explains what's great about Absolute Write Water Cooler, AgentQuery Connect (online social networking community for the publishing industry), Bookrix, Critique Circle, Critters Writers Workshop, Figment, Hatrack River Writers Workshop, MIBBA, NaNoWriMo, The Next Big Writer, The Reddit Writer's Group (or rather, two subreddits).
• Fiction writers
• Fiction Factor forum
• Field Report (this is a writing contest, for "true life" stories, which some of my life-story writing students find addictive)
• How to Visit the Graves of 75 Famous Writers (Emily Temple, Lit Hub, 3-26-18)
• Illustrators and media professionals
• JacketFlap (social networking community for published authors and illustrators of books for children and young adults)
• Journalists' organizations
• Kitchen Tables and Regional Get-Togethers (International Women's Writing Guild)
• Local and regional U.S. groups for writers and editors
• Meetup groups for writers(check out those near your zip code) and the Meetup HQ Blog (to learn about other meetup groups with your special interests)
• Murder Must Advertise (online discussions on best ways to promote mysteries)
• Mystery Readers International, reading groups
• Nothing Binding (social networking for writers, authors, and readers)
• Online writing communities--blogs, forums, conferences, and other groups (about.com)
• Open Salon (a social content site for writers, photographers, and artists, where everyone blogs or comments on what others blog)
• Poets
•Red Room (a social media site that connects readers with authors)
• Science and medical writers
• Screenwriters
• Scribophile (a social writing workshop and writer's community, with online critique groups)
• Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI), regional groups and gatherings
• Sisters in Crime (Internet chapter) (sniff: disbanding in December 2010)
• Specialty writing(network with fellow automotive writers, cat writers, dog writers, horse writers, food writers, outdoor writers, songwriters, sportswriters, travel writers, Web writers, wine writers)
• StackExchange.com (a Q&A site for authors, editors, reviewers, professional writers, and aspiring writers -- with a http://writers.stackexchange.com/faq
•The Stiletto Gang. Women writers on a mission to bring mystery, humor, and high heels to the world)
• a href="http://www.writersandeditors.com/corporate_and_technical_communications_57428.htm" target="_blank">Technical writers
• Therapists Wired to Write (Sarah Kershaw, NY Times, 6-3-09, on a group of therapists who form a creative writing group to help each other write about themselves, their work, and their patients -- and the last is the tricky part)
• Today's Writing Community (appears to emphasize poems and stories, with discussion groups and an archive of many articles and author interviews)
• Washington Biography Group (WBG), meets once a month, Monday evenings, in Washington DC
• The Well (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), one of the oldest virtual communities still in operation. See Wikipedia description and history and Katie Hafner's piece, The Epic Saga of The Well (Wired, 5-1-97) and Salon sells The WELL to its members (Wendy M. Grossman, The Guardian, 9-27-12). Online community will not need a marketing plan – it already has more than 2,500 subscribers.
• What Women Write. See, for example, this blog and conversation about writing retreats and critique groups: Writing Retreats Aren't Just for Writing
• Women's National Book Association (WNBA) (national organization, with chapters in major cities, of people who work with and value books, including writers, editors, librarians, teachers, and publishing professionals)
• Writer-L (a paid-subscription listserv for writers of narrative nonfiction). After many years of activity this listserv finally ceased publication.
• The Writer's Block (Scriptorium's message board)
• WritersCafe.org, an online writing community where writers can post their work, get reviews, befriend other writers, etc.
• The Writer's Chat Room
• The Writers Circle (connect with other writers, on Facebook)
• Writer Unboxed (blog about the craft and business of genre fiction)
• Writing Communities(Writer's Digest's best websites for 2008)
• WritingWorld.com has, among other things, an impressive set of Links to Online Resources for Writers, including Links to Critique Groups and Discussion Groups
• Young Writers Online (a community forum)[Back to Top]

Famous literary hoaxes

• How A Bored Reporter Thought Up One Of The Greatest Literary Hoaxes Of All Time (Katie Serena, All That's Interesting, 12-15-17) The idea for Naked Came the Stranger came from Mike McGrady's disappointment with the current state of literature in America. See also 'Naked Came the Stranger': An oral history (Sam Kim, producer, for PRI, 1-4-18) In 1969, the erotic potboiler Naked Came the Stranger climbed The New York Times bestseller list. According to the back cover, it was written by a “demure Long Island housewife” named Penelope Ashe. Except … that wasn’t the whole story. Harvey Aronson, Marilyn Berger, George Vecsey and other former Newsday staffers reveal the real story behind this literary caper.
• Some of Our Favorite Literary Hoaxes (Gal Beckerman and Tina Jordan, NY Times, 4-1-19) In honor of April Fools’ Day, they’ve collected some of the best book frauds from the last 100 years.
• Literary Hoaxes and the Ethics of Authorship (Louis Menand, New Yorker, 12-3-18) What happens when we find out writers aren’t who they said they were. The stories of several famous hoaxes. "This is a danger often confronted by successful hoaxers. At some point, there is a demand to produce a body."
• Top 10 literary hoaxes (Mark Blacklock, The Guardian, 8-5-15) From Edgar Allan Poe’s account of a transatlantic balloon-crossing to JG Ballard’s hair-raising ruminations on Ronald Reagan, here are 10 narratives that blurred the boundaries between fact and fiction
• Top 10 Literary Hoaxes (Time)
• A Tale of Three Hoaxes: When Literature Offends the Law (Molly Guptill Manning, Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts, 2-7-14) Arthur Train got away with his mischief, Clifford Irving ended up behind bars, and James Frey and his publisher became entangled in a class action lawsuit and a multimillion dollar judgment.
• Literary Hoax Is the Most Underappreciated Genre (J.W. McCormack, LitHub, 10-30-18) From James Macpherson to Lee Israel to JT LeRoy, It's All Good
• 11 Legendary Literary Hoaxes: From Fake Irish Poets to the Genius of JT Leroy (Ed Simon, LitHub, 10-19-16)

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The lives of writers and editors
(in books)

"Writing is something you do alone. It's a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don't want to make eye contact while telling it."

~Attributed to John Green, author of Turtles All the Way Down

Some books to get you going:

• Is Self-Awareness a Mirage? (David Brooks, NY Times, 9-16-21)

“I asked Mary Pipher, the legendary therapist and author of “Reviving Ophelia” and many other books, if she asked her patients “why” questions. She said she prefers “what, when, where and how” questions: When do you notice feelings of inferiority? Basically, she wants clients to become closer observers of their own behavior.
“I called Lori Gottlieb, the author of “Maybe You Should Talk to Someone.” She also sees therapy as a form of story-editing. But she is much more optimistic that we can actually get down to the sources of our behavior. We actually can understand our “whys.” In fact, she says this is essential.
Gottlieb says that if you just try to change your behavior without understanding the source, you will never achieve lasting change. You have to understand the “why,” so you can recognize the behavior when it’s happening again and address what’s causing you to behave as you do.”
• Maria Arana, ed., The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work (a collection from Washington Post Book World)
• Diana Athill's memoirs: Instead of a Letter: A Memoir (her life from birth to 42, featuring a major romantic disappointment which led her to devote herself to her career); After a Funeral (frankly writing about an unusual domestic arrangement, among other things); Somewhere Towards the End (about that period late in life when there is a "falling away" and one is preoccupied with thoughts of death--one of the stronger of her memoirs), and Stet: An Editor's Life (about her fifty years working with legendary publisher Andre Deutsch and with such authors as Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Brian Moore, V.S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys, Mordecai Richler, Philip Roth, and John Updike). If you think you are underpaid, this may (or may not) make you feel better. Love this passage on procrastination, from Instead of a Letter: A Memoir: "It was at school that my secret sin was first brought into the open: Laziness. I was considered a clever girl, but lazy. It has been with me ever since, and the guilt I feel about it assures me that it is a sin, not an inability. It takes the form of an immense weight of inertia at the prospect of any activity that does not positively attract me: a weight that can literally paralyse my moral sense.... I slide off sideways, almost unconsciously, into doing something else, which I like doing.... So often have I proved that this form of self-indulgence ends by making my life less agreeable rather than more so that my inability to control it almost frightens me; but that I should ever get the better of it now seems, alas, most unlikely."
• Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing
• Mason Currey, ed. Daily Rituals: How Artists Work
• Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (1990)
• Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within (1986)
• Jack Hart, A Writer's Coach: An Editor's Guide to Words That Work
• Johnson, Celia Blue. Odd Type Writers: From Joyce and Dickens to Wharton and Welty, the Obsessive Habits and Quirky Techniques of Great Authors
• Stephen King, On Writing (2002)
• Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1995)
• Reading Through the Notes for Peter Matthiessen’s Would-Be Autobiography Jeff Wheelwright on the Life and Underrated Writing of His Adventuring Uncle (LitHub, 6-21-18)
•· The New York Times, and Darnton, John (introduction). Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from The New York Times, New York Times (2002)
• Tan, Amy. The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life

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The lives of writers and editors
(in articles)

• Why Are So Many Knowledge Workers Quitting? (Cal Newport, New Yorker, 8-16-21) D Many generally well-educated workers are "leaving their jobs not because the pandemic created obstacles to their employment but, at least in part, because it nudged them to rethink the role of work in their lives altogether. Many are embracing career downsizing, voluntarily reducing their work hours to emphasize other aspects of life....

"Many well-compensated but burnt-out knowledge workers have long felt that their internal ledger books were out of balance: they worked long hours, they made good money, they had lots of stuff, they were exhausted, and, above all, they saw no easy options for changing their circumstances. Then came shelter-in-place orders and shuttered office buildings. This particular class of workers were thrown into their own Zoom-equipped versions of Walden Pond."
• Here’s Why Introverts Make the Best Writers (Jenn Granneman; Introvert, Dear; 1-25-21) "Many introverts see the world in terms of story and symbol, making them naturally gifted writers. Introverts love their alone time.... Who thinks more than introverts?" Why many introverts are drawn to writing.
• How to Deal with a Difficult Edit (Giuliana Viglione, The Open Notebook, 10-24-23) If things get tense once the draft is in, prioritize calm, compassionate communication. Don’t be afraid to pick up the phone and call when you sense that wires have crossed. Editors, too, have a responsibility to keep a level head, even if a story requires heavy revisions. Communicate edits well, and treat writers with respect. Scope creep is one of the most common ways that an editing process becomes painful. If an edit becomes difficult, let the dust settle once the piece is published.
• The Writer's Process (Hallie Cantor, New Yorker, 5-29-17) Tongue in cheek and right on target.
• Writing When on the Autism Spectrum (Kelly Brenner, The Open Notebook, National Association of Science Writers, 10-9-18) 'I have always had an aversion to talking on the phone, but I didn’t understand why—until earlier this year. In April, I found out that I am on the autism spectrum. The diagnosis explained why I have to mentally prepare myself before answering the phone and why, most of the time, I swipe “reject” instead....Perhaps one of the biggest challenges facing autistic writers is “autistic burnout,” a term we use to describe what happens when we become overwhelmed and exhausted. Neurotypicals suffer burnout too, of course, but autistic burnout comes from a different place. It develops from sensory overload, or the stress and anxiety that comes with trying to fit into a neurotypical world.' Excellent overview and practical advice for writers on the autism spectrum and for editors working with them.
• Eat, Pray, Love, Get Rich, Write a Novel No One Expects (Steve Almond's interesting profile of Elizabeth Gilbert, NY Times Magazine, 9-18-13). And here are her Thoughts on Writing (on her website, where I sought in vain a picture of her office, which sounded interesting).
• What It Means to Be a Writer—and to Emerge as a Writer Guest post on Jane Friedman's site by Albert Flynn DeSilver (@PoetAlbert), author of Writing as a Path to Awakening: A Year to Becoming an Excellent Writer and Living an Awakened Life
• Writers Often Ask Me a Question I Can’t Answer (Mathina Calliope on Jane Friedman's blog, 9-28-2020)The field is saturated, so many people wanting to tell their interesting stories. You wonder: Am I good? Am I a good enough writer to keep doing this? "Good writing isn’t even the main criterion for publication. Sadly, it’s not even in the top three or four. What gets someone published is whether their story is relevant, timely, and MARKETABLE; what sort of platform (social media following) they have; their degree of expertise; and the uniqueness of their idea, its angle."
• 50 Blogs for Mastering the Art, Craft, and Business of Writing (Freewrite, 10-3-18)
• Creativity is overrated (David Moldawer, The Maven Game, April 2018) "There I go with one of my disingenuous, clickbait subject lines again...Working with creative people sucks. They can’t turn it off. They can’t organize or prioritize. It’s one new idea after the other—mostly bad. You’re a giant tube worm at the bottom of the ocean next to a hydrothermal vent. Sure, you might starve without that hot, sulphuric flow of ideas bubbling nearby, but you have to keep your distance if you’re going to get anything done.”
• 10 Odd Stories Behind Famous Authors’ Nom de Plumes (Kim Parker, Flavorwire, 4-7-12)
• Diana Athill, a legendary editor in British literary publishing, has been the subject of a couple of interesting articles: In Life’s Latest Chapter, Feeling Free Again (Sarah Lyall on Diana Athill, at 91, feeling liberated in an "old person's home," NY Times 10-10-10) and The unrivalled Diana Athill (Ian Jack, The Guardian, 10-31-09. "A bestseller at 91, she forged the modern memoir.")
• New Yorker profiles
• ‘You Stink,’ He Explained (Joseph Epstein, Commentary, 11-10-15). The unending deliciousness of literary rivalries, a who-hates-whom of feuds between authors, and aspersions cast, by way of reviewing Literary Rivals: Feuds and Antagonisms in the World of Books by Richard Bradford.
• Jack Handey Is the Envy of Every Comedy Writer in America (Dan Cois, NY Times Magazine, 7-16-13). Handey is best known as the writer and performer of “Deep Thoughts,” a series of quasi-philosophical cracked aphorisms that ran on “Saturday Night Live” from 1991 to 1998. ..."The archetypal Jack Handey sketch is about Frankenstein, or flying saucers, or a cat who, for some reason, can drive a car. 'Little-boy stuff,' Handey explained."
• Penelope Fitzgerald: The Whole Story? (Hermione Lee on a biographer and novelist who succeeded despite more hard blows in life than most of us could bear up under and still write so well and so much)
• Ten Superstitions of Writers and Artists (Ellen Weinstein, Paris Review, 4-13-18)
• 25 Famous Authors With Learning Disabilities (Wide Open Education, Bachelors DegreeOnline)
• P. G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters by P.G. Wodehouse, edited by Sophie Ratcliffe. Reviewed delightfully here: Yours Ever, Plum: The Letters and Life of P.G. Wodehouse (Christopher Buckley, The Daily Beast and Newsweek, 1-28-13).

Family Secrets: On Matthew Spender’s ‘A House in St. John’s Wood' (Matt Seidel, The Millions, 11-19-15). An account of the straight son's memoir of the father's gay love affairs and the mother's fear that the son would expose the family secrets, which he does in A House in St John's Wood: In Search of My Parents

• Suicidal Thoughts: The Creative Lives and Tragic Deaths of a Prince and a Pauper (Nancy Spiller, Los Angeles Review of Books, 12-30-14) Comic Robin Williams and novelist Les Plesko, one wildly successful and the other not, both took their lives. Spiller writes persuasively about what might make creative people more susceptible to dark thoughts that they act on. Among important points made: “We accept the disease model of substance abuse,” Palumbo says. “Depression is still considered a weakness. We’re more likely to say we’re suffering from alcohol or drug abuse, rather than panic attacks and suicidal thoughts. People are still afraid of mental illness.”
• Robin Williams' widow: 'It was not depression' that killed him (Nigel M. Smith, The Guardian, 11-3-15) Susan Williams gives first interview since her husband’s death last year and reveals the actor had a debilitating brain disease called Lewy body dementia
• How Doing Nothing at 5 a.m. Gets Me Through the Day (Abigail Rasminsky, HealthLine, 4-30-18) I was experiencing my life without the nagging sense of having to produce and succeed and run, run, run.
• Is There Anybody Out There? (Abigail Rasminsky, Lenny, 5-11-18) I’m a crowdsourcer. Should I learn to make decisions on my own? Whenever I had a decision to make — should I get bangs? Should I break up with my boyfriend? — I started in on my ask-advice-from-every-human-being-I-know routine. My uncle would say, reassuringly, “Don’t worry, Ab, you’re just making the rounds.” He’d call it my “process.”
• Writers Write, Right? (Jo Eberhardt, Writer Unboxed, 5-6-18) Take time off!
• The Scandal behind "The Scandal of Scientology" (Paulette Cooper) "You may not believe this, but you can write something that some group doesn't approve of and then have a quarter of your life almost ruined. I know because it happened to me."
• Sweet Home Mississippi (Richard Grant, Sunday Review, NY Times, 11-7-15) "Sometimes living in Mississippi makes us want to weep and scream and rush back to the familiar. But Mariah has a library job here now, and we have no plans to leave. Mississippi is such a deep, strange, complicated, interesting place that we often feel ruined for living anywhere else."
• Good Writing Habits of Famous Writers (Mike Hanski, Bid4Papers blog, 2-9-15)
• 25 Legendary Literary Feuds, Ranked (Emily Temple, Literary Hub, 2-16-18)

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• The Love Carousel: Literary Speed Dating at Housing Works in SoHo (J.T. Price, The Millions, 9-5-13). "Each participant found at the entrance a neon green envelope, including a library card in manila sleeve for taking notes on each “date,” and a name tag featuring the handle of a character from a favorite book. These would be our pseudonyms for the night. Each date would last an almost militantly enforced four minutes. A single case of lingering could cause the entire caterpillar crawl to go legs up. There was to be no lingering. Lingering is for books."
• Mark Twain's Top 10 Writing Tips (ThoughtCo.) "Don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in." See #9: Twain really understands the writing process. (Hat tip: Lynne Lamberg, my steady tipster.)
Money Changes Everything: Twenty-Two Writers Tackle the Last Taboo with Tales of Sudden Windfalls, Staggering Debts, and Other Surprising Turns of Fortune bu Jenny Offill and Elissa Schappel
• Music to Write By: 10 Top Authors Share Their Secrets for Summoning the Muse (Steve Silberman, PLOS blogs, 11-15-12)
• Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing by Margaret Atwood. An ambitious inquiry into the art of writing and an unprecedented insider’s view of the writer’s universe, from the beloved author of The Handmaid’s Tale.
• 19 Writing Tips from Writers and Editors for the New Yorker (Grace Bellow, BuzzFeed, 3-12-14) Secrets on reporting and storytelling from some of the best in the business. Here's Evan Ratliff: "I don't think it's feasible to work a full-time job and be able to do this type of reporting. You set aside two hours on Monday and make a bunch of calls. You get one person, and they start calling you back over the next couple of days, and you're doing other things. So it really requires dedicated time. To me, that's one of the dilemmas of longform magazine writing. It's really done best by staff writers and freelancers who dedicate all of their time to it. It's a job that you have to be doing all the time. Then the question of getting paid enough to compensate for that time is the one that everyone deals with in some way or another."
• "Organizing the Writing Life" Day 1: The Maximum-Efficiency Desk (Kristin Gorki's "Write now is good" blog)
• The Paris Review Interviews (sampling from an amazing series of interviews with prominent authors, made available online by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and the generous support of Richard and Jeanne Fisher)
• Playing the Odds (Melissa Yancy, Glimmer Train) Good things and bad things are going to happen to you. Focus on what's important, not on how other writers are doing better or worse than you.
• Plot Twist: Philip Carlo, true crime writer with Lou Gehrig's disease, is working on his memoir. His deadline: his own death.
• Poet Mark Doty (on receiving the $50,000 Whiting Award) speaks movingly about why writers write--what writers want out of writing--and about how insecure they generally feel about their writing (Critical Mass, NBCC blog)
• The Power of Maybe: Processing Criticism (Kevin Fenton, guest blogging on The Loft's Writer's Block)
• Q&A Archives (C-Span) (podcasts and video of a gazillion wonderful interviews)
• Query Letters: How to Lose Agents & Infuriate Editors (Sally Wiener Grotta, Wordsmiths 12-7-06)
• Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain. Introversion is about how you respond to (or need) external stimulation.
• Ray Bradbury Offers 12 Essential Writing Tips and Explains Why Literature Saves Civilization (Open Culture, 6-6-12). On Bradbury's passing, Open Culture brought together some of the science fiction master's bon mots (a couple of videos and several links).
• What Kind of Writer Are You: Cook or Baker? (Anna North, LitHub, 6-28-16) "People who know about food often say you’re either a cook or a baker; either you enjoy the freedom of putting together a savory meal to your own particular specifications, or you like the structure required for making sweets."
• Writers on Writing (New York Times--a complete archive of the Writers on Writing column, a series in which writers explore literary themes)

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Rejection and Rejections

"Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good." ~ Samuel Johnson

"It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer." ~ Albert Einstein

"I sometimes think that reality is like two locked boxes, each holding the other's key." ~ Piet Hein

• On Success (George Saunders, StoryClub, 6-27-24) George Saunders in this article talks about rejection and how it made him feel and how it led him to made a swerve in his craft. There was" a period in my career that I’ve written about many times – when I pivoted from pseudo-Hemingway to something that felt more authentic to me. Part of what motivated that pivot was a steady stream of rejections that all had about them a particular quality of indifference that I came to find nauseating."

He is thanked: "I'll start, as most do, by thanking you for Story Club. Reading A Swim In a Pond in the Rain got me to start writing seriously, and so the existence of Story Club is kind of a small, bi-weekly miracle to me (and many others)."
• There Is No Point in My Being Other Than Honest with You: On Toni Morrison’s Rejection Letters (Melina Moe, Los Angeles Review of Books, 3-26-24) "Morrison’s letters are unexpectedly forthcoming. Often, she supplements her rejections with diagnoses of an ailing publishing business, growing frustrations with unimaginative taste, the industry’s aversion to risk-taking, and her own sense of creative constraint working at a commercial press (especially in the late 1970s and early ’80s; Morrison left editorial work to be a full-time novelist in the early 1980s)."

"The material is interesting," she concluded in one letter, "but not the writing: it needs a lot of work to give it the energy a story must have."
• When Rejection Is Protection (Caroline Cala Donofrio, Between a rock and a card place, 3-27-22) Stories inspired by no. 'Sylvia Plath — whose novel The Bell Jar was rejected by American publishers and originally released under a pseudonym — once said, “I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.”'
• Years of Rejection Just Made J.K. Rowling More Determined (Charley Lanyon, New York Magazine, 11-16) "Eventually, Bloomsbury agreed to publish Harry Potter, though they were less than enthusiastic. Her editor, Barry Cunningham, even advised her to get a day job because she would never make any money in children’s books." See also J.K. Rowling's original 'Harry Potter' pitch was rejected 12 times — see it in new exhibit (Randee Dawn, Today, 10-20-17) and JK Rowling says she received ‘loads’ of rejections before Harry Potter success (Alison Flood,The Guardian, 3-24-15) Harry Potter author tells fans on Twitter that she was also rejected under pen name Robert Galbraith, saying ‘they don’t even want me in a beard’
• Best-Sellers Initially Rejected (LitRejections.com) Rejection is often an error on the publisher's part!
• Your Manuscript Has Been Edited By Top Professionals—But You Still Get Rejected. What Gives? (Allison K Williams on Jane Friedman's blog, 6-14-23) The process of finishing a book is a victory in itself. But it might be your “practice” book, and the world is waiting for what you write next.
• Literary Journals and Rejections Were you rejected by a literary journal? This site will show you what level of rejection you received. Click on a journal to see examples. (H/T Roz R)
• The rejection letters Rebecca Skloot got for the #1 New York Times bestseller, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Jane Friedman, Tumblr)
• 5 Reasons You May Be Getting Rejections--Thoughts from the Editor's Side of the Desk (Jennifer Lawler, on Dollars and Deadlines, 5-25-13)
• Top Reasons Why Fiction Manuscripts Get Rejected (M.J. Moores, Authors Publish) A poor fit for that editor/publisher (do your homework!); author's failure to follow guidelines on what to submit; story/plot weaknesses ("All stories need to start sharply and carry on at a good pace. They need to have a compelling plot or character we like or like to hate."); ms's failure to excite the reader; traditional publishers rarely take on previously self-published work, especially if it has already sold to a core market (already exposed to likely audience); too much backstory up front, etc; timing (things go in and out of popularity); etc.
• If You Can’t Stand the Sight of Your Own Blood, Don’t Step Into the Ring (Catherine Baab-Muguira on Jane Friedman's blog, 2-24-22) This isn’t to romanticize hard knocks, it’s to romanticize resilience. How else are you going to have a writing career that lasts more than a couple of weeks?
• The Most-Rejected Books of All Time (Of the Ones That Were Eventually Published) (Emily Temple, LitHub, 12-22-17) This includes a lot of books that did very well once they were published, so take heart. And check the comments.

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• A Legendary Publishing House’s Most Infamous Rejection Letters (Toby Faber, Lit Hub, 9-12-19) When Faber & Faber’s T.S. Eliot Passed on George Orwell (and More), amusing stories, adapted from Faber & Faber: The Untold Story by Tony Faber.
•"No thanks, Mr. Nabokov," David Oshinsky's story on Knopf's rejection files
• The Failures of a Wunderkind: On Rejection and Persistence (LitHub, 4-23-19) Michael Croley is just fine with publishing a book at 41.
• Literary Rejections (bestsellers that were initially rejected). Interesting rejection story? Submit a blog post to Stories of Rejection. A more helpful feature on that site is Interviews with industry professionals who explain publishing as a business and offering helpful advice on the submissions process.
• From Animal Farm to Catch-22: the most regrettable rejections in the history of publishing (Sian Cain, The Guardian, 8-26-19) Faber is being urged to make amends for turning down George Orwell’s novella in 1944. But it is far from the only publisher to miss out on a future bestseller
• Why You Should Aim for 100 Rejections a Year (Kim Liao on Flipping Your Perspective on Submissions, and Failing Best, LitHub, 6-28-16) She said something that would change my professional life as a writer: “Collect rejections. Set rejection goals. I know someone who shoots for one hundred rejections in a year, because if you work that hard to get so many rejections, you’re sure to get a few acceptances, too.”
• Rejection Letters: The Publishers Who Got It Embarrassingly Wrong... (slideshow, Alice Vincent, HuffPost, 11-7-12). I particularly like the one that ends, "You'd have a decent book if you'd get rid of that Gatsby character."
• 'Fight for what you believe in': How best-selling authors battled rejection ( Rebecca Ruiz and Vidya Rao, Today Books). Featured authors: James Patterson (turned down by 31 publishers), Samantha Shannon (rejected by ten agents), Mary Higgins Clark, Rebecca Skloot.

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• The Resilient Writer: Tales of Rejection and Triumph by 23 Top Authors by Catherine Wald
• On Perseverance (Eva Lomski, Glimmer Train) "The best way I found to avoid misery over rejection was to ensure I had as many stories on submission as possible, so that when the inevitable email arrived, my emotional investment was left relatively unscathed. Every so often, I went through the spreadsheet, counted my "successes" and calculated my hit rate. It remained stable." She quotes Markus Zusak: "Failure has been my best friend as a writer. It tests you, to see if you have what it takes to see it through."
• When You’re Just Not Ready for Rejection (Shana Scott on Jane Friedman's blog, 4-2-19) All the good advice in the world doesn’t matter if the writer isn’t ready, and I wish someone would have said to me, “It’s okay you’re not ready now. You’ll get there in your own time.”

• Haunted by a weeks-long coma, author Caroline Leavitt found solace in writing ‘With or Without You’ (Rachel Rosenblit, WaPo, 8-5-2020) Read this for the great rejection story toward the end.
• The Rejection Connection (Dan Schulman, The Village Voice, 7-11-06) Stories that almost made the New Yorker's Talk of the Town page.
• Rejection letter for Ursula LeGuin's "Left Hand of Darkness"
• The Rejection (Marcia Aldrich, Kenyon Review, Nov/Dec 2016) On receiving a needlessly harsh rejection to a poetry journal.
• My First 400 Queries Were Rejected: How I Persevered and Got an Agent & Book Deal (Laura Drake, Writer's Digest, 8-20-2013)
• Always Act Like a Professional (Behler Blog, 9-12-16) Rejection hurts, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to fire off a “you suck” email after receiving a rejection.
• Bizarre Publishing Stories of 24 Famous Authors
• What Distinguishes a “Real Writer” From “Someone Who Writes” (Regina Barreca, Psychology Today, Snow White Doesn't Live Here Anymore column, 7-22-14) Folks in publishing send letters gushing about work they’re about to reject. Don't save the letter or quote it to other people. It's a form letter. It's publishing's version of "It's me, not you."
• Skin Deep (Snap Judgment, "Gratitude 2016). It’s days before the big dance at Camp Discovery...and there’s a problem, a few problems. And the kids at this Discovery Camp (where all the participants have a skin disease, but at this camp feel normal, because it's a "bully-free zone") are more used to rejection than your average camper. Which is why what happens at the dance is surprisingly emotional (also for those listening).
• On Dealing with Rejection (Jennifer Lawler, on Dollars and Deadlines, 8-30-13)
• On Rejections (Jeannette de Beauvoir, Beyond the Elements of Style, 6-26-12). Putting you in the publisher's place.

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• 30 famous authors whose works were rejected (repeatedly, and sometimes rudely) by publishers (Examiner.com)
• Famous Authors’ Harshest Rejection Letters (Romy Oltuski Flavorwire, 11-17-11)
• Thanks but no thanks: famous authors' rejection letters (Sarah Crown, The Guardian, 11-30-11)
• Charlie Brown cartoon about rejection (Peanuts by Charles Schulz for May 03, 2020)
• Rotten Rejections: A Literary Companion, ed. Andre Bernard
• Pushcart's Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections: A History of Insult, A Solace to Writers (ed. Andre Bernard and Bill Henderson)
Feel better because so many successful writers were also rejected, often many times

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• Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing by Margaret Atwood. An ambitious inquiry into the art of writing and an unprecedented insider’s view of the writer’s universe, from the beloved author of The Handmaid’s Tale.
• 19 Writing Tips from Writers and Editors for the New Yorker (Grace Bellow, BuzzFeed, 3-12-14) Secrets on reporting and storytelling from some of the best in the business. Here's Evan Ratliff: "I don't think it's feasible to work a full-time job and be able to do this type of reporting. You set aside two hours on Monday and make a bunch of calls. You get one person, and they start calling you back over the next couple of days, and you're doing other things. So it really requires dedicated time. To me, that's one of the dilemmas of longform magazine writing. It's really done best by staff writers and freelancers who dedicate all of their time to it. It's a job that you have to be doing all the time. Then the question of getting paid enough to compensate for that time is the one that everyone deals with in some way or another."
• "Organizing the Writing Life" Day 1: The Maximum-Efficiency Desk (Kristin Gorki's "Write now is good" blog)
• The Paris Review Interviews (sampling from an amazing series of interviews with prominent authors, made available online by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and the generous support of Richard and Jeanne Fisher)
• Playing the Odds (Melissa Yancy, Glimmer Train) Good things and bad things are going to happen to you. Focus on what's important, not on how other writers are doing better or worse than you.
• Plot Twist: Philip Carlo, true crime writer with Lou Gehrig's disease, is working on his memoir. His deadline: his own death.
• Poet Mark Doty (on receiving the $50,000 Whiting Award) speaks movingly about why writers write--what writers want out of writing--and about how insecure they generally feel about their writing (Critical Mass, NBCC blog)
• The Power of Maybe: Processing Criticism (Kevin Fenton, guest blogging on The Loft's Writer's Block)
• Q&A Archives (C-Span) (podcasts and video of a gazillion wonderful interviews)
• Query Letters: How to Lose Agents & Infuriate Editors (Sally Wiener Grotta, Wordsmiths 12-7-06)
• Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain. Introversion is about how you respond to (or need) external stimulation.
• Ray Bradbury Offers 12 Essential Writing Tips and Explains Why Literature Saves Civilization (Open Culture, 6-6-12). On Bradbury's passing, Open Culture brought together some of the science fiction master's bon mots (a couple of videos and several links).
• What Kind of Writer Are You: Cook or Baker? (Anna North, LitHub, 6-28-16) "People who know about food often say you’re either a cook or a baker; either you enjoy the freedom of putting together a savory meal to your own particular specifications, or you like the structure required for making sweets."
• Writers on Writing (New York Times--a complete archive of the Writers on Writing column, a series in which writers explore literary themes)

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• The Surprising Early Jobs of Our Favorite Famous Authors (Online PhD programs)
• Talking Writing, an online monthly literary magazine that supports writers and those interested in literature by encouraging creative discussion of the writing process. Follow on Twitter
• Ten Habits of Highly Creative People (Scott Barry Kaufman, Carolyn Gregoire, Greater Good, 1-20-16)
• Ten rules of writing, the Guardian collection of essays by many authors (Part 1: Elmore Leonard, Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Helen Dunmore, Geoff Dyer, Anne Enright, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, Esther Freud, Neil Gaiman, David Hare, PD James, AL Kennedy). And here's Part 2 (Hilary Mantel, Michael Moorcock, Michael Morpurgo, Andrew Motion, Joyce Carol Oates, Annie Proulx, Philip Pullman, Ian Rankin, Will Self, Helen Simpson, Zadie Smith, Colm Tóibín, Rose Tremain, Sarah Waters, Jeanette Winterson)
• Things Writers Can Do Instead of Writing (Patricia Stoltey, 7-23-09)
• 13 Writers Who Grew to Hate Their Own Books (Emily Temple, Literary Hug, 1-29-18) Among them, Ian Fleming, The Spy Who Loved Me (1962); Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962); Jeanette Winterson, Boating for Beginners (1985); Annie Proulx, Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999, because of one story: "Brokeback"; Stephen King (as Richard Bachman), Rage (1977); Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1867) Peter Benchley, Jaws (1974). "Benchley deeply regretted the shark-paranoia that he spawned with his work. In fact, after the book was published, he became a shark conservationist and sought to educate people about the animals and their very slim threat to humans."

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“People ask me, ‘Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security, about love, the way others do?’. . . The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it. . . There is communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.”
~ M.F.K. Fisher, The Gastronomical Me

Writers on writing (Fiction Writers Review--posts by, for, and about emerging writers)

****• Writers on Writing This is a complete archive of the New York Times's Writers on Writing column, a series in which writers explore literary themes and craft.
• Writers on Writing, a weekly radio program hosted by Barbara DeMarco-Barrett (author of Pen on Fire: A Busy Woman's Guide to Igniting the Writer Within) and Marrie Stone, interviewing writers, poets and literary agents. You can download and listen to podcasts.
• Writers on Writing (Fiction Writers Review) Suspend your disbelief.
• The Writer’s Technique in Thirteen Theses: Walter Benjamin’s Timeless Advice on Writing (Maria Popova, Brain Pickings) Examples: “The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.” "Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens."
• Writing Links & Links for Writers (Sal Towse) Lots of links. Browse away.
• The Writing Show (Paula B, podcasts of information and inspiration for writers)
• Writing-World.com (many helpful articles on a wide variety of topics)
• Writing habits of successful authors I have known (Alan Rinzler)
• Writing My Way to a New Self (Hana Schank, Opinionator, NY Times, 3-21-15) "Now, instead of having to call editors or sources, one could simply email them. And while on the phone I was awkward and stiff, in email I was my charming inner self. The phone meant talking, but email meant writing, and writing was something I could do."

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Websites, organizations, and other resources

A GREAT READ

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So, You Want to Write a Book!

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