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Writers and Editors (RSS feed)

The old days, in book publishing

"We proudly carried manuscripts everywhere.... Decades later, I discovered that my right arm was a half-inch longer than my left," writes Joni Evans in a Preoccupations story for the New York Times.
"But it was our office archaeology that I remember the most. There was a primitive chaos to it all — the hybrid scent of tobacco and mimeograph ink, Read More 
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Association for the Abolition of the Aberrant Apostrophe

In his classic column about abuse of the apostrophe, Keith Waterhouse wrote, "The AAAA has two simple goals. Its first is to round up and confiscate superfluous apostrophes from, for example, fruit and vegetable stalls where potato's, tomatoe's and apple's are openly on sale. Its second is to redistribute as many as possible of these impounded apostrophes, restoring missing apostrophes where they have been lost, Read More 
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Where is Sarah Wernick's "So, You Want to Be a Writer" website?

For years writers, editors, and publishers have referred writers with questions about how to get a book published to the wonderfully helpful website of the late, great Sarah Wernick. Her old links don't work but SARAH'S WEBSITE STILL LIVES! You can find it on two pages of my Writers and Editors website:

Part 1 is  Read More 
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Amazon, Sony, and Google: Digital Revolution or E-Books War?

Farhad Manjoo admires the Kindle 2 but fears its implications: "Amazon's reader is a brilliant device that shanghais book buyers and the book industry into accepting a radically diminished marketplace for published works. If the Kindle succeeds on its current terms, and all signs suggest it'll be a blockbuster (thanks Oprah!), Amazon will make a bundle. But everyone else with a stake in a vibrant book industry — authors, publishers, libraries, chain bookstores, indie bookstores, and, not least, readers — stands to  Read More 
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Where does Dave Robicheaux go for information?

“I long ago became convinced that the most reliable source for arcane and obscure and seemingly unobtainable information does not lie with government or law enforcement agencies,” says James Lee Burke’s hero, Dave Robicheaux, in Last Car for Elysian Fields  Read More 
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Narrative Medicine

A colleague who read The Beneficial Effects of Life Story and Legacy Activities told me about a Narrative Medicine workshop being held in Venice, Italy (Sept. 20-22, 2009). The idea: narrative training with stories of illness  Read More 
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Self-publishing success story (again, a good niche)

After being rejected by all the publishers to whom she sent her manuscript, a seven-year labor of love titled I Am Hutterite, Saskatchewan author Mary-Ann Kirkby self-published it under the imprint Polka Dot Press. This was NOT a print-on-demand publication  Read More 
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Authors' moral rights: Don’t Touch ‘A Moveable Feast’

"BOOKSTORES are getting shipments of a significantly changed edition of Ernest Hemingway’s masterpiece, “A Moveable Feast,” first published posthumously by Scribner in 1964," writes A.E. Hotchner in an Op Ed piece, (Don't Touch 'A Moveable Feast'), for The New York Times.  Read More 
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Abandon Hopefully

I used to have a little sign above my office door that said "Abandon hopefully all ye who enter here," and for years I've tried not gritting my teeth when people said things like, "Hopefully it won't rain." My poor daughter grew up with this bias against using "hopefully" in the sense of "it is hoped,"  Read More 
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Memoirs: Is honesty the best policy?

Graceanne K. Deters includes provocative copy in her website copy about the hidden story of a missionary daughter navigating a maze of religious fanaticism, and the dark side of her early life in  Read More 
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