blogging

Without An Address, You Can’t Go Home

Posted on by Tom Bentley

Howdy Pardner Vegas Cowboy

Photo by Kevin Connors

When I lived in Las Vegas, my title at United Parcel Service was “Bad Address Clerk.” Because Vegas is a town of drifters, grifters and shifters of identity, packages would continually go astray, paralleled by the wanderings of their addressees, who in a month’s time in Vegas might have changed their residence—and their jobs, spouses and perhaps even their sex—two or three times. And then disappeared. So my shelves were filled with boxes large and small, for which the drivers could find no recipients.

Thus, if I exhausted every means of trying to locate these souls-on-the-wing (this being the 70s, many phone calls and phone book scratchings later), I would get to OPEN the packages, and, CSI-like, try to ascertain the whereabouts of the recipient by something in their contents. Guess what? People send very interesting things in the mail. Tear gas, for example. Firearms. Naughty things (I kept those). Jewelry. It was a diverting job, for a while; too bad it didn’t keep me out of the casinos.

Vicious tease that I am, I won’t let you see this tale fully unfold here. But know that it culminates in me stealing a car from a stripper, and having a cop remove me from my college classroom.

Well, at least that’s how it went down on paper. Check out the full article at Dave’s Travel Corner.

(What happens in Vegas—stays in your mind for years to come.)

All the News That’s Fit to Squint At

Posted on by Tom Bentley

I have an ongoing battle with myself (damn, every time I get on top, I’m on the bottom too) about reading and listening to the daily news. It can be such a litany of woe and strife: so many deaths, so many injustices that I become inured to the actual screaming pain of it and instead numbly click on to the next article. The drive to drink more news swill is partially due to me wanting to be a journalist for so many years, and for thinking that if I stay current with global currents, I’ll know what’s happening.

But often, what’s happening is just as real under the radar, on the other side of the insistent NOW. Life works its odd ways in the road-not-taken nooks and crannies of not-news and not-hot-news. So, while I continue to battle with whether I’ll lap up the blood-soaked headlines of today, I also subscribe to a number of email newsletters, some of them writing-related, some not, that take a different perspective on what’s interesting and important. (Note: do not point out that reading yet more digests of information doesn’t really address the prescription that it might be time to wean oneself off the news entirely. Bah! Resolutions are for New Year’s.)

So, some offbeat compendiums of not-quite-news:

Next Draft
A daily digest of the provocative, the crazed and the head-scratching (and sometimes it does include top-of-the-news stories, though often from a different angle). The guy behind this, Dave Pell, usually has some wry or deadpan take on the articles he lists, before you click through to the madness.

Brain Pickings
Often centering around writers and literature, this is a weekly digest of the old, the new and the odd. Let them explain: “Brain Pickings is a human-powered discovery engine for interestingness, culling and curating cross-disciplinary curiosity-quenchers, and separating the signal from the noise to bring you things you didn’t know you were interested in until you are.”

Work in Progress
A weekly (though not always) newsletter from the Farrar, Strauss Giroux publishing company, it will often have oddments from the byways of literature and literary types, sometimes with snippets from interviews of famed authors long dead, or snipings from unruly authors quite alive. Some promo of their own publications here, but not obnoxious.

Shelf Awareness
And if you want to find out which of your favorite bookstores are closing this week, this newsletter’s for you. Well, that’s not all they do—from their About: Shelf Awareness publishes two newsletters, one for general readers and one for people in the book business.
Shelf Awareness: Enlightenment for Readers, our new newsletter, appears Tuesdays and Fridays and helps readers discover the 25 best books of the week, as chosen by our industry experts. We also have news about books and authors, author interviews and more.
Shelf Awareness: Daily Enlightenment for the Book Trade, which we’ve been publishing since June 2005, provides booksellers and librarians the information they need to sell and lend books. It appears every business day and is read by people throughout the book industry.

Writing on the Ether
And if you need to read about which publishing industry maven is trashing Amazon today (but it’s funny, really), you can do no better than to go to Jane Friedman’s fine blog and read the Thursday edition of Writing on the Ether. There’s more than just Amazon trashing going on, with all the publishing industry in a constant froth about pretty much everything. Porter Anderson surveys and curates sharp commentary from every whichaway.

Extry, Extry, Man and Dog Both Bite Reporter

And a bit of my own news: Men With Pens put up a post of mine about “Why I Write.” Go there and tell me why you write as well. Or why not.

And I was a finalist in the Gotham Writer’s Workshop 50-word monologue contest, which solicited 50-word monologues on growing up in the suburban 60s. Guilty. I won two tickets to a Broadway revival of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” which I would dearly love to attend, but it being on the Right Coast, I can’t. I’ll be finding some backbiting, caustic, alcoholic NY friends of mine to give them to instead.

The Year of Magical Writing

Posted on by Tom Bentley

Writers’ funks are funny: sometimes it’s a single botched sentence that can send them into a tizzy. Or maybe reading about the success of something like 50 Shades of Grey turns them 50 Shades of Green. My own writer’s funk is restlessness. I do OK as a freelancer, both in writing for businesses and getting my stuff into magazines and other publications. I’m a long ways from writing for content mills or leaving a bleeding kidney on the doorstep of an editor that ignored my query. I’m two-thirds of the way through a second novel, and I know I won’t abandon it to die hungry in a cave.

But my attentions are scattered, and my discipline needs disciplining. I’ve been in the muse stew lately, paddling about the chunks of “why spend time writing that?” and “aren’t you just repeating yourself?” and “yeah, but you have to make a living, right?” A lot of the stewing has to do with thinking I’ve been writing at the same level for a while. I’ve become a bit too comfortable with both my professional and my personal writing—though god knows they’re still six stars short of stellar.

You see, I fear I’m the proprietor of Ye Olde Writer’s Junque Shoppe, where you can find a case-study plate with a little bit of food still stuck on it, another coffee-stained press release, a short story wearing worn shorts. I’m hungry for a challenge to my complacency.

Get Your Red-Hot Writing Wisdom (And There Might Be Cookies Too)
That’s why I’d be thrilled to win a free year of Carol Tice’s Freelance Writer’s Den. Carol is the den mother (along with the formidable Linda Formichelli), and the big brains behind the Make a Living Writing blog, which I’ve read for a long while. The level of practical writing (and writing-career) advice on the blog is consistently high—imagine what it might be in the close confines of the Den, where there are in-depth discussions on the nuts and bolts of writing for a living, and writing as an art. And besides the year in the Den, there are more perks galore to the winning writer.

The Den gives you access to webinars with guests like Peter Bowerman, Sean Platt and Chris Brogan. You learn juicy stuff like how to negotiate with clients, setting rates, knowing your audience, dealing with billing, and scads more. At least I hear you learn all those things, because I’m on the outside, looking in. But I know a big part of being a Den member is the electric exchange of ideas with fellow writers, who understand the struggles of freelancing. And who would likely prod someone suffering from Midlife Writer’s Crisis with a swift and deserved keyboard kick. Or an electronic hanky, if need be.

So, admission to the Den wouldn’t be a retreat, but an expedition to new writing territories, a Lewis and Clark unfolding of a new writing map.

Besides, I suspect there are chocolate chip cookies there too, and I’m hungry.

How to Find Your Why

Posted on by Tom Bentley

One of my most esteemed, smart, good-guy writerly pals, Joel D Canfield (don’t you dare punctuate that “D”) is stepping out on a limb to offer his services and counsel in a new enterprise-cum-enchantment called Finding Why. I suppose this venture is not really stepping out on a limb for Joel, because he has built this philosophical tree of his over time, and this latest branching is sound. Here’s how Joel might have explained it in his own words. (Actually, these are Joel’s own words, pre-trademark violation):

“Too many people spend life stuck, going through the motions; believing they know what to do and how to do it, but never really clear on why. Finding ‘why’ makes ‘what’ and ‘how’ become clear. I want to help folks who are stuck being what the world expected to find their why, to find meaning and joy in life, and show the world who they really are.”

Joel proclaims that there are already 10,000 ringing words on the site. (Joel, these words weren’t selected at random, were they?) There’s also, “… hundreds of thousands to come. Free downloads. Room for conversation. A little insanity.” That “little” is Joel’s first effort at understatement ever. Well done, man!

I do suggest you hie on over to FindingWhy and find out why. Joel’s broad shoulders can bear the weight of the “Renaissance Man” title (while at the same time, I can see him well-fitted for jester’s shoes. But a canny, giving jester at that). He likes good beer, laughs freely and makes excellent pancakes. He will give you good Why.

One-Year-Old and Still Spitting Up Words

Posted on by Tom Bentley

Indelicate as it may sound, what’s the worst thing about changing diapers on a writer’s blog? Obvious: it’s a load of smurshy adverbs and adjectives, plus what looks suspiciously like mashed-up peas. Why would I jar your sensibilities with such imagery? Because this blog is one year old, and it feels like screaming.

Well, perhaps just clearing its throat and smiling giddily for the camera. But instead of recounting my blogging triumphs and tribulations (oh, the hangnails!), and relating my tremulous beginnings, let’s have actual fun instead. Here, then are how three famous writers started their blogs.

Albert Camus
My blog was born today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be bothered. After the first few lines of the post, I felt exceedingly tired, and I put to rest. I answered the postman’s knock, and when he handed me a few fliers, I felt his look contained a judgment. I thought he was accusing me of something, perhaps even something indecent. I blurted out, “Yes, the blog, I’ll finish it. There is time!” But I closed the door on him without needing to see his reaction. Later, I felt poorly for having done it. Ennui.

Ernest Hemingway
He was an old man that blogged alone in a trailer off the California Coast, and he’d gone eighty-four days without a post. The first forty days a ragged old cat sat with him, waiting for the soothing sound of the keyboard. But even a cat loses loyalty after forty days. The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles on his knuckles from holding them over the keyboard. But still the words wouldn’t come. His mind always wandered to baseball, wondering why those damn Yankees were still in the league. But there was whiskey. The blog could wait.

Mark Twain
You don’t know me without you have read a blog called The Write Word, but that ain’t no matter. That blog is just as filled with lies as the rest of ’em, but it’s tolerable, if you’ve a taste for highfalutin hogwash. I’d just as soon blog about how a twist in a catfish tail tells you if you’re coming down with the gout, and whether spittin’ a glob of tobacco juice or a glob of vinegar is more likely to kill a roach. All that other hokum about blog traffic and targets is just fiddledeedee, and them other bloggers know it. My blog will be about graveyards and dead cats and haints—now that’s traffic! Lean on in now and I’ll tell you a story that will set your hair afire…

PS
OK, they might not have done them exactly that way, but you get the idea. They were like all writers, common horse thieves who steal words and ideas. It’s just how they put them together that made the difference. Thanks for spending some time with me this past year.

I can’t wait for the terrible twos, when I really get to scream.