Midge Raymond's Blog, page 62

To Whim It May Concern

During a recent visit with my sister, which always ends up meandering down memory lane, we remembered, both fondly and not so much, living together in Boston as we looked for jobs. This was (way) back when we didn't have Internet access, and we actually looked for work in the classifieds and sent out real, paper resumes and cover letters.

She had just graduated from college, I was finishing my master's degree, we were sharing a very small apartment, and we were both clearly in a big hurry to find

What's in a name? Well…

I remember when I was starting up my writing/teaching/editing business in Southern California — and how, with everything else that had to be done, what drove me the most insane was choosing a name. With the help of friends, family, alcohol-soaked brainstorming sessions (a few sober ones, too), and random surveys, I came up with Metropolitan Writing Works, with the domain MetroWriting.com.

That's a lot better than Pen Island, whose domain is penisland.com. Yikes. (Then again, I'm sure that site s

"Fiction writers are gossips"

…says author Joshua Henkin in this Daily Beast blog, The Book-Club Hustlers, adding "What fiction writer doesn't want to be invited into a stranger's living room?" Not just for the gossip, mind you, but for the book sales.

This is a great post on authors doing book clubs — which these days is one of the major ways for a writer to sell books. (Author Mickey Pearlman, a professional book-club facilitator, goes as far as to say, "The only thing that's going to save publishing is book clubs.") As a f

The Bookstores of the Future

This Boston Globe article on a Vermont independent bookstore offers a glimpse of what our future bookstores might look like — and it actually paints a pretty nice picture.

Imagine your local indie bookstore with "all the classic trappings: exposed beams, wood tables stacked with hardcover bestsellers, comfortable leather chairs nestled into alcoves" — as the Globe describes the Northshire Bookstore. Then imagine being able to get virtually any book you want on demand, while you wait. That's what

On New and Emerging Writers

On Angela Fountas's  wonderful web site for writers, Write Habit, she offers a great list of literary magazines especially for new and emerging writers.

What got my attention was her definition of new/emerging writers — "emerging meaning writers who have not yet published a book, and new meaning writers who have not yet published in journals" — which I was glad to see, since I've never really been clear on the whole thing.

When asked by students, in my cluelessness I've quoted Tobias Wolff's defi

Creative Critiquing

One of the biggest challenges in a creative writing workshop is accepting comments from other writers with open-mindedness and grace. Perhaps an even bigger challenge is critiquing other writers' work with that same open-mindedness and grace. Visit McSweeney's for a hilarious compilation of comments from manuscripts workshopped at a major university.

As someone who's been leading workshops for many years, I appreciate that most of these comments were written in a tone of helpful kindness ("Maybe

Twitterature: It's what's on the syllabus.

This Wall St. Journal blog begins with "Do you hear that? It's the sound of Shakespeare, rolling over in his grave." That's because it's about a new book, Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books, Now Presented in Twenty Tweets or Less, forthcoming from Penguin Classics, which is, according to its web site, "A humorous retelling of works of great literature in Twitter format written by two 19-year old University of Chicago freshmen."

Why can't college freshman just get drunk and pass out somewher

A glut of abstruse neologisms for NYT readers

In class this morning, a writer mentioned that one of the reasons she has a good vocabulary is that, while growing up, whenever she asked her stepfather what a word meant, he would answer in the form of another, bigger word — and then she'd have to look them both up. It reminded me of how I became a good speller: Whenever I asked my mom how to spell something, she'd say "Look it up" — and when you don't know how to spell something or even where to begin looking (and this was back in the day when

A Comma Runs Through It

It looks as if I have something in common with judge and Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor: As William Safire reports in yesterday's NYT Magazine, "'Each time I see a split infinitive,' she is on record as saying, 'an inconsistent tense structure or the unnecessary use of the passive voice, I blister.'"

She doesn't mention comma splices, however.

This sign actually has a lot of grammatical challenges — but the one that bugs me the most is that a comma runs through it, a comma where there shoul

Restless Brain Syndrome

I met my Writing Buddy for coffee yesterday, and as usual we had a great chat about the process and challenges of writing, particularly now, as we each have several projects going at once. I was telling her about my recent malady, Restless Brain Syndrome (not an official condition, as far as I know, but it feels like one), which essentially means my mind can't seem to slow down long enough to tackle any one project with the necessary degree of productivity.

So I'm trying a couple of coping strate