Justine Musk's Blog, page 49

body language

One of the people to leave some of the most remarkable comments on my blog Tribal Writer is Dan Owens, who was referring to my 'body language' posts just when I am thinking about writing an essay called "Body Language for Writers" for my next date with Storytellers Unplugged (I post a piece there on the 20th of every month).

We betray ourselves with body language in a myriad of subtle ways because it stems from a part of our brain that is generally beyond our control. It gives new emphasis to...

year of the phoenix

#Best09

(This is The Best of 2009 Blog Challenge. It's kind of awesome. If you have a blog you should check it out.)

Best word or phrase. A word that encapsulates your year. "2009 was _____."

2009 was my phoenix year. The year divorce unnamed me. The year I renamed myself when I became an American citizen. I saw the truth about my life and my world split open. This is a new life rising.

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where do you get your ideas (or: how it all started with Britney)

cross-posted to Tribal Writer



When people ask, "Where do you get your ideas?" the answer is as simple as "Everywhere!" and too complex to explain without fear of boring the person to death.

To get ideas, you need to be open to the world, you need to be curious and interested, you need to give yourself permission to follow your obsessions wherever they might lead you, no matter how trivial they seem at the time.

I went through a fascination with Britney Spears. I couldn't get enough of readin...

starting your author blog and choosing your blogging platform

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Before you start your blog, it's worth asking yourself, What am I going to be passionate enough to write about, day after day after day?

Frankly I never bothered (or didn't know) to ask myself this.

I jumped in and started to blog.

Although I didn't think of it as 'blogging', maybe because in 2005 the word 'blog' seemed a bit alien to me.  It was something other people did, and as a non-techie non-geek non-computer kind of person who could barely manage her cell phone, thinking of myself as a...

where do you get your ideas: Britney and me

When people ask, "Where do you get your ideas?" the answer is as simple as "Everywhere!" — and too complex to explain without boring you out of your head.

To get ideas, you need to open yourself to the world, give yourself permission to follow your obsessions wherever they might lead you, no matter how strange or how trivial they seem at the time.

I went through a fascination with Britney Spears. I tend not to buy or read tabloids…except if Britney is on the cover. I am not proud of this. I...

would love your thoughts on the different blogging platforms

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I am collecting thoughts and opinions on Livejournal vs Blogger vs Wordpress vs Typepad. Would love to know yours -- which do you use, and why?

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Dinner last night at Craft, which is Top Chef judge's Tom Colicchio's restaurant in Century City (a financial district in Los Angeles not far from where I live in Bel Air). Rich good food served family style, but what won me over were the packaged muffins served with the check for us to take home for breakfast the next morning. It's only the second ...

what a good blogger and a good conversationalist have in common

One of the things I didn't understand when I started my Livejournal four or five years ago was that an author blog is so much more than a way to showcase your writing or promote your books.

When other people read your blog, a small number of them will leave comments, which means the reader becomes the writer and the writer becomes the reader.  That shifting reader-writer relationship plays itself out through a dialogue that makes the original blog post so much more valuable.

A blog is like a...

mapping the space between us

One of the ideas I became interested in and want to explore in my novel-in-progress THE DECADENTS is, to paraphrase a character from one of my favorite novels of all time, WHAT I LOVED (Siri Husvedt) is "mapping the space between us, where one person ends and another person begins."

This is the concept of personal boundaries, and when you're fleshing out your characters it's useful to think of how healthy -- or not -- their boundaries are. If I have boundaries with holes in them (and most of ...

blogging is good for you: why, for the love of the gods, you should start your author blog today

Aren't you guys on Twitter?

So you're an author — published or unpublished, doesn't matter — and you've accepted the cold hard truth: you need a blog.

Maybe you're not exactly sure why you need a blog, only that everybody (publishers, editors, agents, your aunt, your landlord, the kid who walks your dog) says you need a blog, and you have this vague fuzzy sense that a blog is supposed to help you sell books, even if you haven't written them yet. You also have this equally fuzzy sense that a...

one of the challenges for any writer

One of the challenges for any writer is to find that balance between solitude and intimacy, independence and community.

An artist – and by this I mean anyone who takes art-making seriously, whatever kind of art that may be – is by definition a rebel. The whole point of art is to shake things up, challenge the status quo, get people to look at things anew and maybe, just maybe, alter their belief system.

An artist is a witness: to make art is to make meaning of things, and in order for that...