Chris Abouzeid's Blog, page 21

Friday Faves: What Goes Choo Choo Tap Tap?

By Juliette Fay Answer: Trains full of writers working on their laptops! This makes me deliriously happy because a) I have a weird fondness for public transportation (something about the excellent people watching and not having to find parking), and b) I am so productive when I am trapped somewhere ...

Taking the Slow Road to the Fast Track

By Dell Smith I turned 50 last week. I’ve been a writer over half my life. I know things now that my 25-year-old self wouldn’t understand. I make a living working at a job (I manage a team of three tech writers at a software company) that my 25-year-old self ...

Persistence, or Staying on the Bus

by Bethanne Patrick Last Tuesday night I was in the middle of dream in which I was at my mother’s house telling her I had the flu–”Mom, my throat hurts and I can’t breathe”–when I woke up and realized that my throat hurt and I couldn’t breathe very well. My ...

The Business of Being a Writer: Everything We Want To Know, But Don’t Know Who To Ask. PLEASE WRITE THIS BOOK!

  By Randy Susan Meyers and M.J. Rose Every sort of book exists for us except one: an overall “the business of writing” book. Odd isn’t it? For insight on traveling from the first stirrings to actual crafting, there’s the excellent ON WRITING, by Stephen King. If you want to ...

VIDA and You

By Kim Triedman I’m the new kid on the block at BTM, so maybe I can start off by breaking a few rules.  My guess is the site is not meant to serve as a political stump, but if I ruffle a few feathers here I’ll just have to plead ...

Are Books Widgets?

By Laura Harrington   George Packer’s long-form essay, “Cheap Words,”  in the February 17 & 24, 2014 New Yorker, is superb. It’s a behind the scenes look at Amazon’s practices as they relate to books. An absolute must-read.  It’s about books, it’s about the publishing industry; it’s about the intellectual life ...

Writing Old

Abuelita, Laura Avellaneda-Cruz “I have reached an age when, if someone tells me to wear socks, I don’t have to.” –Albert Einstein by Kathy Crowley It’s no coincidence, I’m sure, that the central character of my current work-in-progress is a spirited eighty-something, and I’m suddenly much more attuned to the ...

On Reading One Another

  By Robin Black If you are a writer, the chances are that you have shown your work to other writers for critique and also that you have offered critiques of other people’s work. It’s what we do. It’s how we move from Point A (early draft) to Point B ...

The Waiting Is The Hardest Part (& Top 11 Better Things To Do)

By Nichole Bernier “A most useless place. The Waiting Place… for people just waiting.Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, or a plane to go or the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow, or the ...

And Now We Come To the End

By Ann Bauer I’m thinking of finding a therapist who can help me work through my novel completion issues. Because every time I write one, here’s how it goes. I get to what I know should be the end of the book. I have my characters all assembled and in ...