working hard or hardly?

If you’re not working hard, you are so busted: Steven Barnes tells you why talent isn’t the most important thing in writing.

 

B&N sees digital future

William Lynch is set to guide the retailer into a the digital. He’s just been named the new CEO of Barnes and Noble.

I don’t have a problem with ebooks. I love my Kindle for travel, but I also love books. I expect both will be with us in the future, but traditional publishing is going to have to adapt. That most likely means printing books as they are ordered, perhaps on site as Harvard’s doing.  As mentioned before, The Northshire Bookstore in Vermont has had success with print on demand, too.

 

day jobs

A half dozen famous writers and their day jobs, complete with salaries adjusted to today’s dollars.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day. If green beer isn’t  your thing, here are a few green cocktails.

 

there’s an app for that

Thanks to Leonard Chang for this link to 100 free applications of interest to writers. Enjoy and have a productive week.

 

back from the cold Caribbean

I’ve returned from vacation. Took a Caribbean cruise – sounds warm and inviting, no? Well, surprise, it was not warm. Correction, the people were, the weather was not. The people everywhere were fantastic – on board, on land, passengers, crew, locals, all fantastic. On the positive side, the cool weather kept the mosquitoes down. Had the great pleasure of meeting James Lileks and his family. Cannot top his account. Discovered a lot of people I met read the Dow Theory Letters by my friend, Richard Russell. For more information on Richard along with one of his most popular articles, go here.

In unrelated news, the National Book Critics awards were announced:

• Fiction: Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
• Nonfiction: The Age of Wonder , Richard Holmes
• Autobiography: Somewhere Towards the End, Diana Athill
• Biography: Cheever, Blake Bailey
• Criticism: Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays, Eula Biss
• Poetry: Versed, Rae Armantrout

Haven’t read any of them! My stack of ‘to-reads’ is already a mile high. As it turned out, there were far too many interesting people to talk to on the cruise, so I got almost no reading done. I’m about halfway through The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson and barely into War and Peace. I hope to get back to both this coming week.

The Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace came highly recommended. The interesting thing about a good translation is that it also exposes the limitations of translation. I’m not sure I have the language to explain, but it does make me wish I was fluent in Russian to understand Tolstoy’s rhythms and word choices.

Did I brainstorm new ideas for the next novel? No, I did not. However, I do know roughly what I want to write about. But first, revisions await.