“I know what your thinking,” David Letterman said. “Somebody writes this crap?” A few years ago the Wife and I entered a costume contest, won trips to London, and spend a few weeks in the U.K. As Steve Martin once said- it’s like a whole other country other there. TV is different, in that it isn’t exactly commercial, you have to pay some sort of tax for it. This means that the British TV networks worked for the British Government. It seems there have been a few changes in the system, but I haven’t really kept up. When we were…
Category: writing
Tips for Better Writing and The Readability Tests
George Orwell was like many writers-he didn’t like the way other writers wrote. Writers look at the written word a bit differently from readers. Readers might like writing filled with enough grammatical errors to make English teachers reach for their rulers. Writers hate laziness in other writers. Mark Twain hated other writers. Edgar Allen Poe complained about the writing skills of authors that have long since been forgotten. Hemingway’s short attention span style of writing was a revelation. Yet when Hemingway was writing, William Faulkner was cranking out sentences that took up entire pages. Would Hemingway be a better blogger…
Ghostblogging
Does a blogger need ideas to blog?
I’ve been blogging in a not too serious fashion for a couple of years now. I’ve been writing off and on forever. I used to listen to talk radio and read the editorials in the local papers and these were often all I needed to get a good head of steam up. Somewhere along the line I just stopped caring about most of the stuff they talk about in these places. I mean, it’s like Howard Stern, once you’ve heard one show, by god, you’ve heard them all. I don’t care who killed Kennedy. Whining about the war isn’t going…
If You Write It
Or maybe it should be, if you blog it.I have recently taken a more serious interest in the blogging again. Not serious enough to go out and find people to read and leave comments with, but serious enough to think that maybe there should be a bit more to it. So I have set up accounts on Dig and Netscape and have submitted a couple of my posts to them. I am starting to feel that old tingle of hope that writing is something I can do and make money.Blogging for dollars, anyone need a freelance blogger? Anyone?
About that book I’m writing. . .
Long dark months ago when I started this blog I mentioned that I was writing a new novel. A bit of boffo sci-fi in the near future, end of the world as we know, how will humankind ever survive kind of thing. Well, I am still writing it, but very, very slowly. It is a bit, well, bad. I have fallen into the greatest of all traps and let myself do little more than copy the best bits out of every story I have ever read and paste them together. This is not always a bad thing. The Matrix was…
To be a Writer, then Read
I have been reading since about the fifth grade. I know this is kind of late and sad by todays standards of forcing the little ones to read by kindergarten, but those were different times. My first real book was Charlotte’s Web. We all got a laugh out of the farmer putting his knee to Wilber’s behind to get him to move. It was a couple of years before I really started reading a lot of stuff of my own choosing. A teacher gave me a stack of old sci-fi magazines and I was hooked for life. There was everything…
Out of the Nowhere
One of my heroes is a curmudgeonly fellow named Harlan Ellison. He is famous for ranting and raving and occasionally writing some pretty damned good sci fi, or SF as he might prefer it to be called. Once upon a time he was on about Video Games. He called them time sinks, said they were a waste of time, that you could be doing something, anything, better than playing video games. There is that feeling about blogs as well.And yet.Nothing pains the writer so much as never being published. As never seeing a byline or buying up all the copies…