The London Review of Books yielded this at the breakfast table:

"In the words of A.S. Byatt, who worked with [Penelope] Fitzgerald at Westminster Tutors, the London crammer, she was ...  ‘someone with an austere, original talent’, and Byatt presents the way she came to understand this as an epiphany.

‘She said to me about Human Voices’ - the ( Read more... )

Last night, we went to Town Hall to see Richard Thompson solo acoustic concert of perpetual bliss.  He always does that to me.  A genius songwriter and guitarist - but also a performer of tremendous generosity.  The air changes when he's in it.  I love his albums, but LIVE . . . I swear to you, he cured my flu one night in Boston - for 24 hours, ( Read more... )

My favorite quote from Day 2 was when we were going around the circle of our writers' group, asking what everyone was working on.

Sarah Smith:  "I am about 1000 pages into a 400-page novel!"

And so concludes Day One of the Mass(achusetts) All-Stars 2-day  Ad Hoc workshop, in which Our Gang convenes whenever someone gets a novel draft done, and "sits on it," subjecting it to intense peer scrutiny and analysis.

Today was Holly Black's stunning & scrumptious The Coldest Girl in Coldtown.  Nothing beats talking Writing with her and Sarah ( Read more... )

So many wonderful people were at Readercon - ones I would gladly have spent all day with - or at least had a meal or even a drink with - I never even got to do more than wave at across the lobby!  Which is not to say I didn't have a splendid time with the ones I did spend time with; I did, and I'd been hoping/planning to write up a full con report ( Read more... )

And so we have arrived at the House of Heart's Desire: big house in Maine near Blue Hill, looking out over the Reach to Deer Isle, alone here, settling in to do nothing but read, cook & Write for 10 days.

Came upstairs the first morning (yesterday) to find Delia still in bed, finishing Ysabeau Wilce's new Flora Segunda novel, FLORA'S FURY. Since ( Read more... )

‎"Stories are always really, really hard. I think it's totally rational for a writer, no matter how much experience he has, to go right down in confidence to almost zero when you sit down to write something. Wy not? Your last piece is never going to write your next one for you."
-- John McPhee: 
The Art of Nonfiction No. 3
The Paris Review
Spring 2010

"I do not want actors and actresses to understand my plays.  This is not necessary.  If they will only pronounce the correct sounds, I can guarantee the results."
-- George Bernard Shaw
I'm not sure I agree with that - hell, I'm not even sure GBS did - but I sure love the line.  Gearing up for more "illuminated" audiobooks, control freak that I am, I ( Read more... )

One of the nicest gifts I got this year was this, a cover letter to a set of copyedits from our publisher to all his authors from editor Jonathan Strahan:

As is often the case, the copyedits are sometimes perceptive, sometimes
save the day, and occasionally miss the point or wreck the sense or
poetry of your prose.  In most cases the copyedits are ( Read more... )

Absolutely wonderful piece on the author of "Downton Abbey" (& screenplays of "Gosford Park," Vanity Fair," "Young Victoria' - which we recently saw & were suprisingly impressed by; now I know why - "Emma," etc.), Julian Fellowes, in this Sunday's NYTimes Magazine.  Everything he says sounds right to me - I particularly loved this, though:

"I don't ( Read more... )