Gentlemen (and Gentlewomen), Start Your Novels

November is, as many people know, National Novel Writing Month, or “NaNoWriMo.” It basically means you crank out a novel in 30 days, with a minimum length of 50,000 words, although I imagine children’s book writers get away with shorter word counts. I am not a NaNoWriMo participant, because although I’ve been known to write [...]

Read Full Post »

CLN Trivia for October 30, 2009

The first edition of what scary children’s novel featured the cover text “Time is running out for Lewis and his Uncle Jonathan….”? (Enter Here)

Read Full Post »

Addendum to Previous Post

Read Full Post »

Snake O’Lantern

Here is this year’s carved pumpkin, celebrating Mamba Point. Also me and my wife in our Halloween costumes. Fooled you, didn’t we? Happy Halloween!

Read Full Post »

Do the Gute: The Gold Bug

I said last week I’d post here and there about public domain texts, and it’s nigh time I did. With Halloween approaching, I decided Edgar Allan Poe would be a good place to start, but ended up selecting a wonderful gem of a detective story over any of his famous horror stories. The Gold Bug [...]

Read Full Post »

Books for Boys

I liked James Preller’s blog entry yesterday about “boy books,” and the example he posts of an atypical (and oddly touching) “boy book” about friends growing apart. “Boy books” is an interesting topic to me, and one I should blog more about, but I find myself confounded by the topic. What are “boy books”? I [...]

Read Full Post »

CLN Trivia Answer: This Kid is no Wimp

I asked what kids book outsold The Lost Symbol, at least the week it was released. The answer is Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days, the latest installment in the wildly popular book/cartoon hybrid by Jeff Kinney. I was going by this article, and realize now it only speaks to Amazon.com sales. I hope [...]

Read Full Post »

New Feature: Do the Gute!

I draw a lot of inspiration from other books, especially ones that have gathered mold in the libraries of the world. The reason being, seriously, that all writers basically get their ideas from other books, but the further back you go, the more original you seem. Write a knock off of Twilight, and you’ll make [...]

Read Full Post »

National Day on Writing

Today is the first ever National Day on Writing, meant to celebrate and reflect on all the writing we do — from Tweets to Facebook status to emails to poems and novels. Find out more about the day here, or submit your work to the National Gallery of Writing.

Read Full Post »

In Flew Enza

It’s been nearly a fortnight since my last non-trivial post, and a lot has happened since then. For example, I’ve been to Michigan and got horribly sick. I’m not implying those are similar or connected, mind you. But in Michigan I watched an endless, gut-wrenching tie-breaker baseball game between the Twins and Tigers on TV [...]

Read Full Post »