“Advice for Authors”

Michael Blowhard of 2Blowhards sent me to this excellent post by Seth Godin on the perils of “making a living” writing non- fiction. A couple of quotes? “Please understand that book publishing is an organized hobby, not a business”. “There is no such thing as effective book promotion by a book publisher.This isn’t true, of …

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On regional writing

A friend, a younger writer, asked my opinion on when one can be allowed, so to speak, to write about a place one was not born in. Here are his questions, and some thoughts of mine on the matter, those of a Bostonian who has lived in rural New Mexico for 25 or so years.. …

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So that’s how they do it..

Anyone who has ever been in the far north knows that its greatest curse is not cold but blood- sucking summer insects, in numbers that can drain a caribou or a human. So maybe it should come as no surprise that evolution has fitted some birds with their own built- in mosquito repellent. “Hector Douglas, …

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“The blazon of expressed shapeliness..”

Some very nice lines on domestication from poet, critic, and philosopher Fred Turner, from his The New World: An Epic Poem (1985). “We are the holy and dangerous beast who dared to domesticate not only our plant and animal servants but also ourselves: and not for usefulness only but chiefly for beauty, the blazon of …

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