Cleaning Out The Closet ~ Six Little Jewels for Writers

In order to blog every Monday through Friday, which I’ve done now for 2 years 5 months, I need available material.

I could have chosen to write only my own thoughts here but, early on, I decided I wanted to be a “reporter”, too.

So, I scan the news every day, pay attention to my Stream in Google Plus, and have a number of keywords in Google Alerts.

Anything that seems appropriate for this blog gets stored in my closet—the Bookmarks in my Firefox browser.

Since I don’t usually decide what I’ll blog about till the time comes to compose a post, the process can leave some darn good resources in the bookmarks closet…

I’ll share six of those resources with you today.

First is a site many writers may not realize they could use, Is It Down Right Now?

Simple idea here—you’re doing research on the Web and a site doesn’t seem to want to load. Is it down or is your ISP being sluggish?

Just plug the address into this site and you’ll know :-)

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Next is a page that details some of the options for self-publishing at my favorite publishing-aid company FastPencil.

Do check out FastPencil’s Publishing Services Page.

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On to a site in my Best Friend’s home country, if:book Australia.

From their About Page:

“if:book Australia explores new forms of digital literature and investigates the changing connections between writers and readers. Such explorations at the intersection of technology and publishing take the form of writing, teaching, and experimenting.

“Since its inception in 2010, if:book Australia has published tens of thousands of words from some of the nation’s best writers and thinkers on book futures, delivered workshops from Perth to Canberra to Alice Springs, created real-world story adventures, and took a complete book from concept to print in twenty-four hours.”

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Next is an article about Metadata—do you know what that is?—hint: you definitely need to know about it if you self-publish…

Laura Dawson offers the article What We Talk About When We Talk About Metadata.

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Then, an article from the Oxford University Press Blog—Copyright law and creative social norms.

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Next, from Junot Díaz, Dominican-American writer, creative writing professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and fiction editor at The Boston Review—The Importance of Silence in Fiction.

An excerpt:

“We live in a culture whose expression baseline is the over-confessional mode. The compulsive over-confessional mode. We’ve all gotten so damn loud…At times it feels like too much information is no longer an exception but the order of the day….in such a climate silence for many people is not even a possible strategy; for me it is the substance out of which I carve my narratives.”

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Finally, from Tools of Change for Publishing, a chance to download a free report called Author and Publisher Relations and some commentary on the report.

Excerpt:

“One author wisely pointed out that, ‘I do not think that publishers know their readers. Their customers have always been bookshops and not the readers.’ How true. And isn’t this one of the biggest hurdles for publishers who now want to create a direct sales relationship with their readers?”

Hope you find some personal value in these six jewels :-)
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