Friday, July 15, 2005

Writers Read 

Today's trifecta: authorial incidence.

Item: Great single-paragraph daily bookblurbs in big-splash blogging newcomer (and fellow newparent) Christina's Read Every Day blogcategory. Finally, someone else who reads, as I do, seven times more voraciously than those silly 52 books in 52 weeks adherents.

Item: Donations must still be rolling in over at The Spriggan Experiment, the first book ever to be paid for -- chapter by chapter -- by the audience in advance. Great fun to come back every few weeks and find a few more bits of Wyatt Evans's fun-if-frothy series.

Item: Harry Potter, of course, unless you've been living under a rock. In honor of the "someone dies" routine, britpaper The Guardian challenges readership to write the death of Dumbledore in the style of some writer other than J. K. Rowling in 300 words or less. Blogosphere cut-and-pastes vary according to taste. Personally, I'm a William Carlos Williams fan:

This Is Just To Say

I have killed
the wizard
who was in
your novels

and whose death
you were probably
saving
for book seven

Forgive me
he had it coming
so beardy
and so old

Related Item: Making Light, poets use spam as fodder in their valiant attempts not to win recognition from faux-ganization International Library of Poetry.

Bonus: Writers write, too, and it's nice to be recognized; thanks to fellow wordsmiths Christina and Anne for their generous comments on the literary quality of the preceeding entry. Most bloggers go for content, but after years of teaching comparative media literacies, I guess I see context, text and subtext as equally important in writing clearly and with cohesion.

Another way of saying it took two hours to make that one come out even close to right, and that some subjects demand, nay, deserve being written well. After all, I've been thinking about this for a long, long time.

Bonus, too: Writers also fact-check, lest they wander into Newsweek territory. From this week's Corrections:

Our June 27 "Periscope" item "Third Rock From Gliese" reported that the distance between the dwarf star Gliese 876 and one of its orbiting planets is 8,640,797,039,500,000 miles. It is actually about 2 million miles away.

First their source backs out of his report of Koran-torture, now this. It's enough to turn a body to Time.

posted by boyhowdy | 12:40 AM |

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Comments:

Your parody of WCW is extraordinarily well done! Do you intend to sumbit it to The Guardian?

Amelia

# posted by  Anonymous : 1:32 PM, July 19, 2005

 

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