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Along with Susan Henderson, Litpark, and THREE HUNDRED OTHER BLOGS, I'd like to celebrate the work of a first-time novelist who just realized her dream today, after struggling with all the writing life problems that we discuss here.

Patry Francis wrote her novel The Liar's Diary with a dayjob and a family, finally publishing her book today. Go check it out and cheer her on for this major milestone.

Sadly, Francis is now battling cancer and the litblog community is coming together to celebrate and support her on this happy day. If you get a chance, visit her wonderful blog and keep Francis in your thoughts today--we all share in the struggle and the successes of our online writing community.

Here's the post at LitPark:

"[These] people traded hundreds of emails with me to put this together: Karen Dionne of Backspace, Jessica Keener of Agni and The Boston Globe, Dan Conaway of Writers House, and Alice Tasman of the Jean Naggar Literary Agency. What began as a personal gesture of caring for a friend became an astonishing show of community - writers helping writers; strangers helping strangers; and most surprising of all, editors, agents and publishers, who have no stake in this book, crossing 'party lines' to blog."

Question: What's the most straightforward name for a writing website, ever?  

Answer: YouDon'tNeedNoMFA.com. I love their focus on community, and they have an essay by Jim Harrison that is well worth your time if you are considering enrolling in a MFA writing program. Check it out: "'The Bourgeois Poet' should be taught to the thousands taking M.F.A.’s in creative writing who wish to become poet-professors. As I said I tried it myself but found the work too hard. There’s a subdued but relentless hurly-burly in academia that swallows up discretionary time. It’s like living with a slight backache, not fatal but enervating." (Thanks Gordon Hurd.)

Susan Henderson is going on vacation, and she's taking stock of her web stats. People find your website for the craziest reasons. She leaves the comments section open, so look for hundreds of lonesome quotes from Litpark fans. 

Don't forget that next week, novelist Lance Olsen will stop by to discuss his new book, Anxious Pleasures. I just want to reiterate how much I agree with about finding your writing community (with or without an MFA!): "it's a tiny handful of voices I've learned to trust that can and do continually challenge my writing in fruitful ways," he told me, describing his favorite readers.

Publishing Spotted collects the best of what's around on writing blogs on any given day. Feel free to send tips and suggestions to your fearless editor: jason [at] thepublishingspot.com.

Nice will get you laughed at in the blogosphere. Nice won't score you a tell-all book deal. Nice gets a bad rap.

Nevertheless, I dig nice writers. People like Bruno Schulz or Susan Henderson get passed over because they have such quiet, kind writing voices. This week, in honor of Susan Henderson's fabulous book deal, it is Nice Week at her website.

Go check it out, it will cheer you up. Don't forget to answer her question, "say something nice about the person who posted right before you."

Here's my answer: Mark Bastable has the simplest, most readable Myspace page, more soothing than the hundreds of obnoxious, noisy pages that gum up my browser. Via his excellent page, I discovered his nice short story at Amarillo Bay--a stylish piece in love with the virtual worlds and twisty syntax of the Internet. Most of all, I like how he fixated on the phrase containing "nudist balloonists." That says a lot about a person.