How to use this Page

think.jot.draw

This is a great idea from Leeza Hernandez - a softcover book with lined and blank sections for brainstorming and sketching and then some really handy layouts for storyboarding thumbnail ideas for picture books. Mine has just arrived today - can't wait to start filling it.


You can get a copy here: thinkjotdraw

There is also a contest where you can enter to have a chance of your illustration printed as a limited edition on the cover.

Tonight I'm headed out to Film Forum to watch a 60-year-old movie (Phantom Lady) written by my favorite pulp fiction novelist. Seeing this film will do more to help my writing than an entire semester of literary theory. 

Reading pulp fiction as a novelist is like reading Shakespeare to write a better contemporary play. Writers should always know and emulate the early masters of their form. 

Cornell Woolrich was the godfather of the noir fiction, and his paranoid, twisty prose inspired masterpieces like Hitchcock’s Rear Window. While his hardboiled characters lived out adventures, Woolrich lived in hotel suites with his mother for 30 years.

Over the course of a rocky career, this guy wrote the template for the modern thriller--a road map for all writers on writing suspenseful, gripping plots. If you need more help, Sarah Weinman has a beautiful collection of film noir dialogue, all of it handpicked by contemporary crime writers--earn your Ph.D in pulp fiction.

Another alumni from The Publishing Spot school of hard knocks has graduated to a 10,000 word cover story in the world's best adventure magazine.

John Coyne noticed that our friend Tony D'Souza has been covering a nightmarish murder trial for Outside magazine, telling the story of an American tourist sentenced to 30 years in Nicaraguan prison for a murder he says he didn't commit. Check out the Death in Paradise podcast for more.

Need some inspiration to read and think about a book? Author Richard Powers sums up the power of a good book review. It's such a nice quote that I had to include the whole thing: "The reviewer becomes yet another character in the contested collisions that narrative unfolds. I know a good review – whether I’ve read the book under review or not – when I finish the review thinking about the world differently than when I began it." (Thanks, Sarah Weinman)

Broke? Unpublished? No problem! Smith Magazine links to three great writing contests for stories about dad's, rejections, and social networking failures. Start writing today... 

Are you sick of snobby critics making fun of your favorite science fiction or pulp fiction novelists? Don't despair! The genre book-reviewing world just got a whole lot better.

The Los Angeles Times Books section just contracted two of my favorite literary book reviewers to write about mystery and science fiction. Ed Park, the Believer editor and Philip K. Dick fan, will be writing a science fiction column. 

Then, Sarah Weinman, our buddy from Galleycat and Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, will be writing the paper's crime fiction column.

These writers should be injecting some enthusiasm and deep thoughts to a breed of literary criticism that usually skims the the surface of these wonderful genres. Weinman already opened the whole show over the weekend, these are solid, well-crafted essays. Look for Park next week. 

Check it out...

"I will be penning a monthly column on crime fiction, "Dark Passages," for the Los Angeles Times Book Review. It's part of a rotating cycle of web-only columns that include Ed Park on science fiction, Richard Rayner on paperbacks and Sonja Bolle on children's lit. Column number one debuts this weekend along with the revamped book section, and in it I muse on what happens when ghostwriters go solo - and when the reverse takes place."