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Sooooooooo. I'm swamped with work at The Day Job this week, so I'm going to leave you with some educational and edifying weekend reading.

The Write To Done website is inviting practicing writers to actually interact with commenters in a sort of Comment Section Writing Workshop. It's a great idea, and I hope it works.

Here are a couple comments from some brave writers who stepped up to the plate. Read the whole article here.

First of all, Writer Dad weighs in with a problem that affects my own writing sometimes: "My writing can be a bit too enthusiastic. I get giddy with the words, and sometimes don’t allow ideas to breathe."

Dave Navarro is looking for some guidance on his eBook, looking for advice for "first-time self-improvement authors."

Welcome to Dueling Comments, where I print my favorite comments that I've spotted in publishing blogs. There are some smart people lurking in the comments sections of blogs, so I'm scrounging around the Internets to find the crazy, the useful, and the crazy-useful wisdom that they leave behind.

What kind of prose do you prefer in crime novels?

Over at Sarah Weinman's excellent blog, mystery readers are debating crime writer George Pelecanos' style--he's the author of 12 novels and and a producer on my favorite retired television show, The Wire.

Sarah points us towards a Washington City Paper article that charts the crime writer's style--Pelecanos moved from a more effusive style (in A Firing Offense towards hardboiled haiku (in The Turnaround). 

Opinions of this style shift are mixed in the comments section. Check them out, and meet a new writer in the process. Barbara (who shares my obsession with Batman's political metaphors) writes that she was disappointed with later Pelecanos: "I liked Hard Revolution much better, and some of his earlier ones; the Big Blowdown might give you a sense of what all the fuss is about. He's good at nailing eras as well as place," she writes.

John weighs in with a more measured review. "There's no accounting for taste, is there. A book that one loves another loathes. And so it goes."

Want to get into a creative writing MFA program? Besides polishing up your best work, you need to master in a very particular genre--the graduate school application essay.

Luckily, the Creative Writing MFA Blog has some crucial intelligence on the subject lurking in the comments section. I've dug out a few of my favorites. Here, a person accepted at Columbia University offers some advice:

"I would think they'd rather hear an applicant speaking in a fresh way about a more mainstream book than write something vague and uninteresting about a book that they've never heard of ... 1000 words come easily and well when you have something to say."

And here, Columbia MFA student Lincoln Michel reminds the applicant to pay attention to the kinds of classes offered at his school--another key to crafting a better essay: "Unlike some other programs that only ask you to take a handful of classes, Columbia requires more seminars and craft classes so maybe wants to look closer at how students can contribute to them."

Welcome to Dueling Comments, where I print my favorite comments that I've spotted in publishing blogs. There are some smart people lurking in comment sections, so I scrounge around the Internets to find the crazy, the useful, and the crazy-useful wisdom that they leave behind.

The media blog Fimoculous has become one of my favorite reads lately.

It's easy-to-read, well-written and keeps all of Rex Sorgatz's webby projects together in one place. Every once in awhile, the comments section lights up with some glittering moments of webby theory and attitude.

Case in point, this post where he discusses his microfame article that was published in New York magazine. A great read, it generated some pithy meditations on the fleeting, self-referential nature of web production.

Our buddy Steve Bryant had this to offer: "Self-aggrandizement in the service of self-deprecation in the service of self-aggrandizement is...meta-propaganda? You're a nesting doll of solipsism, rexy."

And Kurtis added this zinger: "If you become microfamous for talking about microfame, does that make you metamicrofamous? And do you get to be in the next Weezer video?"

Welcome to Dueling Comments, where I print my favorite comments that I've spotted in publishing blogs. There are some smart people lurking in the comments sections of blogs, so I'm scrounging around the Internets to find the crazy, the useful, and the crazy-useful wisdom that they leave behind.

I'm taking it easy this week, savoring a little time off at work and bowing to the inevitable summer traffic drop. I thought it might be a good time to test-drive a new feature.

Welcome to Dueling Comments, where I print my favorite comments that I've spotted in publishing blogs. There are some smart people lurking in the comments sections of blogs, so I'm scrounging around the Internets to find the crazy, the useful, and the crazy-useful wisdom that they leave behind.

Over at Gawker, Special K weighed in with these smart thoughts about blogging authors--something all fledgling writers and aspiring bloggers should take to heart. Check it out:

"some bloggers can't write coherently beyond an 800-word limit ... and, like writers-workshop dropouts, also make the mistake that general-audience readers give a flying fuck about their oh-so-unique personal experiences. But there's also this... good blogs tend to be funny, witty, snarky. And not ony is it hard to be funny, witty, snarky for extended periods of time, it can actually be hard to read -- well, snarky at any rate -- for extended periods of time."

On the other side of the coin, Jungle--purportedly a publishing insider--explains why they advise many writers not to blog.