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Deep in the grubby sump of one of those so-called ‘Social Media’ sites, there is a clump of aging comics fanboys called The Really Very Serious Alan Moore Scholars’ Group, known to its sad and lonely adherents as TRVSAMSG. When they’re not annotating everything in sight, or calling down ancient evils on the heads of […]

Do you plan to make a resolution to write more in the new year? Designer Raphael Lysander has created the “68 Inspiring Writing Tips From 9 Great Writers” infographic.

The image features advice from several beloved authors including Margaret Atwood, Kurt Vonnegut, and George Orwell. We’ve embedded the full piece below for you to explore further—what do you think? (via Electric Literature)

The Blank on Blank organization has created an animated video starring Slaughterhouse-Five author Kurt Vonnegut. The video embedded above features a recording made during an event where Vonnegut served as a guest speaker in front of a class at New York University.

During this speaking engagement, Vonnegut shared his thoughts on writing, childhood, and death. In the past, the producers behind this YouTube channel have made pieces with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings memoirist Maya Angelou, Fahrenheit 451 novelist Ray Bradbury, and Where the Wild Things Are creator Maurice Sendak.

Describe your latest book. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is a fairy-tale of New York (well, mostly New York). New York with added genies (jinn). It's about a jinnia princess, Dunia, who acquires a large number of human offspring, and uses them to help her battle an invasion of our world by the [...]

Latest published book … EL PERRO CON SOMBRERO You wrote it because … In doing my school visits to promote my book series Scary School, I visited many dual immersion and spanish-speaking schools and saw the need for bilingual picture books that could be used to teach either English or Spanish to early learners.

Audible.com, Amazon’s audiobook outpost, has released a new audiobook edition of Kurt Vonnegut‘s  controversial titles, Breakfast of Champions, read by actor John Malkovich.

The story is about the “meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast”: One, an unknown science fiction writer named, Theodore Sturgeon; the other an automobile dealer named Kilgore Trout.

“America, when this novel was published, was in the throes of Nixon, Watergate, and the unraveling of our intervention in Vietnam; the nation was beginning to fragment ideologically and geographically, and Vonnegut sought to cram all of this dysfunction (and a goofy, desperate kind of hope, the irrational comfort given through the genre of science fiction) into a sprawling narrative whose sense, if any, is situational, not conceptual,” explains the book’s description. You can listen to a sample version on Audible.com.

Filmmakers Robert Weide and Don Argott hope to raise $250,000 on Kickstarter to fund a documentary film on author Kurt Vonnegut.

Weide met Vonnegut in 1988 and spent years filming the author. The two became close friends, so much so that Weide never completed the film. Here is more about the project from the Kickstarter page:

What started out as a conventional documentary about an author, had now become a highly personal experience that suddenly felt exploitative to release publicly. And the years kept ticking by. (Incredibly, in 2015, Weide is just five years short of Vonnegut’s age when he first approached the author.) Finally, it was a Vonnegut intimate, close to the project, who suggested full disclosure, citing that the evolving friendship between author and fan should be folded into the film — in the same way that Vonnegut often interacts with characters in his own fictional narratives.

Weide has brought on Argott to help direct the segments in which Weide stars.

“A purpose of human life,

no matter who is controlling it,

is to love whoever is around to be loved.” 

― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

It’s something I started doing in the Jigsaw Jones series, so it’s nearly a 20-year-old tradition. I make small references to real books in my fictional novels. There’s no great reason for it, and as far as I know, nobody cares one way or the other. It’s just something I do to please myself. A tip of the hat.

In Scary Tales #4: Nightmareland, I throw in a reference to an old favorite, The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut. It happens in the first chapter. A boy, Aaron, is about to make an ill-fated purchase at a video game store.

And here we go, from page 6:

A black-haired girl with dark eye makeup sat at the counter. She hunched forward with her feet tucked under her chair, reading from an old paperback called The Sirens of Titan.

“Is this game any good?” Aaron asked. “I never heard of it.”

The girl wore clunky bracelets and silver rings on most of her fingers. She glanced at Aaron and shrugged. “Sorry, I just work here. Those games are all the same to me.”

And that’s it. Aaron buys the video game and our plot soon thickens.

As I’ve said elsewhere, I have no childhood memory of my parents reading to me. And I mean, ever reading to me. It must have happened, surely, but just as surely, it could not have been too often. Or I’d remember.

I was the youngest of seven, my father worked a lot, all those mouths to feed, and I don’t think it was something we did. I’m not complaining. Things were different in those days, and seven kids is a handful. I got the book bug — at least those first bites that ultimately led to the more serious infection (or should I say, affliction) — simply by growing up surrounded by readers. My brothers read, my sisters read, particularly Jean, the 6th oldest and closest in age to me; Jean always, always had a book. I think of her reading Tom Robbins and Richard Brautigan, though of course she read everything, and voraciously.

Naturally I became accustomed to the idea that reading was a source of pleasure. It was my destiny; someday I’d get a crack at those same books. My brother Billy, whom I worshipped at that time, favored science fiction. He read the “Dune” series, and Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man and, of course, Vonnegut. I think all my brothers read Vonnegut in the 70′s.

Strangely, I never got around to Sirens until I was in college, taking a class in American Literature while I was attending school in — wait for it — Nottingham, England. Because that made no sense at all! I even wrote a paper about it. I doubt the paper was any good. If you are going to spend time abroad, the last thing you want to do is waste it by studying. There was too much to learn, too many people to meet, too much wild fun to pursue.

But I did read Sirens while I was in England. And today I’m glad to tell you that I gave that book a nod in Nightmareland.

What Kurt Vonnegut set out to do was write a book about war, and in particular the firebombing of Dresden in World War II. What he ended up doing was writing clean around it — traveling in and out of time warps, bouncing on and off the earth, sometimes setting down on the planet Tralfamadore, [...]

Have you ever wondered how much time Les Miserables author Victor Hugo spent sleeping? Or how many hours 1Q84 author Haruki Murakami devotes to writing?

Podio has created an infographic called, “The Daily Routines of Famous Creative People.” The image (embedded below) shows the day-to-day schedules of 26 famous creative professionals including Lolita author Vladimir Nabokov, Slaughterhouse-Five author Kurt Vonnegut, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings author Maya Angelou.

Here’s more from The Huffington Post: “Whether we’re working on our latest novels, paintings or compositions and stuck in ruts, or we’re novices to the creative workspace entirely, we can all benefit from seeing how Charles Dickens, Pablo Picasso, and Mozart spent their days — even if it is just for fun.”

Want to develop a better work routine? Discover how some of the world’s greatest minds organized their days.
Click image to see the interactive version (via Podio).

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

According to Kurt Vonnegut, "The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable." In one hilarious, heart-wrenching, absurdist, wildly imaginative novel after another he did just that for countless readers, making life a little more bearable — not to mention a lot more [...]

Here we go, folks. It’s time for Fan Mail Wednesday — and it’s actually Wednesday, a first for the entire staff here at Jamespreller.com!

I’m reaching into the big box of letters . . . ah, here’s one from Seth in Iowa!

Dear James Preller,

Hello, my name is Seth. I am a fourth grade student in Iowa. Our class is writing letters to our favorite authors. I chose you. You write Scary Tales. What do you do when you get stuck? Also, what book are you writing now? Here are some suggestions; Scary Tales: Slenderman’s Eye because it is really scary. My favorite book is Good Night Zombie. It is captivating! You keep me into the book and the characters. I liked your book because it’s scary and fun to read. What book did you make and like the most? I obviously like GOOD NIGHT ZOMBIE!!! It’s really scary. You also give me courage to read your books. You give me the chills when I read the books. You inspire me to read and write. Thank you for writing stuff like scary books!

Sincerely,

Seth

#1.#2.#3.#4.#5.#6.#7.#8.#9.#10.Alex Palmer

This piece originally ran in Writer’s Digest magazine. For more from WD, check out the latest issue

It is too easy for first-time writers to obsess over book deals. Back in 1972, the great author Kurt Vonnegut cautioned one young writer against seeking an advance before finishing his book–sharing important advice that all aspiring authors.

Vonnegut advised his son (author Mark Vonnegut) “to carry on without an advance” while working on his first book. You can read the complete letter he wrote to his son in the new Kurt Vonnegut: Letters collection, but we’ve posted an excerpt below:

I have mixed feelings about advances on first books. They are hard to get, for one thing, and are usually so small that they tie you up without appreciably improving your financial situation. Also: I have seen a lot of writers stop writing or at least slow down after getting an advance. They have a feeling of completion after making a deal. That’s bad news creatively. If you are within a few months of having a finished, edited manuscript, I advise you to carry on without an advance, without that false feeling of completion, without that bit of good news to announce to a lot of people before the job is really done.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Have you ever written a scary story? In honor of the Halloween season, we are interviewing horror writers to learn about the craft of scaring readers. Recently, we spoke with author Jonathan Maberry.

Throughout Maberry’s career, he has won multiple Stoker Awards for his horror work. Last month, Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers released the third installment of the Rot & Ruin series, Flesh & Bone.

He has written for Marvel Comics and published multiple novels for both adults and young-adults. As a nonfiction writer, Maberry has examined topics ranging from martial arts to zombie pop culture. Check out the highlights from our interview below…

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

To celebrate the 30th annual Banned Books Week, one library in Kansas has gotten artistic. The Lawrence Public Library has created the Banned Books Trading Cards project, a series of drawings inspired by banned books and authors created by local artists.

Each trading card is inspired by a banned book or author. There is one for each day of the week.  The week kicked off with an homage to George Orwell‘s Animal Farm (pictured right) created by artist Barry Fitzgerald, followed by an homage to Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, drawn by Kent Smith. Today’s card by an artist known as Webmocker, celebrates John Updike’s Rabbit, Run.

Here is the artist’s statement: “Burning and otherwise destroying books being a favorite activity of censors, deconstruction seemed an appropriate approach to this tattered (literally falling apart as I read it) copy of Rabbit, Run.  Coincidentally, this book was purchased at the Friends of the Lawrence Public Library book sale.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

John Vitale is leaving HarperCollins this month. He worked with authors that included Kurt Vonnegut, Maurice Sendak and Shel Silverstein.

Here’s more from the company memo: “John joined the company in April 1977 when Harper & Row acquired Thomas Y. Crowell & Co. In 1978, he was named Production Director for the Children’s Division. In 1998 he was promoted to Vice President of Book Production, where he added the Adult Trade Group to his existing responsibilities of Children’s and Audio.”

The publisher will promote Tracey Menzies to VP of production and creative operations to replace Vitale.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

RosettaBooks has released a previously unpublished novella by Kurt Vonnegut. The 22,000-word Basic Training is on sale for $1.99 as a Kindle Single.

According to the publisher, the novelist tried to sell the novella to The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s in the 1940s. His children acknowledged that the story was autobiographical.

Check it out: “Written to be sold under the pseudonym of ‘Mark Harvey’—Vonnegut was working in public relations for General Electric and used pseudonyms to protect himself from the charge of moonlighting—BASIC TRAINING is the story of Haley Brandon. The adolescent protagonist comes to the farm of his relative, an old crazy who insists upon being called The General, who means to teach Haley to become a straight-shooting American. Haley’s only means of survival will lead him to unflagging defiance of the General’s deranged values.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

A 22,000-word novella called "Basic Training,'' written before Mr. Vonnegut's other works made him famous, will be published by RosettaBooks Friday.