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It's funny how, if you're open to thinking in slightly tangential ways, you can learn lots of writing- or author-related things in non-authorial settings. Like that time four years ago when I posted ten lessons I'd learned from watching Top Chef. This time, my lesson was derived from recent outings at rock concerts.

Last night, my friend Lisa treated me to some Cake - not the food, but the music of the band named Cake, best-known for their songs "Distance" and "Short Skirt/Long Jacket" and their funky cover of "I Will Survive." (It was Lisa's treat to celebrate my picture book deal with the good folks at tiger tales books.) We were both looking forward to the concert, especially Lisa, who has been waiting at least two years for them to return to Philly. To summarize our evening really briefly: We didn't care for the band. Don't get me wrong - their music was fine, but they mismanaged their concert time and some of the things that came out of the lead singer's mouth were really off-putting.

Now, Lisa was with M and I last Friday when we went to see The Airborne Toxic Event in concert (their biggest hit is "Sometime Around Midnight", which I can seriously listen to on replay quite a number of times in a row - such a great song structure!), and we are all still raving about how awesome it was. So I'll be drawing some comparisons here, but I promise that you don't have to know or like the music of either band in order to follow along. Although I can't help but repeat what I said in the post about Friday's concert - if you haven't yet heard The Airborne Toxic Event, you really should. And if you are on their tour route (in that post), you should see them. Now. Before they become HUGE. Because it is my belief (and Lisa's as well) that they are going to be big. Soon. But I digress.

What I learned about public appearances

1. No matter who you are, if people have turned out to see you, it's because they want to see you. In most cases, it's because they already like you (or your work), but in some cases it's because they are curious to learn more.

2. People who turn out to see you want to like you, even if they aren't sure exactly how much they like you already. The benefit of the doubt is in your favor. If you are at least okay, they will continue to like you.

    A. If you are really good - you do a great job reading your work, say, or giving a presentation - they may well be converted into lifetime fans. This is what happened for M, Lisa and me at The Airborne Toxic Event Concert. Musically, they were phenomenal. When Mikel Jollett (the lead singer) spoke, he was genuine and super nice, and the rest of the band nodded along, made eye contact with the audience and seemed approachable. So much so that after the curtain call that came after the encore, band members came down into the audience to mix and mingle and take photos. (M has a photo of herself with Mikel; Noah (the bass player) came into the crowd a bit later - I think he changed first, and we talked to Daren Taylor (the drummer) in the parking lot, and M got a photo with him as well.) Lisa, M and I cannot speak highly enough of the concert AND of the band members.

    b. If you are a jerk or if you phone in your performance at a speech or a reading or a meet & greet or at a signing, at least some percentage of the people who were your fans before they saw/heard/met you will decide never to buy another Cake song ever bother seeing, reading or recommending you again in the future. This is Lisa's and my experience with Cake, after John McCrea (lead singer) ruined our concert experience using a variety of tactics, some of which I'll detail below, but the final straw of which involved singling out a

Lauren, Publicity Assistant

If you haven’t already heard, unfriend is the New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year. In honor of this announcement, I surveyed Facebook users across the country about why they would choose to unfriend someone.

1. They’ve turned into a robot.
“People send me Green Patches all the time,” said Jane Kim, a television research assistant in NYC. “It’s annoying. And that’s all I ever get from them. Clearly, they’re not interested in actually being friends.”

That’s because your friends are robots, Jane. Marketing robots. These are the friends you never hear from except when they want you to join a cause, sign a petition, donate money, become a fan of a product, or otherwise promote something. Farmville robots are increasingly becoming problems as well, but are not yet grounds for unfriending.

2. You don’t know who they are.
“A few days ago, Facebook suggested I reconnect with a friend whose name I didn’t recognize,” said Jessica Kay, a lawyer in Kansas City. “She’d recently gotten married, but I hadn’t even known she was engaged. I’ll probably unfriend her later. Along with some random people I met at parties in college.”

“You’re tired of seeing [that mystery name] your newsfeed,” said Jonathan Evans, a contract specialist in Seattle. “You haven’t talked to that person since the random class you took together, and you’ll probably never talk to them again.”

3. They broke your heart.
Jonathan Lethem, author of Chronic City, shared that his number one reason to unfriend someone is “because they just broke up with you on Facebook.”

So, maybe they didn’t break your heart. But if the only reason you were friends on Facebook is because you two were somehow involved, it might be time to play some Beyoncé, crack open the Haagen-Dazs and click “Remove from Friends”.

4. You don’t like them anymore.
In the early years of Facebook, users would  friend everyone their dorm, everyone from high school, and every person they had ever shared a sandbox with. But now, many people are finding they no longer like a number of their friends, and spend time creating limited profiles, customizing the newsfeed, and avoiding Facebook chat.

Teresa Hynes, a student at St. John’s University, pointed out that it’s silly to be concerned one of these people might find out you’ve unfriended them and get angry. “You are never going to see them again,” she said. “You don’t want to see them ever again. You hated them in high school. Your mass communications group project is over.”

5. Annoying status updates.
“I don’t want to see ‘So-and-so wishes it was over,’” said Andrew Varhol, a marketing manager in NYC. “Or the cheers of bandwagon sports fans—when suddenly someone’s, ‘Go Yankees! Go Jeter!’ Where were you before October?”

Excessive status updates are one example of Facebook abuse. Amy Labagh of powerHouse Books admits she is irritated by frequent updates. “It’s like they want you to think they’re cool,” she said, “but they’re not.”

A professor at NYU, agreed, and said he finds a number of these frequent updates to be “too bourgie.” “It’ll say something like, ‘So-and-so is drinking whatever in the beautiful scenery of some field.’ I mean, really?!”

The style and type of each update is also important. A number of users agree that song lyrics, poetry, and literary quotations can be extremely annoying. Updates with misspellings or lacking punctuation were also noted. “I once unfriended someone because they updated their statuses in all caps,” said Erin Meehan, a marketing associate in NYC.

6. Obnoxious photo uploads.
Everyone has a different idea about what photos are appropriate to post , but a popular complaint from Facebook users in their 20s concerned wedding and baby photos. “It’s just weird,” said a bartender in Manhattan. “I know that older people are joining now, but if you’re at the stage in your life when most the photos are of your kids, I mean, what are you doing on Facebook?”

“I think makeout photos are worse,” said his coworker. “My sister always posts photos of her and her boyfriend kissing. Sometimes I want to unfriend and unfamily her.”

Across the board, a number of users found partially nude photos, or images of someone flexing their muscles as grounds for unfriending. Another reason, as cited specifically by Margitte Kristjansson, graduate student at UC San Diego, could be if “they upload inappropriate pictures of their stab wounds.”

7. Clashing religious or political views.
“I can’t handle it when someone’s updates are always about Jesus,” said Robert Wilder, a writer in New York.

In the same vein, Phil Lee, lead singer of The Muskies, said he’s extremely irritated by “religious proselytizing and over-enthusiastic praise and Bible quoting. Often in all caps.”

An anonymous Brooklynite shared that he purged his Facebook account after the last Presidential election. “It was a big deal to me,” he said. “I found it hard to be friends with people who didn’t vote for Obama.” After which his friend added, “I voted for McKinney.”

8. “I wanted a free Whopper.”
In January, Burger King launched the Whopper Sacrifice application, which promised each Facebook user a free Whopper if they unfriended 10 people. It sounded simple enough, but if you chose to unfriend someone via the application, it sent a notification to that person, announcing they had been sacrificed for the burger. Burger King disabled the application within the month when the Whopper “proved to be stronger than 233,906 friendships.”

Since Facebook has made the home page much more customizable than it used to be, you might wonder, “Why unfriend when I can hide?” More and more, Facebook users are choosing to use limited profiles and editing their newsfeed so undesirable friends disappear from view. “I find lately I’m friending more people, then blocking them,” said Gary Ferrar, a magician in New York. “That way no one gets mad, no one’s feelings get hurt.”

Do you have another reason? Tell us about it!

I've been struggling with writing lately, even at work which is unusual. But I've decided one paragraph reviews are better than not talking about books at all, so am using my super-handy reading log to spark my memory about what I've been reading.

Looking back I realise I never wrote about one of my most anticipated books of the year, Laurie R King’s The language of bees. This book saw Russell and Holmes return to the UK, where, as usual, they are rushed off immediately into another mystery to solve*. Despite some serious sub-plots I felt that this novel didn’t have the emotional weight of the previous Mary Russell installment, Locked rooms. But it was still an interesting action-packed detective story, with lots of costumes and proper detecting and mad races. And they even visit the neolithic heart of Orkney which was very satisfying given my own recent holiday there. All in all, not my favourite Russell, but still a good read.

*I haven't re-read the series for ages but feel like they are always rushing off somewhere. Which suits a detective novel series, but I also feel like the pair deserve a bit of time at home together. I also wonder how Russell is keeping her academic career alive - I assume it was a fairly casual arrangement... Read the rest of this post

Inspired by Peter Wonsowski's Winton Green cone, here's my cone for Brian Butler's Ice Cream People project, King Cholado of Chalamello land! See more of these at the link below!

WWW.ICECREAMPEOPLE.ORG

Back in March, Stephen King discussed the art of the blurb in Entertainment Weekly.

He says, “Early on, nobody blurbed any of mine. Carrie, 'Salem's Lot, and The Shining were published before the art of blurbing had been perfected. In the old days, children, the back cover of novels was usually reserved for a black-and-white photograph of the author (often holding a cigarette and trying to look cosmopolitan). Nowadays, the back cover tends to be Blurb City. And really, maybe that's not so bad. Young writers and filmmakers need a hand up, because it's a hard world out there. That alone doesn't justify a blurb, but in most cases, good work does. It isn't just about the artist, either. A blurb is sometimes a better way to point people toward the good stuff than a 2500-word review. It's certainly more direct.”

Read more here.

Are you a fledgling writer or are you a robot?

That's the question I have to ask myself every time I moderate my comments, especially those strange spam haikus that sort of make sense but link back to Viagra websites.

Just in case you hadn't noticed, social networking and video sharing are crammed with spammers, robot posts, and sneaky marketing hacks. Over the weekend, one marketer wrote an essay about his alleged efforts to stir up attention for viral video--is Dan Ackerman Greenberg a prophet or a sneak? Steve Bryant has the skinny, along with smart links to other essays: 

"To judge from the 400+ mostly-outraged comments on the post, plus the slew of response posts on technology blogs, you'd think Ackerman had revealed the concept of Payola for the first time ... the dependably-rational Matthew Ingram, argued that it's hard to believe "that everyone is so shocked at this company’s 'astro-turfing' and 'sock puppet' approach."

In other publishing news, the next time you write a sex scene, don't write like a spammer, robot or marketing hack. You could end up on the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Thanks, Literary Saloon. 

Finally, Ed Park gets his very own New York Times profile for his work on New York Ghost. Look for his new novel next year. It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy, my Believer editor for the essay, “Skinning the Americans.”

I could blog about publishing and web journalism news all day, but that won't help anybody learn how to write better. Today, I have a couple new publications and writers for your reading, submitting, and thinking pleasure.

Last night I discovered the literary magazine Saltgrass, edited by blogger and writer Julia Cohen. They are a brand-new project mixing unknown poets with established writers--a virtual laboratory for fledgling authors like ourselves. Check out the Submission Guidelines and pick up a $5 issue for more information.

Then, Ed Park and Richard Grayson are guest blogging for Ed Champion this week. Ed Park blogged about a mystery publication called The New York Ghost. Maybe it's an incredible new magazine, maybe a fiendish trap. Either way, I subscribed.

Then, Grayson blogged about Peter Cherches, a New York writer with some great memories about his days as a struggling writer. Read it for some inspiration to get you through the next rejection letter or unanswered magazine query. Check it out:

"Long before I reinvented myself as a food and travel blogger, long before there were blogs, I was a “downtown” writer and performance artist. The recent publication of the anthology Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992 (NYU Press) has inspired this reminiscence. Over the years I’ve published fiction and other short prose pieces (which some choose to call prose poems) in many literary magazines, most with pretty small circulations..." 

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."