April 2009

23 April 2009

50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice

"April 16 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of a little book that is loved and admired throughout American academe. Celebrations, readings, and toasts are being held, and a commemorative edition has been released.

I won't be celebrating.

The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students' grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it."

Article in The Chronicle Review

20 April 2009

The Missing Piece

"Virginia Woolf's father went in for mountaineering and public groaning, mine for gardening and a kind of tuneless humming; he also liked to walk with his dog Anna by the river Deben in Suffolk. My mother sought relief in pre-Prozac pills called Tofranil, and in novels. I take long walks and do jigsaws."

Margaret Drabble writes about escaping depression.

Guardian article

16 April 2009

Concerning the Release of Book Two

Closely related to the item below is this blog entry.

"In concrete terms, there's not much you can do to speed book two along. Ultimately, nobody can write it but me.

That said, it would be nice if everyone was conscious of the fact that I am a person, not a whirling machine that does nothing but churn out EFP*.

It would also be nice if folks avoided bitching to me about the delay. It's really counterproductive."

*Extruded Fantasy Product. (No, I hadn't heard of it either.)

Patrick Rockfuss's Blog

16 April 2009

Readers "Owning" an Author's Work

"For George RR Martin fans, however, enough was enough. After announcing yet another push-back on the completion of A Dance of Dragons, the latest volume in his fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, the author admitted on his blog to finding himself facing a "rising tide of venom", as frustrated readers deluged his inbox with complaints. They took him to task for watching football, going on holidays, and "wasting time" on other writing projects, as well as toying with his own mortality by being "60 years old and fat"."

How Much Do Authors Owe Their Readers?

08 April 2009

We Want a Happy Ending

"In a recession, what people want is a happy ending.

At a time when booksellers are struggling to lure readers, sales of romance novels are outstripping most other categories of books and giving some buoyancy to an otherwise sluggish market.

Harlequin Enterprises, the queen of the romance world, reported that fourth-quarter earnings were up 32 percent over the same period a year earlier, and Donna Hayes, Harlequin’s chief executive, said that sales in the first quarter of this year remained very strong. While sales of adult fiction overall were basically flat last year, according to Nielsen Bookscan, which tracks about 70 percent of retail sales, the romance category was up 7 percent after holding fairly steady for the previous four years."

New York Times article

06 April 2009

Obama Wins British Biography Prize

Barack Obama has won the biography prize at the 2009 Galaxy British Book Awards for Dreams From My Father. While I've not read the other contenders for the prize, I'm not surprised it won. I found it engrossing.

The memoir was written before he entered politics, when he'd made history as the first African American to be elected president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review. If you've not read the book, I recommend that you do, because it's not only well written and revealing but also an insight into what drove Obama to become the President of the United States.

BBC News