I had an interesting conversation on Saturday with Bruce Spector, the founder and CEO of a new web service called LifeIO. (See the end of this article for an explanation of what LifeIO is all about.) Bruce was part of the team that developed WebCal, which Yahoo! acquired in 1998 to form the core of [...]
Categories: Internet · Publishing
Tags: featured posts · Fred Wilson · free · Malcolm Gladwell · Seth Godin
In the deluge of clips since Walter Cronkite died a few days ago, the same video seems to come up over and over, like a greatest hits collection: Cronkite announces the JFK and Martin Luther King assassinations, the moon landing, the call to withdraw from Vietnam. I’d like to call your attention to a more [...]
Categories: Boston · My Books
Tags: The Strangler · video
Yesterday I wrote about the film version of The Friends of Eddie Coyle, which I think is the best movie ever made about Boston. Today, over at the Rap Sheet, my review/appreciation of the George V. Higgins novel is up, part of the Rap Sheet’s “Book You Have to Read” series highlighting forgotten classics. Here [...]
Categories: Book Reviews · Boston · My Other Writing
Tags: George V. Higgins · must reads
Recently I wrote a short appreciation for the Rap Sheet of George V. Higgins’s definitive Boston crime novel, The Friends of Eddie Coyle. The piece will run soon as part of the Rap Sheet’s terrific Friday series, Books You Have to Read, which celebrates forgotten (or never properly appreciated) crime novels. [Update: My article on [...]
Categories: Boston · Movies
Tags: featured posts · George V. Higgins · Robert Mitchum · video
Author Steven Johnson on what we may be losing in the switch to e-books. Because they have been largely walled off from the world of hypertext, print books have remained a kind of game preserve for the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading. Online, you can click happily from blog post to email thread to [...]
Categories: Books · Internet · Publishing
Tags: ebooks
A reader suggests that I use this blog to share a little about how my books develop from initial concept to final draft. I’ll try, but readers should understand that a strange sort of apathy descends as soon as a project is finished. When I am writing, I am obsessed with the book being drafted, [...]
Categories: Boston · Crime · My Books
Tags: The Strangler
In The End of the Affair, Graham Greene described what was in fact his own method of working. Over twenty years I have probably averaged five hundred words a day for five days a week. I can produce a novel in a year, and that allows time for revision and the correction of the typescript. [...]
Categories: Writers · Writing
Tags: Graham Greene · How Writers Write · writing tips
I don’t get into the city much anymore. I have young kids and I work at home and I never seem to have the time. But tonight I met a good friend for a drink, and we wound up making three stops in town, all unplanned, chosen at the spur of the moment. All three [...]
Categories: Boston
Tags:
“Did Truman Capote and Ralph Ellison have writer’s block — or were they just chronic procrastinators?” This interesting article from Slate, by Jessica Winter, considers whether there is a difference between writer’s block and procrastination to begin with. Famously, both Capote and Ellison went silent after producing great books. Capote’s silence lasted nineteen years, from [...]
Categories: Creative Process · Productivity · Writers · Writing
Tags: procrastination · Ralph Ellison · Truman Capote · writing tips
