My old friend John Kenney is a brilliant ad writer. He has created national campaigns that you would instantly recognize and Super Bowl spots, and traveled widely to research and shoot them. After twenty-plus years in advertising, he has a pretty good sense of what works and what doesn’t. Last weekend John sent me an [...]
Categories: Publishing
Tags: advertising · bookselling
It is strictly forbidden to fall asleep at the Boston Public Library. I presume this policy is intended to keep the homeless from camping out here, but the homeless know the rules because, well, they camp out here, so it is not the homeless who are primarily affected. It is everyone else. Like me. Unfortunately, [...]
Categories: Boston · Odds & Ends
Tags: Boston Public Library · writing life
Is there a more demoralizing problem than global warming? Discussing it feels utterly hopeless. Climate skeptics are unmoveable despite the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence. Intelligent, well-meaning conservative friends of mine, people I like and respect, simply reject that the problem exists, let alone that we ought to fix it. So I found this video [...]
Categories: Odds & Ends
Tags: Bill Gates · climate change · TED talks
I stopped by the new exhibit today at the Howard Yezerski Gallery on Harrison Avenue, “Boston Combat Zone: 1969-1978.” The gallery and the show both are small but well worth a visit, even on a raw, rainy day like today. The exhibit gathers together black-and-white photographs by Roswell Angier, Jerry Berndt, and John Goodman. The [...]
Categories: Boston · Photography
Tags: bookfour · Combat Zone
Selections from the Twitter feed of Alain de Botton, a master of the tweet. The attraction of the melancholic: sadness has created the room we’re going to take up in their lives. We can only envy people towards whom we feel equal: it would not occur to anyone to envy the queen for her house. [...]
Categories: Odds & Ends · Writing
Tags: Alain de Botton · Twitter
Commandments 1. Work on one thing at a time until finished. 2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.” 3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand. 4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time! 5. When [...]
Categories: Creative Process · Productivity · Writing
Tags: Henry Miller · quotes for writers
In December 1839, Charles Dickens was 27 years old and already a superstar. He had written the Boz sketches, Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickleby. Each was a double sensation, scoring first as a serial — the day an installment of Nickleby was released, according to a contemporary account, the Strand “looked almost verdant with the numerous [...]
Categories: Writers
Tags: Charles Dickens · creativity · featured posts
Rummaging through my computer recently, I came across this ad (PDF) for The Strangler. It ran in the New York Times and the Boston Globe on February 6, 2007, and in the weekly Boston Phoenix at the same time. There was a radio spot airing that week, as well, which was very fun to hear [...]
Categories: My Books · Publishing
Tags: advertising · bookselling · The Strangler
Yesterday I finished the last scene of the new book, a scene I had been wrestling with for days. Endings are a tricky business. Obviously the last page of a novel should move the reader somehow, which is why writers tend to swing for the fences. This is where the prose often puffs itself up — [...]
Categories: My Books · Writing
Tags: bookthree · writing life
From a blog called Snarkmarket, sorting the 2010 web using economic principles: There are two kinds of quantities in the world. Stock is a static value: money in the bank, or trees in the forest. Flow is a rate of change: fifteen dollars an hour, or three-thousand toothpicks a day. Easy. … But I actually [...]
Categories: Blogging · Internet · Productivity
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