blogging
-
How to Use a Blog to Sell Your Book
The government shutdown is over. For now. After so much productive and rigorous hashtagging on Twitter, complaints on Facebook, and half-plagiarised news articles looking for traffic, our representatives had no choice but to start funding things again. And agree to fund the things they passed this year already. During that time – while I was…
-
Is Writing & Music & Art Getting Specialized to Death?
I just watched “Dear Mr. Watterson,” a light-hearted documentary about the impact that Bill Watterson’s ever-famous, ever-persistent comic strip, Calvin & Hobbes, has had on people over the years. The part that gripped me most was when several prominent cartoonists spoke in extremely gloomy terms about new media. Berkeley Breathed, the cartoonist behind Opus, Bloom County, and Outland,…
-
Fitzgerald & Hemmingway Were Bloggers, Too
Sometimes, I feel guilty about blogging. It’s a little pinching sensation, probably a sensation most writers are familiar with – the feeling that you’re wasting time you should be using to work on your novel. That’s why I was reassured when I read a recent interview with a professor about “the Lost Generation” and found…
-
Is the Final Draft Dead?
I wrote a lot of this in my car, because I have a smartphone, so now I can talk sternly to it and, magically, those incantations are turned into text. I’ve tried this method to write blog posts before, but it never quite works because swerving through rush hour traffic isn’t the most conducive environment…
-
3 Free Platforms for Writers, Musicians, and Artists to Make a Website
If you’re a writer, musician, or artist looking to make a website these days, what do you need to start? Not any knowledge of HTML. Not a web designer. Not a lengthy textbook about “building a website.” You just need about an hour of time and a slightly foggy notion of what to do. Oh,…
-
[GUIDE] How to Use a Blog To Show Off Your Creative Work
When it comes to blogging, nothing is ever easy. Creative people who are blogging as a way to show off their work have it even harder. You can upload as many art pieces and short stories as you want, but it seems almost impossible to get the kind of traffic you want. In many cases,…
-
When You Can’t Just Make Art for Art’s Sake
My last blog post, which talked about the merger between Penguin and Random House, reminded me of an important lesson that, as someone who enjoys the notion of “being creative,” I shouldn’t have forgotten. On the internet, you can’t make art for art’s sake. If you do, that’s more or less assuming that your art…
-
4 Things You Need to Know About the Brave, Lonely World of Blogging
When I posted my first attempt at “15 Minute Fury” – blog posts that I don’t spend more than 15 minutes on – I thought pretty hard about it. You know, afterwards. I was wondering if I was sacrificing quality for quantity. If, by trying to force myself to create something by giving myself a…