America Loses a Giant – J. D. SalingerPosted by John Woodington on January 28th, 2010

We lost Salinger today.  His short stories are, for me, some of the best examples of creativity in the form.  I’ve got Catcher in the Rye on the shelf, waiting to be read later this year.  Salinger avoided the public eye, and apparently wrote a bunch of books that he never brought out for publication.  Maybe we’ll see them posthumously, like Pirate Latitudes.

There’s a writing competition over at Writer’s Digest that’s worth checking out, though apparently I should’ve known about this competition prior to this, considering it’s been going on for 79 years.  My bad.  I’ve only been around for 26 years and a few months, so you can’t blame me too much.

I’m still enthralled with Fictionaut, and the quality of the writing posted there just keeps getting better and better.  It is so far the only site I’ve found that has users posting literature worth reading.

Time for sleep.

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Get Writing, and Read some New CrichtonPosted by John Woodington on November 9th, 2009

Remember that this in National Novel Writing Month, and if you are participating, you should have about 15,000 words written by the end of the day to keep pace with reaching the goal of 50,000 words by the end of the month.

Don’t worry if you are behind.  You can catch up.  The most words I’ve ever written in one day is a little over 7,000, and by the end of that session (six hours, I think) I was pretty wiped.  But it can be done.  So instead of watching Monday Night Football or Antiques Roadshow or reruns of Friends, sit down at the computer (or notebook) and get writing!  Don’t worry if it’s good or bad now.  That doesn’t matter in the first draft.  Just get the words on the page.  You will have to rewrite anyway.  Everyone does rewrites.  Except, or so I’ve heard, for Terry Goodkind, though I wouldn’t consider him a good writer.  A rich writer, yes, but not a good one.

In other writing and reading news, there will be a new book out by one of my favorite pulp authors who passed away not too long ago, Michael Crichton.  It also looks like Spielberg wants to do the movie adaptation of the posthumous novel, which is always promising.

It’s good to see one final piece out of Michael Crichton.  Jurassic Park was one of the few novels that hooked me into reading and, subsequently, writing.

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