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Posts tagged ‘news’

Dec 22

pirates
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The Perfidy of Piracy?

This week, award-winning Spanish novelist Lucía Etxebarria announced she will quit writing since more copies of her book have been downloaded illegally than sold. She said she could no longer justify devoting three years of her working life to producing a book. Agreed, she may have a point. Agreed, after China and Russia, Spain has the highest number of per capita illegal downloads in the world. Agreed, loss from illegal downloads and e-book piracy costs writers and publishers close to $3 billion in the US alone. But what if the writers themselves advocate file sharing?

Many authors claim making their work available online increases book sales…

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Dec 6

woty
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The Word of the Year 2011

It is the time of the year to select the word or phrase which best defines 2011. What word or phrase reflects the ideas and events which occupied the world this year? How do you select such a word? According to the American Dialect Society, the best word of the year candidates will be: demonstrably new or newly popular in 2011,widely and/or prominently used in 2011, indicative or reflective of the popular discourse, and not a peeve or a complaint about overuse or misuse.

The Oxford English Dictionary has already made its choice. The one word or phrase that characterized the past 12 months is squeezed middle, a phrase first suggested…

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Jun 25

200px-Gadsby
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The novel without the letter ‘E’

Gadsby is a 1939 novel by Ernest Vincent Wright written as a lipogram and its 50,010 words do not include words that contain ‘e’. The plot revolves around the city of Branton Hills, which is in decline, but revitalized thanks to the efforts of the protagonist and his youth group.

To prevent any stray Es from entering the text, Wright tied down his typewriter’s E key, and then put his vocabulary to the test, a difficulty the narrator acknowledges in the very first chapter: ‘Now, any author, from history’s dawn, always had that most important aid to writing: an ability to call upon any word in his dictionary in building up his story…

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Jun 12

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A year in prison for reading a poem

We are the people who will kill humiliation and assassinate misery.
Don’t you hear their cries?
Don’t you hear their screams?

Ayat al-Ghermezi, the 20-year-old Bahraini poet and student arrested on 30 March this year for reciting the above lines which were deemed critical of Bahrain’s rulers was sentenced today to a year in prison. She was convicted of anti-state charges, including inciting hatred. Al-Qurmezi was in her second year of study toward a teaching degree at the University of Bahrain when she joined the protesters in Pearl Square…

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Jun 12

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Prolific or Prodigious: What would you rather be as a writer?

As a writer how would you like to be remembered: a one book wonder, who never found enough words to write another, but with the legacy of a work that was well received; or would you rather be someone who reeled off one book after the other like a well-oiled writing machine. I had a bit of an idea, and began compiling a list of books whose authors managed only one notable work of fiction in their life time. The first list threw up a lot of surprises. In the list were writers I enjoyed over the years and whose work I kept reading and re-reading.

The list went something like this…

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Jun 4

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Getting over Writer’s Block?

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say? – Kurt Vonnegut

Most writers will have trouble writing at some point in their careers, the cause of which they will attribute to writer’s block. Neurologist Alice Flaherty, author of The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain (2004) argued that ‘literary creativity is a function of specific areas of the brain, and that writer’s block may be the result of brain activity being disrupted in those areas.’ Victoria Nelson, author of On Writer’s Block(1993) writes that ‘although it can be triggered by any number of…

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May 28

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The Maths of Writing

How much should you write everyday? Have you ever written with the reassurance of maths behind you? Have you ever thought, if I can write x thousand words a day, and a standard-length novel is y thousand words long, then I finish mine in z weeks. Supposing you aim to write a novel about 80,000 words long, and you think you can manage 500 words between your job and walking the dog, it would take you 25 weeks to complete a first draft unless you are Isaac Asimov. This then is a measure of your daily creative output measured by numbers.

Stephen King in On Writing says he writes ten pages a day without fail…

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Apr 30

Mad Writer
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Odd Writing Habits that Worked

The literary world is dotted with figures, each with its unique, and in a way, eccentric writing habits. Some were fastidious, some methodical, a few wrote with a drink by their side, some wrote standing up, some walked while they wrote, while others liked to write lying down.

Writing standing up was an oddly common method. Thomas Wolfe wrote standing up as did Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov, the author of Lolita. Nabokov used index cards for his writing. He wrote the scenes non-sequentially so that he could re-arrange the cards as he wished. His longest novel Ada(1969) took up more than 2,000 cards…

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Mar 24

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The Alchemist for free!

Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist in Arabic has now been made available as a free download by the author.

This was what he wrote in his blog: ‘Due to the current circumstances, several readers tell me that they can’t find my books in some Arab countries. Therefore, I went to a “pirate” site and found the current edition. I don’t know if the translation is good, but I think it is my duty to facilitate the access of my books.I trust you: only download this edition if you can’t find my books in bookstores.’

Nice gesture. I like the bit about facilitating ‘access to my books.’ But what I found grotesque was…

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Mar 15

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New Sun Rising: Stories for Japan

Blogger and writer Frankie Sachs is doing his bit for the tragedy unfolding in Japan. He is putting together a collection of stories, poems and art honouring and celebrating Japan with the proceeds being donated to a charity engaged in the relief effort in Japan. Submissions for the anthology New Sun Rising: Stories for Japan is now open.

Send your stories, poems and artwork celebrating this wonderful country. If you are not much of a writer, poet or artist, you can help by spreading the word…

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