Scott’s joined the team at the writing blog, Green Spot Blue. He also has a new website of his own to keep all of his blogging in one location. Check it out.

The former home of James Thurber, the famed humorist and New Yorker cartoonist has been converted into a museum and vibrant literary center in Columbus, Ohio. They give out the Thurber Prize for Humor and coordinate writer-in-residency programs, writing workshops for children and adults. In addition, they present the Columbus Literary Awards and support local authors like Jody Gerbig in a myriad of ways.

On Wednesday, October 22nd, Jody attended a book club meeting at a private home in Upper Arlington, OH. Twelve people attended, and she fielded questions from the group based on their reading. Future meetings are planned. Here are a couple of pics from the event.
  

Today I came across an article in The Guardian that discussed a debate at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. The topic under consideration was whether British biblio-couple Richard & Judy should be pushing good literature rather than pablum.

My interest in that particular debate is very slight (I’ve never seen the show after all), but a statement made by novelist Andrew O’Hagen caught my attention.

‘When you speak to students, if you teach on a creative writing course, often what you find is that they are not interested in life at the level of the sentence,’ he said. ‘When you try to activate some interest, they find that slightly distracting. What they want to talk about is what it would be like to be a famous novelist.’

The problem is, if, as an author, you don’t value life at the level of the sentence, you’ll never be a famous, or even successful, novelist. As an editor, I see the results all the time of the apathy O’Hagan speaks of. A kind of carelessness toward the words that are the materials of the craft—a disregard for euphony, syntax, and even clarity. The whole universe of the story is contained in each and every sentence. The sentence is where the characters live and breathe. If you want to be a novelist that’s where you have to be.

Thanks to the bloggers of the Writing Popular Fiction Program at Seton Hill University, I came across this article by Wired Magazine that’s making the rounds. They had this idea about Ernest Hemingway’s six word short story (“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”)–could they solicit some six word masterpieces by some of today’s great Speculative Fiction writers? The result was a bit uneven. There seemed to be a few good ones, telling enough of a story that draws us to fill in the rest just like Hemingway’s original:

• K.I.A. Baghdad, Aged 18 – Closed Casket
  - Richard K. Morgan
• Osama’s time machine: President Gore concerned.
  - Charles Stross
• Corpse parts missing. Doctor buys yacht.
  - Margaret Atwood

But there a lot more that aren’t–it’s clear that some didn’t take the exercise seriously or weren’t overly inspired:

• I win lottery. Sun goes nova.
  - Steven Meretzky
• WIRED stimulates the planet: Utopia blossoms!
  -Paul Di Filippo
• It’s behind you! Hurry before it
  - Rockne S. O’Bannon

Other’s seemed more like great first lines of longer stories or were more poetic than prosaic:

• He read his obituary with confusion.
  - Steven Meretzky
• Your house is mine: soft revolution.
  - Howard Waldrop
• Kirby had never eaten toes before.
  - Kevin Smith

Check out Wired for the rest of them.

The whole thing reminded me a bit of a recurring forum thread over at Bookcrossing where people are invited to write five word reviews of the books they’re reading. Many are more like summaries than reviews, but they’re great fun to read.

Feel free to post your own six word story or five word review.