“Perhaps no part of the First Novel Experience is as confusing and overwhelming as figuring out how to balance the demands of social media with the demands of writing more fiction.” Martha Woodroof talks with Lydia Netzer about social media in the world of publishing and book promotion. Their advice? “Try to be funny as much as you can. Try to participate in conversations, not just start your own. Try to engage, not just talk.”
Engage, Don’t Just Talk
Mangrove Opens Submissions Nationally
Are you an undergraduate who writes? Do you know one who does? This year, my alma mater's literary magazine is accepting submissions from undergraduates even if they don't attend the University of Miami. Check out its blog for details.
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Susan Orlean’s Library Book
Year in Reading alum Susan Orlean's next book will be entitled The Library Book. It will be “a love letter to an endangered institution, exploring their history, their people, their meaning and their future as they adapt and redefine themselves in a digital world.” The book will focus in particular on the unsolved 1986 razing of the Los Angeles Central Library.
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“Lyric Essay as Perversion”
"In the twenty-first century, the lyric essay at its worst is a utility or an app; at its best, it’s a cross-hatch of a genre in which things cross over; implicitly chiasmic, it’s a space in which incompatible discourses are allowed to intermingle; wherein poetry and prose create productive frictions, enabling a new, unnatural form, illegible and readable for the first time." Mary Cappello writes about the lyric essay and Djuna Barnes.
Books for Problematic Times
Read and submit a "book for problematic times," a blogger's response to Newsweek's uninspired 50 Books for Our Times.
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Appearing Elsewhere
Millions writer Sonya Chung has a trenchant essay up at Huffington Post on the topic of writing and motherhood: "Art Before Life: Questioning the Parenthood Question."
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Real People
"Here is the last and biggest piece of advice I have: If you have a story that you want to tell, but you’re afraid that someone in your life is going to feel wounded, whether that feeling is justified or not, fair or not, tell it anyway." Emma Straub, who recently wrote about her Year in Reading, gives some advice on fictionalizing real people in an essay for Rookie.
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