The title pretty much says it all – I’m super psyched for Laura and the Street Books people

Here’s a link to the news at the National Book Foundation: 2012 Innovations in Reading Award Winners.

Now I just need to start mentioning how useful my presence might be at the awards ceremony in NYC this fall (bag carrier, message taker, clothes presser?)…

As I believe I’ve mentioned here before, my friend David Naimon and I are co-writing a book called The Voyage (currently) .  I hope it will be my third published book (after Sherwood Nation makes its way into the world – no specific news I can talk about there yet…).

We’re substantially into the long process and have done some incredible world-building on a world I’m really excited about.

This weekend I learned that RACC (The Regional Arts and Culture Council) said yes to our grant proposal. We’re funded! Toot toot!

I’m sure you will hear more about this as we go — part of the grant requires that we host a public performance from the piece. Likely we’ll also chat about the pleasures and difficulties of doing together what is traditionally a very isolated, solo art. Fortunately for us, David and I know how to argue productively. Though by the end, who knows, Kung Fu may become necessary.

If you wish to see a short summary of our work (or how much $$ we got), you can see all awarded grants here. Do an in-document search for my name.

And writers: As I begun the grant process, I didn’t even realize that RACC supported literary projects. I can’t recommend highly enough how accessible RACC was during this time, and how much they seemed invested in my success. Here’s a quote from Ingrid Carlson, a Grants Officer at RACC, who wrote me the following:

“First, let me say that we offer the same percentage of Project Grants in the literary discipline as we offer in every other discipline.  The challenge is that we only receive a very small handful of applications from literary artists, as opposed to a discipline like visual arts.  We fund about 40% of the literary arts applications – the same as in other categories.  The problem is that we average about 7 literary project grants and only a couple from individuals each year.  It would be great to get more!”

Subtle hint…

Thanks Ingrid & RACC!

I love David McCandless’s information visualizations at Information is Beautiful.

Today’s project is a re-visualization of Business Insider’s charts for their post ‘What the Wall Street Protestors are so Angry about…‘

McCandless has a gift for making data instantly grok-able.

Sweden at 23x still seems pretty damn high. The poverty line for a 4 person family in the US is $22,050 and I started to play with the numbers above before I realized that they’re based on the Gini Coefficient…which is above my math level.

Though sometimes narrative can be much more powerful. This one has been making the rounds.

As I’ve mentioned, David and I are co-writing a book which takes place in the far, far North. He sent this video over.

What a cool planet, right? Hit that fullscreen button.

http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/9603/occupy-writers.html

&

http://occupywriters.com/

Felix Schlater wrote to tell me he’s heading into the month of torture and mania that is National Novel Writing Month. I’ve never done NaNoWrMo, though it’s always sounded like fun.  He wanted to know if I had any advice on book writing.

When you’re getting started or blocked the whole process can feel like some kind of dark secret. A black magic that requires just the right set of spells. When I go to author readings, inevitably there’s someone in the audience that asks how so-and-so does it. Use a typewriter or a computer? At night or in the morning? There’s no one right way to write, obviously, and everybody has got their own style. I’m co-writing a book with my friend David Naimon, and just last night we compared our radically different approaches to writing — but we’re both producing at an equal rate.

Differences aside, I feel like I’ve got a pretty useful bag of tricks for flat-out composing. Here they are, I hope Felix (or you) finds them useful:

- Write first thing in the morning. I used to hate this advice — early bird gets the worm, blah blah blah. But I kept seeing writer interviews in which the writer talked about writing in the dark every morning. Finally, a couple of years ago I forced myself to become a morning person, and now I can’t speak for it highly enough. I try to get up every morning at 5:30. Make your pot of coffee at night and set it up on a timer. If you have a pet, your pet will quickly acclimate to the schedule and help you keep it (my cat starts nagging me if I don’t get up now). It’ll be dark, everyone will be sleeping, and you own the world. I can usually get in 250 to 1000 words before 7am, when the house wakes up. The rest of the day feels like a free ride after that. You’re going to need to be writing closer to 1700 words a day to make your 50k goal in November, if you’re doing NaNoWrMo, so you might have this as your first shift.

- Edit the previous day’s work first. It’s hard as hell to sit in front of a blank piece of paper and start from scratch. Going over your previous day’s work gives you sort of a running start. Imagine it as the run along the diving board before you dive into the deep end. It gets you up to speed on where the narrative is going, and allows you to tighten as you go.

- Write on paper or use a typewriter. Computers are demons of distraction, and worse, they allow you to edit as you compose. Forget about editing — when you’re composing, sprint forward. If you use a pen and paper it’s much harder to worry about what you’ve written and there are no other distractions.

- Write only the good stuff. The worst thing in the world is to be faced with a scene you can’t figure out how to start, or one that seems too daunting to write. After being blocked, many times I’ve found the scene I was struggling with doesn’t belong in the book. If it feels really hard, or you feel like you’ve got something that you feel obligated to write in order to make something else happen, then alas, it’s probably junk. Write the stuff that seems fun. I don’t mean funny, just work that you’re not fighting against. In my experience, nine times out of ten work that I’ve fought with bitterly gets thrown out.

- Write out of order. I usually have a sense of future scenes in a book. If you get stuck on the scene you’re on, write something that happens way down the road. Write the ending! You’ll probably need to edit those scenes later on – but the writing of them can also inform scenes earlier in the book.

- Keep a tally of your word count. Post it up on the wall and mark each day down. After a while it’ll begin to feel less like marking your prison-stay off on the the cell wall and more like money in the bank. As a bonus, add a note on how that day went — that way you might spot trends. (How *did* I write 5000 words in one day?)

- Take long walks with a voice recorder. You can get a decent digital recorder for about $30-$40 (or use your phone if it has the capability, though you have to guard against distraction there). I’ve found that just setting out with the book in mind and spending 45 minutes on the road can allow you to create quite a lot of work over time. Sometimes it’s just ideas, sometimes it’s actual writing. Also, you feel like a bit of a detective walking about and taking notes to yourself. Record everything, commentary about passers-by, rants, speak the character’s voices, build the world you’re writing in — just like the composing sprint, you want as much material as you can.

- Transcribe. If you’ve used a voice recorder or used pen & pencil you’ve got bonus material. This always feels like free money. Start off your writing schedule by simply typing in what you’ve previously done. It allows for a quick edit as you put it in, and will also give you that vital ramp into the mindset of the story (the diving board again).

- Edit ruthlessly. I hate to be adding this in, since you’re mostly concerned with getting it on paper. This comes later. If you’re doing a sprint, like NaNoWrMo requires, then you’re going to be adding in a ton of cruft. If you really like it, but it doesn’t fit, set it aside for another book. I just finished a novel of 145k words, and dumped at least 50k words from it. Before it’s over, I’ll probably be chopping out more. There are an endless supply of words in the world, the trick is using the right ones.

Good luck at NaNoWrMo everybody – let me know how it goes.