The most interesting essay in Tom Bissell’s collection, Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation, takes a close look at the differing styles of writing books and the kinds of promises they make to prospective writers. Ostensibly a survey of several different books, Bissell pithily outlines the rules of engagement for each type: the users manual, exemplified by Strunk and White, which focuses on the mechanical aspects of crafting sentences; the Golden Parachute books, such as Donald Maas’ Writing the Breakout Novel, which trades equally on the promise of creative fulfilment and future commercial success; the Nuts & Bolts crowd, where a mid-list writer share techniques and exercises that worked for them; the tea and angels crowd, driven by the same impulse as the nuts and bolts crew, but with a considerably more mystical and muse-driven approach.  Then, of course, there’s the Olympus books: written by highly esteemed writers, wether it’s Stephen King or Margaret Atwood or Joyce Carol Oates, and

My friend Lois shared this post about the difference between Supper and Dinner, and the meaning of dinner changed as a result of industrialisation and the rise of the middle class.  Meanwhile, this week’s my newsletter will feature a short semi-essay about the origins and goals of of the Short Fiction Lab series. If you’ve read Eight Minutes of Usable Daylight and Winged, With Sharp Teeth, and you’re curious about the behind-the-scenes stuff, there’s still time to sign up. I just finished Sharp Ends, Joe Abercrombie’s collection of short stories set in the same world as his First Law Trilogy. It was a weirdly enjoyable colleection–the stuff that I loved, I really, really loved. The story I disliked proved to be a major stumbling block, though, and meant I left the book 80% read for the better part of nine months before finally finishing things off. There is, however, something to be said for Abercrombie’s riffs on the sword-and-sorcery partnership

The free period for Winged, With Sharp Teeth is over, which means I’m now sitting here and prodding the numbers with surprise, saying things like, “Really? That many people from the German store? Who’d have thought it?” Some people went on and pre-ordered Eight Minutes of Usable Daylight, which is out now if you live in Australia and out in approximately eight hours from now if you’re in the United States. Alas, I cannot tell when the Germans will get it, for I’ve not had to get into the habit of doing that math off the top of my head over the last week. I did try to Google it, but the math stymied me–there’s a reason I work with words wherever possible. Yesterday was a bit of a lumpen, unexpected day. I had plans, but they did not come together. I progressed stories, but the writing was hard. On the plus side, I did get Amazon-based print version of The Birdcage