Here it is, the commencement address everyone’s talking about: Neil Gaiman at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. “A freelance life, a life in the arts, is sometimes like putting messages in bottles, on a desert island, and hoping that someone will find one of your bottles and open it and read it, and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you: appreciation, or a commission, or money, or love. And you have to accept that you may put out a hundred things for every bottle that winds up coming back.”
Which adjectives do reviewers commonly place before debut (a promising debut, a timely debut, a stunning debut) and what’s the subtext?
A maze-like infographic showing how a book is born. The process begins with “Somebody has an idea” and includes points along the way such as “Creative director starts drinking heavily” and “Idea revamped until totally unrecognizable.” Anyone who’s worked in publishing knows there’s more than a little truth here.
Mock prewriting rituals of various writers, from Benjamin Percy to Elissa Schappell.
WWBBT (What Would Bob Barker Think) about Plinko Poetry? In this new game developed by a team of MA students at NYU, “users drop a plastic disc down rows of pegs, and as the disc bounces down its unpredictable path, the disc determines a random sampling of words pulled from the latest Fox and New York Times tweets.”
Dan Chaon and the students in his Advanced Fiction Workshop at Oberlin College culled a list of 200 very short stories to the top 50 for Wigleaf. Here’s the list.
Take this test to find out how fast you read.