My Weekly Reader

Ten favorite posts and articles that grabbed me this week and last:

Undercooking a Novel by Nathan Bransford, in which agent Bransford expounds on why novels are not pasta, but indeed stews. No al dente please.

Is 30 Rock Racist? Journalist Zeeshan Aleem asks the question on the Huffington Post and gets buried in comments. Aleem asks “If there is a forceful difference between past pernicious representations of a race and the contemporary one. In other words, does Tracy’s embodiment of age-old stereotypes of the black community look meaningfully different from what Americans saw in antebellum minstrel shows or in Amos n’ Andy in the 1950s?”  Very interesting.

The Author Background Check A kind of scary but should-be-read post on how publishers check out authors before signing the. Luckily, Alan Rinzler gives tips on how to watch out for yourself. (Hint: don’t lie.)

What if you had a very strict (French!) teacher leading your writer’s workshop? How would she translate comments like “When you hear: Your story is so quickly paced, it’s exquisite. But in some places it would be nice to know about what the characters think and feel. Just a little, here and there, I think.”

Find out by reading installment one (above) and two of Becky Tuch’s Madame Verité, the scary truth teller of Beyond The Margins.

What the heck does one do when an offer from an agent comes in? (Besides fall to one’s knees.) Say yes right away? Call every agent you’ve ever dreamed of working with? Agent Caren Johnson gives a no-nonsense Ms. Manners on how to handle this.

A great post on being careful about posts! Therese Walsh on Writer Unboxed warns us about the dangers of splitting one’s brain into a thousand tiny microchips. While tweeting, and posting, and promoting, we don’t want to lose our creativity.

What happens when you are discovered to be cool at the age of 76? According to the Guardian UK “At the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC, a current exhibition called Women to Watch featuring “underrepresented and/or emerging women artists” has chosen, besides seven women from the US, one woman from the UK: 76-year-old Wylie.”

This NYT article from Elmore Leonard, Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodleis from a 2001 series “Writers on Writing” more than bears a second look. Print this one and look at it often. Not that his rules can’t be broken, but you won’t go wrong knowing them.

Heat get you ill tempered? Yeah, agent-writer Betsy Lerner also.  Read her list of Ten Things I Don’t Need in 103 Degree Heat (unless you are a nun or something—Ms. Lerner don’t mince no words.)