writing

[calimac]

1. Paul Krugman says something will be lost when newspapers and their wordage restrictions disappear in favor of the web. Confining your thoughts to 800 words can be excellent training in writing and reasoning, he says. Funny; where I write on the web, we're asked to keep our concert reviews down to no more than 800 words, normally. The internet isn't going to run out of space; it's simply that my editors believe people are unlikely to read anything much longer than that on the web.

2. Speaking of training in ... something, I've just finished boiling down an 800-page, completely disorganized book on Tolkien into a coherent evaluation for the Year's Work project. Now I want to soak my head in brine for a week.

3. Wow, something I wrote has been linked to by the Christian Science Monitor which calls it "a fine bibliography." (And the novel they're discussing? You can sample it at its web page. It's bad. It's baaaaaaaad. Surely the line "this lion of letters trudged in fear" should win some sort of purple finger of fate award.)

4. For better prose, try these guys: the Nebula nominees have been announced.

Comments

[scribblerworks.livejournal.com]

Read that Mirkwood chapter.

Uh... yikes. All that description of what "is not". Very distracting. But worse, no real sense of what's up with the story. Famous author arrives somewhere, feeling apprehension and clutching some sort of document. Not very intriguing there.

Plus, in the area of credibility, if Tolkien were arriving in NYC for some sort of fuction at Columbia, by 1970, he was notable enough to have been met at the airport by someone.

Sorry... just blowing off my immediate reaction.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Tolkien's depicted arrival in New York is not half so incredible as the idea of him just up and casually flying to New York in the first place. Not much of a world traveler, he.