Category Archives: Writing

New York State Summer Writers Institute

I’m baaack. It was fabulous. I was in Rick Moody’s masters section — life changing. I’ll wite more as I process it all.
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TaskPaper, Scrivener, and Note Taking on the iPad

TaskPaper, Scrivener, and Note Taking on the iPad

We’ve been having a great conversation over on the Literature & Latte forums about TaskPaper, Scrivener, and note taking on the iPad. I’ve clipped

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The Influential Books Game

Everyone’s making a list of ten books. Tyler Cowen started it. I caught up via Ross Douthat’s article NYT in the New York Times. The drill is: stream of consciousness, from the gut, no great research, off the top of your head, what ten books most influence your world view. Here's my list...

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My policy on email

I get a lot of email, I mean a lot — not as much as I did when I was in commerce, but still what could justifiably be called a deluge. Some if it is of my own making, most is not. Almost all of it demands a thoughtful reply, and each reply takes, for me at least, emotional energy, if the response is going to be more than the web 2.0 version of a grunt.

In addition to the volume of mail I get, emailers have increasingly imposed their own ever shortening version of response times on that torrent. Besides whatever they wrote, they implicitly say: I wrote you. I want, demand, will extort, a reply NOW.

Here's what I do...

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Notational Velocity – Show in Finder

Missing in Notational Velocity is an apparent command to “Show in Finder” but it's easy to use Spotlight to do the same thing.

Here's how I do it...(and why it matters to interface architecture)

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myMFA – A two year writer’s development program

A few months ago a writing pal passed along a link to Dennis Cass’ post discussing his version of an idealized MFA program, an alternative MFA. Cass’ point of view was that traditional MFA curriculums were filed with blanks, specifically outside of craft development, as done through workshops, and outside (perhaps) literary criticism, as done through massive reading work.

This struck a cord with me, it sounded about right, so I went off and built one of my own, what I call myMFA, it’s outlined in detail, along with the schedule of how I implemented it in 2009 and 2010, after the jump…

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