It Ain't your Baby no More

In the wake of the Boston terror attacks at the marathon the other day, some strange twists developed that gave me pause for thought.  And they were strange - and I believe important - enough for me to break from tradition and share my thoughts on them with readers here.

Shortly after the attacks and their aftermath, musician and performer Amanda Palmer, as you may have seen, wrote and posted a poem to her blog titled "a poem for dzhokhar."  Based on the title, I can only assume it's dedicated to the suspected terrorist pinned down and arrested after several days of absolute madness in Boston.  A title is, after all, supposed to be "a descriptive name, caption, or heading" for a book, poem, etc.

Not surprising (at least to me) was the incredible backlash she faced as soon as she published the poem to the blog.  Reactions varied between mild concern over the poem's title and content, to "are you fucking kidding me?"  Ms. Palmer seemed to think it astonishing that people would think she was writing about him, and even had to defend the poem and try to explain what she really meant writing it.  She even came out and stated verbatim "the you isn't him," even as it appeared so to me and many other readers.  Many of her fans have come to her rescue too, stating quite emphatically that those who reacted negatively to the poem just didn't understand it.

I don't often discuss politically-related stuff on Twitter, or blog about it here, but felt compelled enough to comment.  That instantly drew me into conversation with someone I can only assume was one of her fans who promptly informed me that if I couldn't get the true meaning of the poem, I'd best butt out of the conversation and leave it to the adults.  We had a somewhat civil discussion following that about the intent and meaning of the poem, for what it's worth.  But it really got me thinking about what a story becomes to author and to reader.  And therein lies the key to a very interesting literary concept, folks.  It's not one often talked about, but it's very vital to the relationship between authors and readers.  That concept is this:

Once the author or artist publishes something, its interpretation is no longer theirs, but the readers'.  They have done their part to form something which they hope best conveys their thoughts to the audience, but once it is published, the interpretation no longer belongs to them.  In other words, it ain't your baby no more.

Of course, the author(s) and/or publisher(s) still hold the copyright to the work.  That is an important distinction, separate from what I'm talking about here.  They still have control over further creative edits, as well as the sale, production, and reproduction of the work.  That is a vital component of literature and art.  What they don't own is the imagery of the story itself, the reader's experience of it.

I've seen, time and again, literary agents give advice to authors, and one such piece of advice that has stuck with me is this: if you have to explain your writing to someone, you have failed as an writer.  It's your job to form the words in such a way as to best convey ideas and imagery from your mind to the readers'.  If that image is jumbled en route from your mind to theirs, then you have failed in that job.

There is an entire sub-set of the publishing industry built around interpreting plot points and meanings behind literary works, in the form of Cliffs Notes and other such cheat sheets and guides.  We take classes on literature and art, read all manner of written works, and then sit around and commend each other on how well we've understood and interpreted the author's true meaning behind the words.  We practically throw our shoulders out of joint patting ourselves on the back because we got the "true" meaning behind what the author wrote.

And a lot of it is bullshit.  While there is merit in understanding the meanings behind art and literature, and while there is often intended meaning behind such works, those works are by their very nature subjective.  This means they're completely subject to the readers' points of view, not the author's.  The imagery in the reader's mind's eye belongs only to the reader.  The accuracy in which it is conveyed from author to reader is because of the author's talent in writing, not the reader's in understanding.  And just as important, the lack of accuracy in transferal also belongs to the author and not the reader.

In my head are very vivid pictures of a world quite different from ours, a world that started with the image of a lone gunslinger heading out across a dry and dusty wasteland.  Now Stephen King did a tremendous job creating those images in my head, and I'd bet they're fairly similar to what he had in mind when he wrote the story.  That's a tribute to how well he did his job as an author.  But no matter how well he wrote, my images of that world will be far different from his, because when I read those books, that part of the story became mine.

Ms. Palmer is a songwriter and musician who has been in the business for a while.  She's married to the incredibly talented author Neil Gaiman.  Together, that's a ton of artistic and literary talent and experience.  I'm sure she's fully aware of this concept.  When her stated intent behind the poem clashes with such a large number of its readers, that tells me she failed to convey her intent to them.  At least I hope so, because the alternative is worrisome.

I'm not here to speculate on her motives for writing such a piece, although by publishing it, she leaves the option to do so fully in her readers' hands.  I have to think that if it's a sort of "sympathy for the devil" piece, it didn't work very well at all.  There are many pieces of literature throughout history that have themes of empathy for antagonistic characters.  Vladimir Nabokov's character Humbert Humbert in the novel Lolita is a fine example.  As a reader, you come to hate him in the end, even as you understand him.  Author Joe Hill wrote one of the best such examples I can think of in recent history with his novel Horns.  His character Ig Parrish is quite obviously an antagonist written as a protagonist - essentially the devil himself, and yet we find ourselves rooting for him.  That's a hard thing to pull off in a book.  And yet it works incredibly well, because it isn't merely a story glorifying a very bad guy, but one that distinctly highlights the clash between good and evil in all of us.

So why do I feel that Ms. Palmer's poem didn't work very well in that regard?  Because while allegedly writing it to appeal to the compassionate or empathetic side of human kind, she linked it specifically to a man who planned and prepared for weeks in advance, deliberately placed a bomb down behind an eight-year-old boy, and then walked away smiling as shrapnel ripped through that boy and hundreds of other victims.  The horror was still vivid and immediate in the mind's eye because most of America watched as he did it, a few short days before.  To link that imagery, that callous lack of regard for the lives of others to the thought that we're somehow all connected, all human, completely boggled my mind.  There is a reason we call such acts "inhuman," and it's because they are decidedly not within the bounds of normal human behavior, not suited for human beings.  It's no wonder - and should be no wonder to Ms. Palmer - the poem has received such vitriol and negative criticism.

So to those who criticize detractors because we "just don't get it," just stop.  Just fuckin' stop.  You're insulting our intelligence by suggesting we can't grasp the "real" meaning behind it, and you're denigrating our humanity by insinuating we aren't willing or able to empathize with a terrorist who killed innocent life in cold blood.  If Ms. Palmer wants to write something that makes half her readers think she is glorifying a terrorist, fine, it's her prerogative.  If it does something for some folks, that's fine too.  But don't try to invalidate others' views of the poem or argue they don't get the meaning, because it ain't her baby no more.

Update: the Twitter user with which I conversed on this topic has since deleted all related tweets, leaving only my replies as evidence.

Writing Advice from the Masters

So there's a lot of writing advice out there.  A lot of it's great.  Some of it stinks.  I've even thrown my two amateur cents into the ring from time to time, whether good, bad or otherwise.  It all has some merit, though, when weighed with a grain of salt or two.  After all, many great authors differ greatly with the advice they give on writing.  And one can still learn from mistakes and bad advice, just as they can from the good.

On that note, I thought it fitting to compile some advice clips from the masters of the craft, those to whom we look to as the ultimate experts of the trade.  Here are ten authors talking about various aspects of storytelling.  Enjoy and learn as I did.

Ray Bradbury on writing persistently:

The most interesting part of this is how he would send short story after short story out, and wait for the rejections.  This is something I've done countless times, and at about the same ages.  Always the rejections.  I looked forward to them, to each one, hopefully with some tidbit of personal advice upon which to learn and grow.  I have close to 300 of them from short stories alone, most collected during my teens and early twenties, tucked away as mementos to perseverance and to giving my heart and soul to writing.  Most of the time between then and now has been spent writing, honing, perfecting; not trying to get published.  I've been too often in parts of the world where it was just not conducive to querying.  It's always been on my mind, even in places as foreign as Afghanistan, as quite a few rejections will testify to.

Elmore Leonard on hard work, characters, descriptions, and rhythm in writing:

"I made myself get up at five o'clock every morning to write fiction.  I had a rule that I had to begin writing, get into whatever the scene was, before I could put the coffee on.  If I hadn't done that, I don't think I'd be sitting here today."  That is a pretty powerful impetus for sitting down on your ass and cranking the words out.  Probably makes most of us, even the more successful ones, a little chagrined, more eager to jump back into a story again.  He's absolutely dead on - at least in my case - about writing four pages for every one quality page.  Writing is rewriting.  The one thing I can't agree with is writing longhand.  I've done it before, and just can't stand it.  Give me a good ol' word processor every day of the week.  That way I can go back and change a word mid-stroke when I realize it wasn't the best choice to use.

Stephen King on writing short stories:

So interesting his view on why people don't read short stories as much anymore.  He attributes it to laziness, which is probably a large percentage of the truth.  The other percentage, I think, is the way stories are promulgated to the public.  We aren't satisfied with a single peek at something.  We have to have more.  Even a movie or a single book isn't enough.  We have to have trilogies and series and goddamn sagas!  Let it never end!  And yet a short story does just that.  It's like the one night stand of literature, that fleeting kiss in the night, never to be continued, but only remembered for its fiery brevity.  I absolutely love short stories.  And in today's world of short attention span theater, and fear of commitment, I don't know how the short story isn't more popular than it is.

Kurt Vonnegut on writing short stories:

Short, sweet advice, just like a short story.  But it's some of the best advice I've ever heard.  And the thing is, all these words of wisdom are just as applicable to writing novels as they are to shorter works.  We see professionals in the literary business talking about how stories just don't start fast enough, that there's too much pre-story or world building, or character development happening before the actual story starts.  Vonnegut's advice on starting the story as close to the end as possible is just as good in these cases as it is for a piece of flash fiction.  Start with the action, make your characters want something, and then take it away from them.

Neil Gaiman with advice for new writers:

His advice, apart from going out and actually living and seeing the world is spot on. If you want to write, you have to write. The elves aren't going to magic your book into finished form. You're not going to get a sudden epiphany one day and churn out a book, slavering over an old fashioned typewriter like the classics. You're not friggin' Snoopy, sitting on your doghouse, pecking out that great work of literature without a flaw. You're going to make mistakes. You're going to write absolute crap. God knows I have. And you'll learn from it. You'll edit like there's no tomorrow, and when you're done, the finished product will look nothing like what you started with. And it's all because you wrote, and wrote, and wrote. And wrote some more.

Margaret Weiss talks with R.A. Salvatore on collaboration and how gaming affects fantasy books:

The most interesting part of this interview for me is hearing about collaboration. A story of any size is very personal; it's probably one of the most intimately personal pieces of creativity there is, and sharing that with anyone can create some complex and often problematic issues. It appears that one of the reasons why Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman have been so successful writing fantasy together is the way they have worked together. Each person has specific tasks and goals, each a certain chunk of the story they are responsible for. With less overlap, there is less a chance that the artistic vision of one author will clash with that of the other.

Louis L'Amour talks about historical accuracy and research in writing:

One thing he mentions later in this interview is his trademark lack of profanity. While he grew up in among a very rough crowd, he never saw the need for it. He didn't feel it was appropriate to use profanity, and that using it was often a crutch for a "lack of real skill". While I'll sprinkle my stories with profanity where necessary, L'Amour has a very good point - one shouldn't have to use it at all to get the point across. In the end, I'd opine that it's fine if used as a part of one's style; not if used as a crutch.

Chuck Palahniuk with a succinct analogy on writer's block:

Slightly crude or not, his point is made. And that's really the thing. Many writers advise one to write every day, to write nonstop. But Palahniuk's advice is simpler: if you don't have anything to write, there's no sense trying to force it out. But I think it goes deeper than that, and is something that is nuanced in what he says here. Many writers have tons of great ideas, filling their heads and overflowing onto the written page, whether they like it or not. But they don't have those ideas without living, without gaining experiences, because those experiences are what feed the ideas necessary to write.

Garrison Keillor with some advice to writers:

"Get out of the house," he says, and he's right, because writing isn't just about the author. In fact, I'd argue it's exactly the opposite. Writing has almost nothing to do with the writer, and everything to do with the reader. It's the reader's experience that brings a book to life, not the writer's. If you don't go out and experience life, relate to others, stay tuned to what's happening in the world, you'll end up writing a bunch of self-absorbed pretentious crap that nobody wants to read.

John Irving with encouragement to new writers:

It's tougher today than ever before to break through in this industry. The competition is not only an increasingly larger number of writers, but it's also tougher. The talent pool is larger. But that shouldn't mean discouragement. Rather it should be incentive to work all that much harder. It takes a lot to really produce a quality work of art, no matter the medium, and the higher the competition level, the better the best work is going to be.

Watching these videos, we get rather common themes from them. Write often. Read a lot. Get out there and live. Persevere. Write a variety of genres and lengths. Experiment. But over all, write, write, write. And then write some more.

Finding One's Voice

I find it odd, this thing called voice.  I read quite a wide variety of authors, both classic and contemporary, and with the good ones, no matter the genre, voice is always king.

Fellow Pacific Northwest native Tom Robbins, of which I've spoken before, has one of the most distinguishable voices there is.  His voice is magnificent!  It rises from whatever depths necessary to envelop the reader with pearls of wisdom, still wrapped in the gooey funk of the underdeep.  He grabs the reader by the stack and swivels, and woos you face to face with his wisdom and wit, whether you like it or not.  He's the only author I know who shatters George Carlin's plea on writing:

The only story I know of where clouds are important was Noah’s Ark!

- George Carlin

Tom Robbins does better than that.  "A rank of ample black clouds had been double-parked along the western horizon like limousines at a mobster’s funeral. Rather suddenly now, they wheeled away from the long green curb and congregated overhead, where, like overweight yet still athletic Harlem Globetrotters, they bobbed and weaved, passing lightning bolts trickily among themselves while the wind whistled 'Sweet Georgia Brown,'" he writes in Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates.  And in another novel, I forget which at the moment, he describes clouds as "nuns having a pillow fight".

That's voice, folks, pure voice.  Few others can equal that ability to trick images to leap into our minds from a few carefully placed words on a page.  None can mimic that exact cadence and poetry he employs.  And even if he's just talking about the weather - something writers are constantly advised not to do - you want to keep on reading.

Robbins isn't alone in displaying a unique, discernible voice.

Stephen King has a voice.  So much so that people called him out on his pseudonym Richard Bachman, because after a few novels they had it figured out, just by the sound of the voice.  His voice is one of the things that sets him apart from other authors, and one of the main reasons I believe he's had so much success.

David Eddings had a unique voice as well.  So much so that one could easily identify the author just by reading a few passages of his character's dialogue.  His dry, sardonic humor seeped into his characters so well that it made them easily recognizable and made them react in familiar manners when faced with obstacles in the plot.

And that, I think, is one of the problems of having such a distinctive voice.  All authors put so much of themselves into their work that it shows through in every character, every passage of narration.  But by doing that, they give it a sense of sameness, of consistency.  And while this is good for the overall tone of the book, it has a tendency, as we've seen with some of Eddings' writing, to give all the characters a similar voice.  And if they all sound the same, it's hard to make them unique.

A certain adaptation to character is needed.

It would be nice to have a certain way of adapting to whatever voice was needed at the time, a kind of Joss Whedon's Dollhouse way of slipping into a character and making it your own.  To create characters with a sort of schizophrenia, allowing completely different personalities to seep into each.  This is why perhaps, a pool of writers such as in a television series allows a more diverse group of characters.  It's easier for different writers to focus on different characters, instead of pouring themselves into each one.

And it seems some characters lend themselves more easily to voice than others.  I have one in particular who is so insistent on being an individual that he stands out easily from the others.  He's less subtle, I guess, which helps.  He's a little harder to write because he's over the top a bit, and yet I don't want him to come across as too much so.  It would create too much of a caricature out of him, when what I really need is just the emotional energy he provides.

I think a distinctive voice comes down to two things, and both stem from copious amounts of writing.

The first is experience, simple time spend pounding the words into story.  The more you do that, the more your voice begins to take shape and the less it imitates your sources of inspiration.  You begin to see how to hone your writing, to delete excess words, identify overused words, and craft tighter sentences.  All of this lends to your voice, making it more distinct and more identifiable as yours.

The second thing necessary is an understanding of your characters.  The more a writer knows about a character, the more distinctive their voice becomes.  When they're loosely shelled out, with vague goals and moods, they're harder to define.  They have no substance, no value behind what they do and say; they're simply doing or saying those things to advance the plot.  When that happens, they fall short as believable characters.

In the end, it's just hard work.

It takes time to hone one's voice.  Time spent cloistered away from living companionship, lost with those who live only in your own mind.  It takes hours and days and months and years sitting there, crafting words, blowing them up, and crafting them all over again.  Even a cursory look at the great writers will show that they put their devotion to writing above all else.  They prioritized it, even when they had to work other jobs to put food on the table.

They say it takes 10,000 hours of doing anything to master it.  I think I've easily surpassed that mark, probably years ago.  But I think that's just the first tiny step in the longer journey of honing one's voice and mastery of storytelling.  There is always much room for improvement, and still so very much to learn.

Book Review: Slaughterhouse-Five

Kurt Vonnegut's best known work is part war memoir, part dark comedy, and part science fiction.  None of those genres make the book what it is.  Stellar writing, satire, and a voice like no other are what make this book one of the finest pieces of literature ever to be penned, and Vonnegut one of the finest novelists to put pen to paper.

The books' plot is jangled and fragmented, and follows a quite nonlinear narrative.  The main character, Billy Pilgrim, jumps around from one point in his life to the next, without real pattern or reason.  He has become "unstuck in time".  He's quite fatalistic, resigned to his fate, and simply along for the ride much of the time.  He is so not because of any negativity, but because he's seen his death and he knows why it happens.  There is nothing he can do to prevent it and he knows this.

We follow him as he jumps between life on the planet Tralfamadore (where he was kidnapped by aliens, thus unsticking him in time), to Dresden, Germany during World War II, to his life before the war and after it with his wife and son.  The jumps are at random, but allow him to have a realistic view on his own life and death without becoming pessimistic.

The plot is merely secondary to the reading experience, though.  What shines through is Vonnegut's ability to tell a story.  I think one of the paragraphs that shows that ability the most is how he describes a minor character near the end of the book.  He doesn't write a word about how she looks, but he doesn't need to.  When he writes that she is "a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies," the image in the reader's mind is crystal clear.  He has no need to enhance an image of her using any physical descriptions because she is already fully formed in the reader's mind.  With a single sentence, he accomplishes what most authors need several paragraphs to do.

And this is common throughout the book.  Many times he never really says what is going on directly, but rather talks about how a character relates to it.  And every time, the reader gets a clear vision of what is going on, without actually reading it.

The book has an intimate feel to it, as though Vonnegut is sharing an inside secret with only a single reader.  At several points in the book, he breaks the fourth wall and explains that he was there when a particular thing happened, inviting us to believe the whole as recounted memoir, and not just scattered incidents serving as inspiration for a work of fiction.  It makes it that much more believable, even when he explains that the alien Tralfamadorians can see in four dimensions, and have already seen every instant of history, past and future.

It's an interesting look at a wide array of colorful, interesting characters, more a study on human nature and personal interactions than classic story line.  It's a look into behaviors, and into our very souls.  We find ourselves drawn into the story not only for the plot and characters, but the way Vonnegut puts words together. All authors have the same words to use.  Kurt Vonnegut was better than most at arranging them in a pleasing manner.

So it goes.

It's available on Amazon, should you somehow not have it in your collection.

Short and Sweet

Words: they say a picture is worth a thousand of them.  Fair enough, but I think sometimes the exact opposite is true.  Sometimes nothing can portray emotion as well as a few simple words.  Consider the shortest story Ernest Hemingway ever wrote.  As legend has it, he was once challenged to write a story in only six words.  The result, as many know, is one of the most poignant, touching stories ever written.  Hemingway himself is rumored to consider it his finest story ever:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Wow.  Adding more words wouldn't add anything else to that story.  It wouldn't heighten the pain, the loss, one feels when reading that.  More verbiage wouldn't add to the broken heart you know the mother, the whole family, suffered.  Six words is enough to know they moved on, but only out of necessity.  Six words is exactly enough to convey a punch to the gut.

Ernest Hemingway, © Penn State

I think Hemingway would have scoffed at those who say 140 characters isn't enough to adequately express oneself on Twitter. I think he would have loved Twitter. I'd have followed him for sure.  He was a master at saying exactly what he meant, and only that.

There's something to be said about brevity.  It's partly why literary agents want only a one-page query.  It's why we are told to hone, tighten, shorten, to turn the whole story into a synopsis.  To create a few-paragraph back cover blurb, and then take that blurb and shorten it into an elevator pitch.  Literary agent Rachelle Gardner has some excellent advice on creating elevator pitches.  Author David B. Coe shows us how to pare a blurb down, trim it to the bare essentials, leaving nothing but a concise pitch line.

These are things every author needs to do, if nothing more than the ability they lend to edit the story itself, and make every word count.  Kurt Vonnegut's advice on the matter was, "Every sentence must do one of two things, either reveal character or advance the plot."  Elmore Leonard's was a little simpler: "I try to leave out the parts that people skip."

It isn't easy, but then again, no one who's written anything worth a damn ever said it was.

Touring the Blogs

Recently, a couple of people have passed on blog awards to me, and I thought it was time to look into that subject a little deeper, and pass them along myself.  I'm normally a little reserved about doing this thing myself, which is probably why I've put it off for so long.

There are a large number of blogs out there, and many that are helpful, entertaining, insightful, creative, or intriguing in some way or another.  These awards are designed for the little blogs, to get them more attention.  So, to that end, here are two more.


The Versatile Blogger

Guilie, who maintains the blog Quiet Laughter, passed this one along to me, and I have been a little slow to pass it on myself because, well, 15 blogs is a lot of friggin' blogs!  It's taken a while, but thank you again, Guilie.

The guidelines behind this one are threefold:

• Thank the awarder and link back to them
• Share 7 things about myself
• Pass this award to 15 blogs I've recently discovered

The seven things about myself, well, that's easy.  Seven non-incriminating ones?  Yea, I can do that too.  Here goes:

1.  I once was nearly run over by Mario Andretti.  True story. I was walking down the paddocks area at Laguna Seca Raceway with my dad and a couple of friends during the Indy race when he barreled up from behind on a moped.  Dad hollered for me to watch out, and just in time.  Let's just say it's a good think I have cat-like reflexes.  And there's a damn good reason people use the expression "drive like Mario Andretti"!  Bonus tidbit: I've also been around that track in the pace car.  Very fast, and very fun!

2.  I'm a beer snob.  Four wonderful years of living in Southern Spain and touring around Europe completely ruined American mega-brews for me.  There are so many fine styles around the world, but one of the best things about the Pacific Northwest is that it's the micro-brew capital of the world.  Bonus tidbit: I can make a pretty decent micro-brew myself.

3.  I am somewhat the expert on wilderness survival.  As a young man living in Southwest Montana, my buddies and I used to go out camping in the woods.  Day or night.  No matter the weather.  No matter the season.  We never used a tent, never brought much food, if any, and would go for as long as jobs or school constraints would allow.  We'd eat the animals and plants available there.  And many's the time I remember waking up to a bright sunny winter morning as I peeked up through a tiny hole through a foot or more of snow on top of my sleeping bag.  Bonus tidbit: I've touched a wild porcupine on the nose, out in the wild.

4.  I'm a big sports fan.  It's no surprise the Seattle Seahawks are my favorite team, but I'm a sucker for pretty much any sport.  Hockey comes in a close second, with the Colorado Avalanche as my favorite NHL franchise - at least until Seattle finally gets a team again - but I'll watch pretty much anything.  Baseball, racing, rugby, soccer, you name it.  Bonus tidbit: I've been to several NFL Pro Bowls.  Go for the experience, the activities, the autographs, the barbecue, not the game.

5.  I like a variety of music, and it all depends on the mood I'm in.  I'll listen to Rob Zombie one day and turn around the next and listen to Boots Randolph.  The one stipulation is that each story I write has its own special soundtrack.  That way the mood, the feel of each story is the same throughout.  Bonus tidbit: I like a lot of foreign bands and singers.  Much of what I listen to is not English.

6.  I'm not a very big self-promoter.  Weird, because I'm very outgoing and gregarious as a person.  I have few very close personal friends, but a lot of casual ones, and enjoy meeting folks.  I just don't like tooting my horn all that much.  I'm sure that affects how well I'm able to get my work out there for folks to see, and I bet I could prove it too.  Problem is, it's not all about that.  Bonus tidbit: I'd love it if others promoted my writing, but this is probably as close as I'll ever come to asking.

7.  I'm not a very serious guy.  As much as I don't write the stuff, I love irreverent comedy.  Love finely crafted humor.  I just don't do it very well most of the time.  And I've been told only about a tenth of the humorous things I say is actually funny.  Bonus tidbit: that tenth thing is usually pure comedy gold, however!

And now for the fifteen blogs.  I apologize if any have already been nominated for this, but I ain't checkin', and you can't make me.  So here they are in no particular order:

1.  Let's Get Digital - Author David Gaughran is now an established expert on the subject of self-publishing.  He's written the book on it, quite literally, and is also a pretty damn good fiction writer himself.

2.  Unexcused Absences - World travelers and ski addicts Kent and Heather chronicle their meanderings, explorations and adventures as they do what most of the rest of us only wish we did.

3.  The Sharp Angle - Young adult author Lydia Sharp is a prolific blogger, offering advice, tips, industry secrets, reviews and other assorted writing-related goodies on her blog.

4.  Seattle Sportsnet - Alex, fan of all things Seattle talks sports - Seahawks, M's, Huskies, and others - as well as a variety of other Pacific Northwest nonsense.  Some of it's even pretty good!

5.  Bibliophile Stalker - Author and science fiction afficionado Charles Tan links to an incredible amount of resources, information, and sites of interest on his blog.  A definite must-follow for fans of the genre.

6.  Foie Gras Hot Dog - Foodies and culinary explorers Ryan and Julie share recipes, food secrets, and accounts from the quest to find the perfect food for the perfect occasion.

7.  Dave Krieg's Strike Beard - Longtime Seahawks fan DKSB posts analysis, spouts fan opinion and rhetoric, and shares historical moments and achievements on the blog.

8.  Steam & Ink - Author C. J. Ivory runs a smart blog about Steampunk, Victoria Noir, among an assortment of musings, ramblings, reviews, and other fun stuff.

9.  The World in the Satin Bag - Science fiction author Shaun Duke blogs speculative fiction, writerly interests and other bits of interesting nonsense.

10.  Karin Cox's Blog - Editor and author Karin Cox serves up lots of good advice on grammar, writing well, and tips for writers.  She knows what she's talking about, folks!

11.  Seahawks Draft Blog - Seahawks fan Rob Stanton provides analysis, scouting reports, opinion, mock drafts, and other related awesomeness on his blog.

12.  Minetweeps - Author and Minecraft geek Roger Hoyt runs a new blog about adventuring in one of the most addictive time sinks known to man.  Get your geek on!

13.  Fangirl In Training - Fangirl Shelby blogs about baseball and a sundry other weird subjects.  Pictures from numerous games, practices and events make this one an interesting read.

14.  Adventure Without End - Comedy author Tony James Slater blogs about... well, as he puts it, leading a life with no holds bared!  Adrenalin, adventure, misadventure, yep, they're all there.

15.  17 Power - Seahawks fanatics Brandon and Scott run this site, a great place to find analysis, information, and opinion on the team, as well as links to other Seahawk-centric sites and resources.

The Liebster Award

J. W. Alden, who runs the blog Author Alden, gave this one to me. This award is designed to honor smaller blogs which motivate and inspire us, those with under 200 followers.  Thank you, J.W.!

The guidelines for this one are simpler:

• Thank the person who nominated you on your blog and link back to them
• Nominate up to 5 others for the award
• Let them know by commenting on their blog

So, for the five blogs I feel deserve this award, also in no particular order:

1.  JetInk - Author Jettica runs a number of blogs, but this one's about writing, characters, stories, and various other musings from the other side of the pond.

2.  Die Laughing - Author Luke Walker blogs about writing, book reviews, movies, horror, the publishing industry, as well as a variety of other subjects.

3.  Jamie Todd Rubin - Science fiction writer Jamie Todd Rubin blogs all things science fiction and technology, as well as writing and other random musings.

4.  Writings, Workouts, and Were-Jaguars - Author Shiela Calderón Blankemeier posts about writing, the query process, literary agents, and other essential bits of information for writers.

5.  Steph Crawford's Word Barn & Letter Emporium - Author Stephanie Crawford talks writing, words, and other such interests on her blog.

And there we have it.  A bunch of new blogs to run down and follow.  You're welcome.  And yes I am an author, running an author blog.  No, not all these blogs are author blogs.  Some of them, in fact, have a pretty good amount of traffic already.  It doesn't matter.  Broaden your horizons, because if we don't get out of our incestuousness little author circles, the world stays pretty small.  And you're still welcome.