Writing Gooder

Over the next few days, I plan on making a series of posts looking back at YWS over the past year.  The YWS Blog has been an off & on venture that first began in 2006, but withered away.  We began it again in April of 2007 with 12 different authors.  Over time, those authors were narrowed down to just four: myself (Nate), Suzanne, Via, and Trident.

The blog, though, didn’t really take off until August of 2007, and now it’s a fairly well trafficked part of YWS.  2007 ended up being a good year for the blog, but here’s hoping that 2008 will be even better!

The top 10 blog posts out of 872 from the past year by comments are as follows:

1. You Write? by Whence with 19 comments
2. August Statistics by Nate with 17 comments
3. YWS Will Become Text Only by Nate with 14 comments
4. Argh Matey! That’d Be YWS Swag! by Nate with 13 comments
5. Growing Up On YWS by Nate with 13 comments
6. Write Me = ? by Via with 13 comments
7. Buffalo buffalo… by Suzanne with 13 comments
8. Why Firefox Is Better For Writers by Nate with 13 comments
9. The Big Move by Nate with 12 comments
10. Plotting With Note Cards by Suzanne with 11 comments

Why not take a trip down memory lane and check out a few of those?  Some are no longer applicable (August Statistics and Write Me = ?) but others are fantastic (You Write?).

It’s the New Year, so what do you plan on doing with it?  Any resolutions?

Honesty has always been a tricky thing; some people have it, others don’t.  In fact, everyone lies all the time.  Most of the time it’s a white lie, such as saying your day is going fine when it really isn’t, but sometimes it’s a big lie.

Not long ago, the group behind Hannah Montana sponsored an essay contest.  The winning essay was by a six year old and was titled “My daddy died this year in Iraq.”  Unfortunately, the essay was a lie by the girl’s mother.  She did whatever she could to win, and now her daughter risks losing the prize through absolutely no fault of her own.  To be fair, the contest organizers should have done a double-check beforehand, but that in no way excuses the conduct of the mother.

An excerpt of the news story & link after the jump.

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The Financial Times had a good article today about the lack of business fiction that got me wondering.  After all, the last novel I read about the workplace was “Syrup” by Max Barry, and that was years ago.  Since then, I’ve read about Danes invading England, comic book writers in 1940s New York, cowboys in Wyoming, cattle farming on Mars, a terrible piece about some Australian man who loves Hong Kong, etc.  But nothing about office politics, and office politics can be absolutely ruthless.

The FT writer, Rhymer Rigby, thinks it may have to do with writer elitism to an extent as well as the notion that novels are there for us to escape in.  But I don’t necessarily buy either; after all, there is a wealth of young adult literature on the politics of the schoolyard and the mundane atmosphere of the school room.  Why not with the office?

Since most people 16 and over have a job, I think it’s fair to ask everyone here why you think there are few novels about working in general (from the library to internships to offices).  It’s a popular theme on TV (Just Shoot Me, 30 Rock, The Office, and Murphy Brown to name a few young and old), but not in literature.

On the upside, there’s definitely a niche there to be filled! An excerpt of the FT story and a link follows.

Where is the great workplace novel? For most of the fully employed, work consumes between a third and half of our waking lives. In our open-plan worlds, we build empires, form alliances, start feuds, beat rivals and fall in love. Yet this most central of human activities is rarely represented in literature.

Howard Davies, director of the London School of Economics and chairman of the judges for the Man Booker Prize, this year bemoaned the lack of biz-lit, lamenting that “most of our novelists are more preoccupied with life after working hours and below the waist”.

That is not to say there are no workplace novels. Think hard and you might manage a dozen examples. Douglas Coupland has written Microserfs and JPod , set in the worlds of software and games developers; this year Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End , chronicling the death of a dotcom-dependent advertising agency, received critical acclaim; Joseph Heller wrote Something Happened about the work and home life of Corporate Man; and there are novels such as Slab Rat (Joseph’s son Ted) and the Devil Wears Prada , set in the febrile world of magazine publishing.

Click Here To Read The Whole Thing

Caveat Scriptor: “Writer Beware”

I’m thinking of putting together a testimonials page for YWS, so any comments here will help me in putting it together.  But caveat scriptor!  If you post a comment, you may just find it out on such a page!

In any case, has the Young Writers Society helped you with your writing?  And if so, how?  If not, why not?  I want to know!

Wow, it’s hard to believe that I’ve been putting the entire Journal together for ten days now.  Nearly everyone has been contacted save for a couple, and I have already received five publishing agreements back.

So today I thought I would concentrate common mistakes people have made in submitting their work.

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How is everyone’s winter break (…those of you that have one) going?  When do you have to go back to classes?  How long have you been off?  Are you jealous of others or should we be jealous of your break?

 You know what would be funny?  To leave tons of comments to a default test comment over at a new blog put up by our sister site, Inspired Writers.

So go here and leave a comment! It’ll be HI-larious!

http://inspiredwriters.wordpress.com/

There’s a problem I have with the New York Times Top 10 Book List of 2007: I haven’t heard of any of those books.  Sure, I bet they’re great and wonderful and all, and I’ll also probably pick up a few, but what are they?   Actually, I have heard about “Imperial Life In The Emerald City” and “The Nine,” but that’s it.

Fortunately, Amazon has come through in connecting with our popular mainstream culture as their editors have picked their 100 favorite books of 2007.  The top 10 is below with a link to the full 100 afterwards:

1. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
2. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar by Junot Diaz
3. Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
4. The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
5. The Dangerous Book For Boys by Conn Iggulden
6. Heartsick by Chelsea Cain
7. Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
8. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah
9. Better: A Surgeon’s Notes On Performance by Atul Gawande
10. I Am America (And So Can You) by Stephen Colbert

Click here for the full 100