Ikea looms this weekend

As I head south to the family abode this weekend for Mother's Day, I'll stop off en route at Ikea and buy this desk. With a birch enamel color over the particleboard, it will fit in nicely in an area of my to-be home office.

One of the first stories I'll be writing will be an essay comparing the past eight months living in Newburyport versus about two years in Somerville.

I started brewing a story idea earlier today while eating lunch beside the Rowley River in said town, and how the outdoor sounds were eerily quiet until an MBTA train rumbled by. I thought of many afternoons walking around South Boston's Castle Island and hearing and seeing the planes land at Logan across the harbor. Then, my mind shifted to downtown Newburyport and surrendering my senses to the tranquility of mildly moving powerboats on the Merrimack River.

Once complete, I plan to pitch this story to the Boston Globe.

T + P4 = B

Six years ago, I scribbled the above formula into a notebook while listening to bestselling author Laurie Beth Jones keynote at the 31st annual American Society of Journalists and Authors conference.

I thought about that today, not the formula as I had to look it up in my notes but the general essence of that conference, as I hobnobbed with some 40 authors, playwrights, and poets in town for the 4th annual Newburyport Literary Festival. Throughout the day, I sat in on several panels involving children's writing, graphic novel illustration, and poetry.

Which brings me to travel...

Seven months before hearing Jones speak, I had returned home to Massachusetts after a consulting job in California went sour that resulted in a cross-country roadtrip.

Driving over 20,000 miles across 20+ states and half of Canada, I visited the sun-drenched beaches of San Diego and Halifax, the natural wonders of Yellowstone and Acadia, and the urban centers of Winnipeg, Toronto, and Denver. My so-called "Great American Roadtrip" later became a series of workshops at the Boston Center for Adult Education and provided the backdrop for numerous travel essays that continue to this day.

After returning from California, I attended numerous literary conferences in Boston and New York between 2002-04 through illustrious organizations such as ASJA, Harvard's Nieman Foundation for Journalism, and the South Asian Journalists Association (the latter I previously wrote about here).

Perusing through my saved journals from the j- conferences, I see copious notes on writing tips and tricks, finding one's voice, advantages of not having j-school experience and dozens of other media topics from the likes of Barbara Ehrenreich, Ken Burns, Susan Orlean, Roy Peter Clark, Adam Hochschild, Jacqui Banaszynski, Mark Obbie, Adrian LeBlanc, and Victor Merina... not to mention those who have passed on such as David Halberstam, Molly Ivins, and Peter Jennings.

Fast forward to the present, and the first panel I attended, So You Want to Be a Famous Writer, featured authors Terry Farish, Lauren Weinstein, and Natasha Friend.

I listened to an elderly woman ask the women how to discipline oneself to write a novel without distraction from daily vices. Weinstein talked about the importance of pets and Friend spoke of keeping to a calendar, and through it all I chuckled to myself because God knows how many times in how many conferences and how many panels I've heard that same question.

Everyone wants to be a writer, and God bless every one of them. But how many wannabe writers successfully transition from concept to creation?

People, said Jones at the 2002 ASJA conference, are whiners, dreamers, and doers. Whiners complain about what is, dreamers wonder about what could be, but doers encapsulate the raw material of what is and what could be to define a vision and bring it into the now.

Jones formularized writing as T + P4 = B, where T is Talent; P is Passion, Pain, Persistence, and Promotion; and B is Bliss.

Do you agree with this formula?

Churning story ideas to write

I want to capture a variety of experiences over the past two years and put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard, in this case) and write essays to ultimately pitch to regional newspapers and magazines.

These experiences include traveling to the Carribean and China (such as an essay I wrote for the Boston Globe last winter), and my pending travel to Israel; working on Beacon Hill; and possibly profiling people I know who are celebrities in their own right but the media has missed them.

One such idea I've already started to write...

The KISS method on word count

We've all heard of the KISS method, applicable to most facets of life.

Keep
It
Simple,
Stupid

The KISS method should also be used for word counts. Any editor will tell you that newspaper space is real estate; because a paper can always run an advertisement, there should be a reason why a 800-word story is better than a 400-word story with the same plot elements.

Granted, hard copy real estate is different than online real estate, but that's no excuse for writing fluff just because you can.

Sandy Cohen, an Associated Press entertainment writer, wrote this story about Paris Hilton's first night in a LA jail. But because the press is not allowed inside the jail and the paparazzi are barred from photographing the hotel heiress for the next few weeks, only a few sentences carried content on the jail cell's description and her soon-to-be activities.

Ms. Cohen wrote 787 words for this mindless drivel. Is this really necessary?

I say Davis Square, you say David Square

Because I am always on the lookout for new writing opportunities, I monitor craigslist for local writing and editing jobs.

On Friday, a Somerville-based online publisher of technology product reviews posted this ad for a copyeditor.

In the body of the ad is the clause, You work out of our office in Davis Square, but as the site organizes job ads by location, the publisher typographically erred and wrote, David Square.

For any other job ad, I'd pass over the error but for a publisher seeking a copyeditor? One would presume the potential interviewer would know how to proofread.

Perhaps I'm being harsh, as Technorati shows 28 blog posts with the clause, "David Square." I don't know how many of those posts were also intended for "Davis Square," but I'll hazard a guess that none of those results are for writing opportunities.

Static Websites Are OK, But for Boston's Grub Street, the Content is Old

It is a misnomer for a professional website that advertises creative writing classes and other media content to fail to regularly update the data.

In Boston, there are three primary purveyors of professional writing classes: Boston Center for Adult Education, Mediabistro.com, and Grub Street. However, while the content on BCAE's and Mediabistro's websites are dynamic to server databases, the content of Grub Street is clearly static.

Mark Cahill at Vario Creative: Static websites remind me of the dark old days when someone would hand us their product catalog and we’d simply put it on line, in the hopes someone would find it and buy something.

Take a look at Grub Street's self-titled opportunities for writers. The links work, but the accompanying captions describe contest deadlines from 2004 and 2005. Moreover, the copyright line at the bottom of the page is dated 2003.

Mediabistro and BCAE use dynamic content, linked to server databases. Grub needs to get with the times.

The Sigificance of Six

Many thanks to Robert McEvily for publishing my quirky ode, "The Significance of Six" (linked above, and here), on his online compilation of real and imaginary authors who will write about any topic for a shot of fame.