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Worth your time, yo.

The Present Tense

Mission Statement

The staff of this publication believes the time has come to focus a spotlight on those writers whose work moves beyond the traditional publishing industry standard. We want more tension. We want this journal to serve as a launchpad for the emerging writers of today, for those readers who want to be entertained. The stories in our journal are filled with desperate, lonely, and weird, with characters at the end of their ropes. This is a springboard for a new era of writers. This is a means to distribute carefully crafted stories of action and tension using all the technological means of the modern literary world. This is the Present Tense.

Wow, Present Tense Writer's Journal is fricken awesome!

Pictures by Jill Krementz at New York Social Diary.

Stephen King with his Corgi Marlowe, Bangor, Maine, July 20, 1995.

I’ve been an admirer of Kevin Brockmeier since 2006, when I read his novel, The Brief History of the Dead .  His latest book, The Illumination: A Novel, is a remarkable work, one that again demonstrates Brockmeier’s ability to combine fantastical situations (pain manifesting as light) and literary inventiveness (a chapter written entirely in ten word sentences) with incandescent prose.

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Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, February 2011: When wounds and illnesses, both superficial and severe, begin emitting a beautiful shimmering light–a phenomenon quickly coined “The Illumination”–a chain of characters learn to adapt to this unexpected change in Kevin Brockmeier’s incandescent novel, The Illumination. No longer able hide their own pains from the world, and suddenly exposed to the discomfiting wounds of strangers, friends, and lovers, these characters struggle to adapt to a new way of experiencing life and, in very different ways, to understand the intrinsic connection between love and pain. “There was an ache inside people that seemed so wonderful sometimes,” one character muses. And then, because this ache is also corporeal, “He wished he had brought his camera with him.” While Brockmeier’s brilliant novel is innately tied up in pain and loss, witnessing the lives he creates in the midst of this new wonder is not only a beautiful experience but, yes, an illuminating one. —Lynette Mong

An interview with Kevin Brockmeier.

Followup to previously posted images of people reading. Faulkner, Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, William S. Burroughs, John Cheever, Nikki Giovanni, and more at link.

via LIFE:

William S. Burroughs

* hat tip to BoingBoing

Writing advice from

Chuck Palahniuk

via chuckpalahniuk.net:

Nuts and Bolts: Hiding a Gun
by Chuck Palahiuk

Sometimes called “plants and payoffs” in the language of screenwriters, Hiding a Gun is an essential skill to the writer’s arsenal that university writing courses almost never touch upon. Learn to identify and use multiple forms, including the Big Question, the Physical Process, and the Clock.

Fucking typewriters. How do they work?

via New York Times:

Click, Clack, Ding! Sigh …
The Digital Generation Rediscovers the Magic of Manual Typewriters

Vintage typewriters at Donna Brady and Brandi Kowalski's booth at the Brooklyn Flea.

Manual typewriters aren’t going gently into the good night of the digital era. The machines have been attracting fresh converts, many too young to be nostalgic for spooled ribbons, ink-smudged fingers and corrective fluid. And unlike the typists of yore, these folks aren’t clacking away in solitude.

They’re fetishizing old Underwoods, Smith Coronas and Remingtons, recognizing them as well designed, functional and beautiful machines, swapping them and showing them off to friends. At a series of events called “type-ins,” they’ve been gathering in bars and bookstores to flaunt a sort of post-digital style and gravitas, tapping out letters to send via snail mail and competing to see who can bang away the fastest.

The subculture of revivalists includes Donna Brady, 35, and Brandi Kowalski, 33, of Brady & Kowalski Writing Machines, who sold the aforementioned Smith Corona Galaxie II one recent Saturday afternoon at the Brooklyn Flea, a market for crafts and antiques.

“You type so much quicker than you can think on a computer,” Ms. Kowalski said. “On a typewriter, you have to think.” She and Ms. Brady began their vintage typewriter business last April. So far, they have refurbished and sold more than 70 machines, many to first-time users. Their slogan? “Unplug and reconnect.”

Following up an earlier post with this surprising bit of the news. Chalk up another victory for The Man, man.

via The New York Times:

A Successful Self-Publishing Author Decides to Try the Traditional Route

“I’ve done as much with self-publishing as any person can do,” Ms. Hocking said in an interview on Thursday. “People have bad things to say about publishers, but I think they still have services, and I want to see what they are. And if they end up not being any good, I don’t have to keep using them. But I do think they have something to offer.”

Publishers, weary of hearing about their disposability in an age when writers can self-publish their work on the Internet and sell it on Amazon.com, said they were vindicated by the news.

Matthew Shear, the publisher of St. Martin’s Press, said that he wanted “pretty badly” to win the auction for Ms. Hocking’s books and that he would be able to introduce her work to a wider audience of readers. He first heard about Ms. Hocking six months ago from an editor at St. Martin’s, Rose Hilliard, who pressed him to read “Switched,” one of Ms. Hocking’s novels. (They are for sale at online retailers like Amazon and BN.com.)

“I think a lot of authors are looking at self-publishing as a way to perhaps make a certain amount of money sooner rather than later,” Mr. Shear said. “But a publisher provides an extraordinary amount of knowledge into the whole publishing process. We have the editors, we have the marketers, we have the art directors, we have the publicists, we have the sales force. And they can go out and get Amanda’s books to a much, much bigger readership than she had been able to get to before.”

I’m very excited to be a part of the 2011 Clarion Writers’ Workshop.

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Established in 1968, the Clarion Writers’ Workshop is the oldest workshop of its kind and is widely recognized as a premier proving and training ground for aspiring writers of fantasy and science fiction.

Our 2011 writers in residence are Nina Kiriki Hoffman, John Scalzi, Elizabeth Bear, David Anthony Durham, John Kessel and Kij Johnson

Useful lessons from a surprising source.

via Utne Reader:

The Art of the Police Report
A Los Angeles cop writes “just the facts” and still tells one helluva story

Crime reports are written in neutral diction, and in the dispassionate uni-voice that’s testament to the academy’s ability to standardize writing. They feel generated rather than authored, the work of a single law enforcement consciousness rather than a specific human being.

So how can I identify Martinez from a single sentence? Why do his reports make me feel pity, terror, or despair? Make me want to put a bullet in someone’s brain—preferably a wife beater’s or a pedophile’s, but occasionally my own? How does he use words on paper to hammer at my heart? Like all great cops, Sergeant Martinez is a sneaky fucker. He’s also a master of inflection and narrative voice.

For writers who want to bypass traditional publishing without going full-on Cory Doctorow, this story is heartening.

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via thestar.com:

How a failed author made $2 million from e-books

A year ago Amanda Hocking was working full-time at a job earning $18,000 a year. Now she’s writing and publishing her own ebooks, raking in close to $2 million.

Hocking, who lives in Austin, Minn., has sold more than 900,000 copies of her nine books, the first of which went on sale last April.

Her sales are so brisk (more than 450,000 in January alone), she may have broken the one-million mark by the time you read this.

Though she’s excited, “the numbers sort of seem unreal,” Hocking told the Star.

The 26-year-old, who specializes in paranormal fiction, wrote her first book at 17.