Christopher Meeks | Christopher Meeks
Nov.02.2011
I noticed there was a similar title to a blog last week, but I guess good ideas come in waves. The Huffington Post had asked me to write for them, and I gave them this idea before I saw it elsewhere on Red Room (in a couple places that I now look.)
I happened to be inspired when I came across a...
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Oct.21.2011
A few years ago, I read a post about short stories and the challenges book groups had to them. Short story collections rarely get discussed in book clubs because as Dawn explained in her above post, how do you discuss not one story but many?
Last year, I took this very challenge to my college...
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Oct.16.2011
“You must come to my class,” said the beautiful young woman with the Scandinavian name and face. This was when I was in USC’s MFA professional writing program. “Thomas Thompson is a big-deal writer," she said, "and just because he teaches nonfiction, people are missing a great teacher.”
If she...
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Sep.27.2011
THE 99-CENT EBOOK DILEMMA: ROAD TO SUCCESS OR A SUGGESTION “IT SUCKS”?
When Amanda Hocking first made news earlier this year that a 26-year-old out of Austin, Minnesota, could become a millionaire by selling her books for 99 cents on Kindle, anyone with a flicker of a story hammered it out and...
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Sep.21.2011
While I’ve written a lot over the years about my writing process either in commissioned articles or in blogs, I’ve never written about humor. That may be because it’s as mysterious to me as phlogiston was to 17th century scientists who tried to understand fire. Both fire and comedy exist, but HOW...
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Sep.20.2011
Do you remember the scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen argues with Diane Keaton in a movie line, and a pedantic man behind them rattles on about Marshall McLuhan? Pissed off, Allen disagrees with the professor and pulls out McLuhan who tells off the professor. (Click here to see the one-minute...
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Sep.08.2011
My grandfather loved Walnettos, which were chewy chocolate caramel squares loaded with walnuts and invented in Minneapolis, where he lived. Then along came Hersheys, and now we have Trader Joe organic dark chocolate with almonds. Things change.
In the old days if you were a writer, you had a clear...
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Sep.06.2011
After I wrote about the challenges of marketing literary novels (see my previous post here), I asked if anyone knew of an author writing a literary book that’s done what Amanda Hocking, J.A. Konrath, and other eBook superstars have done. A reader on Kindleboards told me about Darcie Chan and...
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Sep.03.2011
It started when my agent at the time did not want to send out a manuscript of my short fiction that had been published in literary magazines. I was calling my book The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea, to reflect both a sense of humor and literary quality. One magazine editor had already called my...
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Jul.22.2011
I grew up in a Frank Lloyd Wright house--or it would have been an official one if he'd had lived a little longer. In a few tours that were given before the house was knocked down last year, people asked me what was it like growing up in an "organic architecture" home. I've thought about...
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