Today in the New York Times: In the sprawling slum of Haiti’s Cité Soleil, Placide Simone, 29, offered one of her five offspring to a stranger. “Take one,” she said, cradling a listless baby and motioning toward four rail-thin toddlers, none of whom had eaten that day. “You pick. Just feed them.” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/world/americas/18food.html World hunger [...]

A critter and a beta reader’s job is to honestly tell the author the problems they find in a manuscript, including: what they like and do not like in a story or its writing, where they lost interest, if they lost interest at all, what they think does and doesn’t work. Their job is NOT [...]

I was doing a Google search and came across this in the results…which, of course, had nothing at all to do with the subject of my search, but, hey, you know search engines! [A self-employed person has] “no guarantee of either a steady income or work, no company-provided life insurance and health benefits, no company [...]

Today I ran across two situations which are the flip-sides of the same coin — a depressed author who writes marvelous middle grade YA stories (Yes, I’ve read her work) and a despairing literary agent who represents YA books. The author is seeking a literary agent and the literary agent is seeking clients — good [...]

This today in Publisher’s Lunch which got it from http://www.businesswire.com/ : You can also read about it here: http://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUSN0835916320080408 Poll Asks, Name Your Favorite Book Harris Interactive surveyed American adults to find out “What is your favorite book of all time?” The answers: 1. The Bible 2. Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell 3. [...]

From today’s Publishers Lunch: Bob Miller’s new experimental start-up with HarperCollins took shape quickly after a casual discussion over drinks with Harper ceo Jane Friedman at the end of February. Miller says that he was “feeling restless and didn’t know what next mountain to climb” and was “talking about my frustration with the paradigms in [...]

Way back when, Steinbeck was mandatory reading: Of Mice and Men, Cannery Row, The Grapes of Wrath — all miserable books, hated by everyone in our class because the novels were so saturated with hopelessness, despair, and outright cruelty. “Oh,” but the teachers said, “it’s about the triumph of the human spirit over adversity.” These [...]

This morning I woke up, fed the cats and the birds, but not the fish. This morning I woke up the computer after keeping it up last night way past its normal bedtime. This morning I started my writing day by fielding a couple of requests, then grabbed my coffee and settled in for my [...]

You ever heard ants chewing your house down from inside the walls? It’s this faint, constant crunching sound…like Lilliputians eating tiny bites of toast. If you want to hear it, click this link.* That’s what was going on inside my brain this weekend. While this wonderful chewing was happening, I wrote a short story, something [...]

The article is in the NYTimes here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/31/nyregion/31dith.html?hp