There are so many links I come across and there is not enough time to write longer posts about all of them. Borrowing an idea from Ben Dowdy and his Misfill feature at The Pen Addict, I have started sharing these links in a blog post with a short description about why each article is interesting for authors.
- Pop Culture Mondays – PCM is a newsletter written by Brooke Hammerling on Medium. She started the weekly newsletter because friends would ask here about stories rippling through the interwebs. Each issue has three or four memes with their origins and their effects with just the right splash of personality. The 2020 Challenge opening image is courtesy of this week’s issue.
- Read This Twice – This site pulls together celebrity book recommendations from all genres. You can see what Keanu Reeves and Melinda Gates suggest that you read. You can also go from the other direction and see the most recommended books. There are other sites like this but this one wins because the user interface is simple and easy to navigate.
- Five Books – I personally like better the approach that Five Books takes to making listings. On the site, they ask an expert to select five titles and then interview the expert about the topic and the books they chose. You get better context for the category and the books chosen.
- The Seth Godin Encyclopedia – Brendan Cahill has done an amazing round-up of Seth’s work with his five books, a half a dozen videos and 101 quotes.
- Kickstartup – I wrote a long post this week about Craig Mod’s Kissa by Kissa project and it is worth going back to his 2010 post about his Kickstarter project for a previous book, Art Space Tokyo. He has analysis on what tiers work best and what happens to pledge activity during the course of the campaign. All of it is still relevant.
- Authors’ ‘invisible’ words reveal blueprint for storytelling (Arc of Narrative) – Three act structure has been well established as a pattern in story, but disagreements arise about what the exact patterns are that make great stories. A set of researchers propose that the kinds of words you find in a story change over the course of the narrative arc with lots of prepositions at the start to support staging and cognition verbs in the middle as characters make sense of their new circumstances. Their website also lets you submit your own stories for analysis by their tools.
