I just spent the day reading interviews on Writer Unboxed. Do you know about those guys? They’re pretty cool. And they’ve interviewed LOTS of people!

I went there originally this morning to re-read their interviews with Donald Maass and Lisa Rector and refresh my memory for the co-interview I’m doing with those two right now. (There have been unavoidable delays, but it is going forward nicely.)

However, I got hung up on an interview Writer Unboxed did with independent bookstore manager Robert Dougherty of Clinton Book Store, because it’s all about Indiebound. And I realized I ought to be bringing Indiebound to your attention. So you can bring it to other people’s attention. So they can pass it on.

Because Indiebound is the voice of independent booksellers online, and I can’t even tell you how important that is—to you, to me, to all the writers and readers out there.

Susan Johnson of The Urban Muse has done a really nice piece today on creativity, or What I Learned About Being a Fiction Writer from Musical Theater. And I’m not just saying this because I live with a musical theater buff who can sing all of The Pirates of Penzance at the drop of a hat—including impromptu lyrics (and frequently does).

Also, Mystery Man on Film kicks off his new series of appearances on the Story Department with a classic discussion of exposition. Take note, especially, of #2 under Other Considerations way down at the bottom. This is, in a nutshell, the logic behind saving backstory for Chapter 2 or 3.

And Laura at Combreviations posted a clip last November (which I am just getting around to pointing out) of Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner doing “The 2,000 Year Old Man,” which lead me to reading the interview she linked to, which lead me to Mel Brooks’ wonderful ad-libbed description of Jesus: “Always came into the store, never bought anything. Always asked for water.”

Apparently Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, now in their eighties, are best friends and spend most evenings together having dinner and watching movies. What I wouldn’t give to be a fly on the wall—I love Mel Brooks’ delivery. That guy could read a shopping list and make me laugh. “ONIONS!”

And he had also the incredible good sense to be married to Anne Bancroft for 41 years. Way to go, Mel!

I’m going on vacation for a couple of weeks. Every year my family celebrates with great hope the extreme low point of the year at the Winter Solstice—like everyone else, I guess—and then takes the ten days between that and New Year’s Eve as time out of time, that gap in the Gregorian calendar between the Solstice and the New Year it inaugurates. We like to pretend there is no calendar, there is no schedule, there is, in fact, no movement of time. We will also be overhauling this website. . .at any rate, that’s the plan.

This year my husband’s starting his vacation tomorrow, so, hey! We’re making it a party. I expect to spend my days by the fire with my feet up eating chocolate. (Are you listening, sweetheart?) I will, of course, be checking email, so if you’re a client or considering becoming a client, you will still be able to reach me.

But I would not abandon you readers! Oh, no. I would never do that. Because I know that while I’m kicking back in my rocking chair with a cat on my lap, re-reading Ivy Compton-Burnett’s A Family and A Fortune (for that wonderful uncle Dudley and the dry, witty sniping about how the youngest brother Aubrey is “different” that the older brothers use to drive their mother crazy), you will all be hunched over your desks in your freezing garrets type-type-typing away at your beloved fiction, working on your craft, sweating over your plots, living with your characters in that ephemeral otherworld in which fiction writers prefer to live.

So I’m leaving you with three wonderful essays on the craft of writing from Glimmer Train.

Glimmer Train, in case you don’t know, is a couple of sisters in Portland who run a quarterly literary journal of some serious repute. They’ve been doing this for almost twenty years now, and they’ve expanded into online submissions, monthly contests, and a writer’s magazine, Writers Ask.

I hope this tides you over.

Happy holidays! Watch for a new look for the website in the New Year, along with a co-interview with literary agent extraordinaire and author Donald Maass and independent editor Lisa Rector-Maass, a brand-new Free Edit project like the HOOKS project last fall, and hopefully even a brilliant way to bring back the old posts, which we’ve been mulling over lately. Yes, there is a very real possibility! Stay tuned—

This month’s mania is the Season of Giving.

Thank you to Susan Johnston of The Urban Muse for promoting the Writers’ Emergency Assistance Fund.

This fund is a 501(c)(3) charitable trust made up of donations from writers like you to help freelance nonfiction writers in times of acute financial distress. As you can see from the stories, writers who receive funds (not huge, either) generally qualify through not just one financial disaster but two—double-whammies. We’re talking about serious medical conditions like cancer draining a freelance professional’s savings and preventing them from working to support themself.

Do you believe in writing? in writers? in being grateful when you’re on the end that gets to give and not the one that has to ask?

Give what you can.

Happy holidays!

I’ve mentioned before my addiction to the Hugh Laurie characterization of P.G. Wodehouse’s quintessential dingaling, Bertie Wooster. Bertie is everything hopelessly one-sided about the British upper classes: white, male, rich, privileged, and a complete brainless gorm. He’s melodramatic, narcissistic, and self-glamorizing to the point of insanity. He’s also, fortunately, good-hearted, talkative, impulsive, surrounded by people even more harebrained than himself, and driven relentlessly by something he calls the Code of the Woosters—which simply means Wodehouse put him into predicaments and refused to let him take the sensible way out.

And Hugh Laurie has given Bertie the flamboyant mannerisms and puzzled jolliness he needed to round him out perfectly. In Laurie’s hands Bertie suffers a constant, unending series of facial expressions, ranging from baffled to appalled to triumphant and everything in between—even when he’s not talking, his wonderfully-mobile face simply never rests.

My husband has gotten so fond of Laurie’s Bertie that it’s causing hitherto unknown resources of genius to surface in him. He announced recently he’s discovered how to read Moby Dick without getting bogged down in Melville’s nineteenth-century loquacity.

“Picture Bertie dragging on a gasper,” my husband says, “while holding captive one Jeeves standing in the doorway with a trayful of empty glasses enduring the moments until he can retire to the kitchen. Sometimes I mentally put in an ‘I see, sir,’ or ‘Quite so, sir.’”

And damned if it doesn’t work! Suddenly Melville takes on a whole new personality. Talk about your layering!

So today we’re linking to Moby Dick, to be read as told by Bertie Wooster.

This week we’re linking to an excerpt from a novel by Millicent Dillon, A Version of Love.

I know who Dillon is because in 1995 I stumbled across her biography of Jane Bowles in a bookshop in lower Fillmore in San Francisco, A Little Original Sin, introducing me to the extraordinary, baffling, intriguing world of Jane, ever since one of my favorite writers. In the process of researching her biography, Dillon got to know Jane’s husband, the writer Paul Bowles, quite well and eventually wrote a biography of him, too: You Are Not I. Dillon went on to edit the collected letters of Jane, Out in the World (the bulk of them “agonizers” to Paul, as they traveled extensively and often separately throughout their lives, while maintaining an extremely close marriage) and The Viking Portable of Paul and Jane Bowles.

NOT ONLY THAT. But Dillon is an award-winning fiction author herself. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a resident writer at Yaddo and won the O’ Henry Award five times. Her novel Harry Gold was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2000.

AND. I have been having a long, luxurious, protracted conversation with her for months now about Jane Bowles, during which she’s commented periodically about her work on her latest novel, which she’s been working on for five years. She just finished it. Take note: you heard it first here.

So I’m recommending that all aspiring writers take a good, hard look at these early chapters of A Version of Love. Notice what she puts in. Notice what she leaves out. Notice the telling details, the significance of the dialog, the exposition that exists only to say something she couldn’t have said any other way.

Most of all, notice the polish. Dillon is a craftsperson of the highest order. This work of hers—in its deceptively simple, meticulous, factual tracking of characters through experience—is the essence of literature.

Boy, I’ve been sick as a dog all week and am just catching up with work. And guess what I discovered this afternoon? Agents giving advice on Twitter? I don’t think it’s such a good idea to insult aspiring writers in public.

Particularly one you’ve actually requested a manuscript from and are hoping will turn out to be a client.

I just took the heat this afternoon for standing up for aspiring writers and suggesting that advice can come without insults, and it was not a fun experience. I don’t like dealing with rude people, and I certainly don’t like doing it in public. But I felt sincerely bad for aspiring writers out there, who know less about this industry than I do, thinking, “Thank god that agent offered me that advice. Too bad about the sacrificial lamb, and yes, if it’d been me they were talking about, I’d know and I’d be feeling like crawling under a rock right now. Nothing like having your innocent hopes twisted in a knot by an agent who thinks they’re funny when they’re actually just mean. But I guess that’s the rough-&-tumble biz.”

No business is any more rough-&-tumble than the participants make it. The “thick skin” everyone talks about is about accepting the reality of rejections, not ridicule in the guise of snark. There is absolutely no need for discourtesy from professionals to amateurs.

No need at all.

Sure, I know there’s a kind of brat pack of young literary agents out there who are very visible on blogs and Twitter. I link to a lot of their articles and retweet a lot of their advice. They post some incredibly smart and helpful information. I also sympathize deeply with their problems with people who are neither writers nor aspiring to be, just nuts wanting someone to pay attention to them. I deal with some of those people, too. And I know some of those agents are quite funny on their blogs and trade a lot of commiseration about their jobs among themselves. My editor friends and I commiserate about our jobs, too. Sometimes about nuts agents.

But Twitter is not the place to be snarky about potential clients. If you think they’re idiots, that’s your business. If you flaunt your opinion in their faces, though, they’re going to take their business elsewhere.

Do agents not have competition in other agents? Um. Yes, they do. The world is full of aspiring literary agents. The big names—who are completely out of the snarkers’ league—actually compete rather stiffly among themselves. And with current lay-offs from the publishing houses, there are more and more hungry literary agents every day, many of them seasoned professionals who know publishing insiders personally. People with long, illustrious publishing careers behind them, sometimes as the heads of whole publishing imprints. People also out of the snarkers’ league. Hungry for clientele.

So here’s some advice for hopeful agents in these troubled times: Don’t expect writers to flock to submit to you and then sharpen your wit publicly on their mistakes. In my professional experience, that is called, “Shoot self in foot. Repeat as necessary.”

The really successful professionals—with the great accounts and the brilliant authors and the big reputations—don’t have any need to publicly make fun of the writers who submit to them.

It’s a small planet, folks. We’re all in this together. And we all have feelings. Let’s remember to treat each other like human beings.

So today we’re linking to peace, because, you know, it’s all we’ve got that actually works. And maybe some people just need to be reminded.

Today we’re linking to Mira’s List.

Mira is a visual artist, educator, and author with a list of MFA’s you could stack books on. She appears to have been everywhere and done everything, and I also like her because she was an adult in the eighties. (I have very specific interests, I know.) And because she’s been published in the Bellingham Review, from my hometown Bellingham, for whose annual poetry chapbook contest I was a semifinalist when I was 19. (That’s the only poetry contest I’ve ever entered. A few years later, I drew the cover illustration for another poet’s Bellingham Review chapbook, The End of Forgiveness by Joe Green.) Also because she likes bluegrass. We are very big on bluegrass at our house.

However, Mira is important to you, personally, because her website is entirely devoted to researching and publishing information on grants, fellowships, and other such resources for artists and writers. You heard me right—she does this free, just because she likes you. I suppose.

And, even more important than that, she’s an educational consultant for the Transcultural Exchange, whose mission is to promote world peace through an understanding of the many cultures that make up this amazing planet we call home and this human species we call ours.

Today we’re linking to the Red Room—specifically to an interview Andy Ross, past-owner of Cody’s Bookstore in Berkeley, did with Alan Rinzler, Executive Director of the San Francisco Jossey-Bass imprint of Wiley and Sons and an independent editor. Andy has a previous interview with Alan, too.

I had lunch with Alan yesterday. Such a very nice man—conscientiously polite, considerate, approachable. Unfailingly gentlemanly. It wasn’t an interview, although I may someday ask him if he’d like to be interviewed here. But I did write a post about the experience today on Pulp Rag.

Thank you, Alan. Yes, I do like the Grand Cafe dining room. Especially those tiled pillars.

Today we’re linking to one of my favorite sites ever: the Poets & Writers collection of Jofie Ferrari-Adler interviews.

Have you ever read the Paris Review interviews? My friend Sasha Troyan (award-winning author of Angels in the Morning and The Forgotten Island) got me into those years ago. Wonderful stuff—interviews with all the great authors of the twentieth century you’ve ever heard of and all the ones you haven’t yet. I discovered Isak Denisen, Edna O’Brien, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and dozens of others through them.

Now Poets & Writers is doing the same thing, only with the agents and acquisitions editors of the contemporary publishing world.

Read these interviews. Then read them again. Then read them again. Enjoy them for the great conversations they are. Take notes. Follow advice. Look up the books and authors mentioned.

This is the company you hope to join.