Bits and pieces of things that caught my eye not only for my own interest, but enough to want to share with you, too… 

It’s all about the writing this week….

It’s National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in which the goal is to write a 50K draft of a novel in 30 days. I mentioned last week that I do not participate in this because I couldn’t possibly meet that goal, but my own goal of writing for 30 minutes of day is going GREAT so far. So there’s that. Kudos to all who are participating in the great writing sprint. May the odds be ever in their favor.

Speaking of goals and writing, author Laura Tobias offered a post on the value of ritual and how it increases the cooperative firing of the neurons in our brain (I’m probably not phrasing that right – I apologize to any brain experts). She shares not only her writing rituals, but also some interesting ones of other authors. Do you think professional athletes are the only ones with superstitions? Check out some others, but find out how it can actually be helpful in our creative process.

Character development is a key factor in fiction writing. Angela Ackerman talks of how to move beyond facial expressions when conveying character emotion. In fact, it’s too difficult to successfully describe the micro-expressions that we catch when in visual contact with someone, therefore our writing must reflect emotion differently.

The BIG PUBLISHING NEWS of the week was the merger of two of the biggest publishing houses: Random House and Penguin, now to be called Random Penguin Penguin Random House. Agents – and some authors – expressed misgivings about it and Agent Kristin Nelson wrote a very brief reaction post that helped me best understand why.

On a tangential note, I found this interesting article about how many bookstores are shutting out Amazon-published books from their shelves. Barnes & Noble naturally does this since they have their own digital site and e-reading niche. Smaller stores, however, are doing so out of unhappiness with the fact that Amazon is largely responsible for the demise of the independent booksellers. I can’t say that I blame them, but if you are a self-publisher and are looking to expand your market in print, you might run into more roadblocks than you bargained for.

Video of the Week:

I don’t have a super cool video this week, just a song I really love right now: