Here’s a photo of Atilla Vekony and Grael Norton at Wheatmark Publishing, sporting their new Fictional Café headgear! You can get one too! Be sure to Join the Fictional Café here to become eligible to win a FC baseball cap, then watch your email for our forthcoming contests and giveaways! Becoming a member also entitles you to submit your own creative work: poetry, short stories, novel excerpts and art. P.S. Wheatmark is publishing my latest novel, Madrone. Stay tuned for news about it!
Google’s Street Art, Across the Universe
A few years ago, Shepard Fairy, a well-known street artist, was arrested in Boston by an overzealous, graffiti-art-hating cop, for postering a portrait of Obama named “Hope” on a public wall. That strikes me as arresting someone for self-publishing their writing. Now, Google has raised street art and its cousin [or are they the same?] to new heights in its growing art portfolio. There is some wonderful art being created by artists who can’t or won’t be seen in a formal art gallery. Visit here to see more wonderful art.
What a nice surprise!
Bravery in a Windows 8 World
I don’t much care for television commercials. I mean, come on, “ask your doctor” if you need to take a placebo pill for your placebo-fantasy condition whose side effects will make you sick? But I don’t want to get started. Except my wife and I were watching “Big Bang Theory” and this Microsoft commercial comes on. Innocuous enough, but then at the end there’s some woman screeching something I cannot understand. It sounds like she’s having a bad-tattoo experience. Or maybe her phone just fell out of her back pocket and was run over by a truck. Or maybe it was a cry of frustration with trying to work a Windows 8 computer. I was curious enough to Google around to find out why she was in such pain. Turns out she’s singing something about being…
Interview With Alex Hughes, Author of “Sharp” and “Clean”
I had a chance to meet Alex at last year’s Willamette Writers Conference — of which both I and Fictional Cafe founder Jack are on the presenters’ staff for this year — and she was kind enough to sit down and answer a few questions both about her work and the work. 1. Let’s start with the numbers. How many books did you write before writing “Clean?” How many queries did you send for “Clean?” How long had you considered yourself a writer before making the sale? Clean was my third completed novel. Clean was also my learning novel, on which I learned revision, scene structure, story structure, description, pacing, and a whole mess of other lovely and difficult things. By the time the final revision was done for the publisher, I’d taken it through eight drafts. Only a…