Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The awesome (and scary) thing about being a writer is that you can always improve. It’s why people can sit on a draft for weeks — every time they take “one more look,” they can find a way to make it better. While it’s definitely a fun challenge to see how long you can keep…
Some time in the middle of Avengers: Age of Ultron, I came to terms with the fact that there will never be any more decent Marvel movies. In fact, there can’t be. Some of what I have to say is going to read as genre snobbery. So let me get this out of the way:…
Gothamist is expanding and deepening our coverage of New York City, and we’re paying. We want original, compelling, heartbreaking, funny, enraging, enlightening work, written clearly and with an eye towards stories that cut through the dull hum of the internet—stories that help the reader better understand New York City and the people living in it….
Why scribes belong together My husband, Art Taylor, and I talk about a lot of things. Most are along the lines of “What’s for dinner?” or “Need to clean up the cat vomit.” However, when we’re not navigating the day-to-day chores of life, we talk about short fiction. And that’s why we’re here. To celebrate…
At the American Copy Editors Society’s annual meeting in Pittsburgh today, updates to and new entries in the 2015 Associated Press Stylebook are being revealed. This news will not affect you at all. But I think it’s interesting, so go to hell. Tons of newspapers, magazines, and websites rely on the 62-year-old AP Stylebook. It’s…
In nautical (and aeronautical) contexts, a vessel may declare a number of “souls onboard”. I’ve googled around for origin of that phrase, but haven’t found a definitive explanation. Most discussions of the phrase I’ve seen on aeronautical forums and obviously concern the usage in aviation, with the discussion often revolving around on rescuers tallying the…
The earliest reference I can find to ‘souls’ as a count of persons is mid-eighteenth century, although it probably was in use earlier. It appears in maritime commerce, as the number of living humans aboard a ship, and in civics, as the population of a town or city. I think that in the early 1700s…
No one knows who wrote this infamously bad, now-legendary <em>Harry Potter</em> fanfiction. Photo: Jed Egan and Photos: Warner Bros., Shutterstock Like Stonehenge or the works of Shakespeare, we’ll probably never know who was behind “My Immortal” — the massive Harry Potter–inspired text that is widely regarded as the worst piece of fanfiction ever written — but…
The Reading Level of the State of Union Address is in Decline Feb 17, 2015 · 2,239 views Recently, the Priceonomics team released a tool that measures the reading level of any text. To achieve this, we use five of the most commonly used reading indexes — the Automated Readability Index, the Coleman-Liau Index, the…
White Spaces In my ongoing quest to come up with a way to write more, I’ve been trying to think about the things stopping me. Sure, there are big things such as not having enough time. But there are also little things. In some cases, literally. Take, for example, the text entry box on various…