Friday Fridge Clean-Out: Links for Writers, July 16th Edition

►At The Paris Review blog, poets review songwriters. Or is that like saying poets review poets?

► Do you puzzle over when, how and whether you should use cultural references in your work?

► Blogs worth checking out: Work in Progress, a new blog from the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux; author Allegra Goodman's; and freelance writer Kelly James-Enger’s Dollars and Deadlines (hat to Erika Dreifus for the latter two).

► Writer Jesse Kornbluth’s Head Butler offers sometimes offbeat reviews of, and other musings about, music, books, movies, writing and more.

► At the Nieman Storyboard (which is always full of great material), Peggy Nelson looks at how short attention spans and technology may be affecting narrative.

►The literary journal Ploughshares has a good blog. I liked this guest post by Aimee Nezhukumatathil – with lots of photos – on the spaces where writers create.

► The Colorado writer who blogs at A Writing Life is sharing her experiences in a workshop with author Pam Houston, like this one, on Houston’s advice about that “analytical bitch in the closet.”

► Finally, if you haven’t seen it yet, Dennis Cass’s quietly funny Moby Award winning best performance by an author in a book trailer. Procrastinators, Luddites and lazy authors who would rather write than promote books will love this.

Have a great weekend.

Friday Fridge Clean-Out: April 9th Edition

► Do you have a daily word or page count, or something similarly concrete to take you from concept to finished manuscript over the course of a set number of days, weeks, months? Allison Winn Scotch shares her “brick by brick” strategy over at Writer Unboxed.

► Literary Mama is running an interview with Jennifer Graf Groneberg, whose memoir, Road Map to Holland, traces her family’s first two years raising a son with Down’s Syndrome. Here is how she got the book done, when her three children were preschool age: “When I was working on the bulk of the book, which took about 50 weeks, I wrote on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We had converted part of our garage to a little office, and I'd go down the hill to the garage/office in the dark of the morning, before the kids were even awake. I'd work very long hours, into the night. On those two days each week, I was completely gone from family life, and I missed it terribly. Even knowing the kids were with Tom, who was not `babysitting’ but on fatherhood duty, I still felt very torn. But that was what seemed to work best for our family, at the time.”

►Big news for Erika Dreifus, of the writer-friendly blog Practicing Writing (and a friend), who learned her short story collection, Quiet Americans, will be published in early 2011. Many congratulations to Erika, whose blog and monthly newsletter are so enormously helpful to writers of all genres. Today she’s posted an interview with Kim Wright, who wrote nonfiction for 25 years and has just published her first novel, Love in Mid Air.

► I love Steve Almond for a lot of reasons, and now I have a new one. Read this exchange between the writer and an anthology editor who tries to justify collecting a sizable advance and then not paying contributors. Thanks, Steve. You speak for us all.

►And finally, if you must, get your Eat, Pray, Love jewelry here.

Have a great weekend.

An Organized Room of My Own. Mostly.

Whoever said that everything takes longer than you think it will might have had children, a house, a spouse, several consulting clients, a visiting mother, balky electronic gadgets, classes to plan, books to review, two editing assignments, and a distracting habit of occasionally enjoying sleep and regular meals. This person was probably also trying to write something. Ha! This same person likely also was too smart to try, amid the above named chaos, to do a complete office de-cluttering and overhaul, thinking X number of days was probably enough.

Still, I did promise photos after the deed. Well, the deed is about 80 percent done.
And this is how the office looks now,

in contrast to how it looked then.

Then, there's this -- piles still awaiting sorting (yes, I know I am ridiculously lucky to have such a large home office...) and this mass

of electronic messiness (where are those cord bunching thingees Santa brought?).

No, it still hasn't been painted, the comfortable corner reading chair a friend is giving me is still not here, and it's still mostly filled with cast-off furniture and bins, and makeshift shelving my husband's company once used to display merchandise at his retail clients' stores. But now it's a room of my own in which, for the first time in a long time, I can see where my own stuff is stored. And not piled on my desk and floor. That's a start.

I thought at this point, I'd have some nifty ideas to pass along about how to best organize things, some ingenious new system I'd share, a few terrific tips. I don't. I can only offer that the tried-and-true advice works; toss out a lot (12 bags and counting), group what's left in ways that make sense, and be ruthless about what's necessary and what's just nice to have around.

Today's the first day in the "new office". I did find it easier to get through the to-do list and – except for that one file folder I could swear I put in the top drawer -- I spent almost no time looking for something I know is "here somewhere."