First up is Californio of DFW Writers’ Workshop. Great link to a treasure trove of articles from the NY Observer on the current state of Magazines and freelance writing. Ok, there are 4 articles and I suppose we can’t really call that a trove of any sort. Perhaps a treasure twiddle?

Anyway, Doree Shafrir’s lead article begins with the following quote:

“There’s not one path anymore,” David Hirshey, executive editor of HarperCollins and former longtime deputy editor of Esquire magazine, said the other day. “Thirty years ago, you worked at a newspaper, you moved to a magazine, and then you wrote books or screenplays. Today you can be a blogger who writes books or you can be a stripper who wins an Academy Award for Best Screenplay.”

Them Gawker “alums” show up all over the place, no?

Some pretty funny stuff going on at Writer’s Resource Center: March Writing Blog Madness. Basically, it’s a throw down between writing sites. Now I have a nice cache of sites to add to my reader. Thanks, John!

I owe this one to my wife for my earlier link to 5 ways your blog is like a bra:

It takes great patience to live with a writer. It takes much more than patience to live with a writer who is trying to complete a book. It takes something superhuman to do so when there are two young children…

— Jeff Gordinier, author of X Saves the World on The Publishing Spot (see Jason’s whole series of Jeff Gordinier posts).

James at Men with Pens does Drive-By Web Consults on the side. Today he gunned down The Writing Journey. Good advice for $25, IMHO. Plus you get the plug on a great site…

A tech fellow named Hank Williams has some angry thoughts about the free model of software distribution. I think his thoughts could easily apply to writers trying to make it online.

In today’s “free” world, in most online business categories, it is inherently impossible to start a small self-sustaining business and to grow it. This is because in the digital world, advertising, the only real revenue stream, cannot support a small digital business. If businesses were based on the idea that people paid for services then small companies could succeed at a small scale and grow. But it is very hard to charge when your competition is free.

Brian Knight has a tale of hair-raising horror for the published writers in the crowd, and some tongue and cheek fun for the rest of us.

Brian’s post on Storytellers Unplugged led me to his post on envy. Seems like a popular topic with authors over the last few weeks. Mark Terry’s post on envy has a nice little comment thread to go with it.

My oldest boy had a slumber party on Friday night. It was a great excuse to go out for donuts on Saturday morning. I don’t need an excuse of course. I love donuts. [I should add that donuts are in fact covered in chocolate frosting and filled with cream. Donuts filled with custard are an abomination, an affront to all things decent and holy.] Mike Dellosso also likes donuts but he can’t eat them anymore because he was recently diagnosed with colon cancer. Instead, he’s “caressing his colon with lots of fiber and veges.” I’m not a christian fiction reader, but my heart goes out to a fellow donut-eater.

While I was dreaming of the donuts to come, somewhere in the world a woman named Mada was writing in bed and thinking about more serious matters.

This morning, I picked up the notebook and read what I wrote. I wrote about my fears and concerns. I’m 30 years old, married, and a mother, yet I feel like I have no direction in my life. I know some things that I would like to do with my life, but I can’t seem to find the passion so many others have found. I love to write, but do I enjoy it enough to pursue it?

This marvelous post of specfic links from Writers Group Blog got my attention. Not sure how this site got into my slush pile. Great group of writers there. Instant upgrade to the specifc folder!

Slush pile? Yeah, I got one.

If you use a feed reader, you probably have nice hierarchy of folders for your feeds. I do too. However, I also have little scripts that can strip the links out of posts I like and then go off to see if there are feeds I don’t have in my list. These new feeds get dropped into the slush pile.

I was going to spin the paragraph above into a witty comment about the fate of my own stories, but that’s really just too depressing. Moving on!

So, to end on a high note, TED blog has a nice post about the mystery of life revealed on a Cambridge blackboard. Seems Stephen Hawking borrowed the classroom and the answer happened to be written on the board. If you’re scratching your head after reading the article, read this one.

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