This looks like a really good book to have

Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction by Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd Tracy Kidder (The Soul of a New Machine) and his longtime editor, Richard Todd, are rock stars of narrative nonfiction. When they talk about their art and craft, you'd be wise to listen. In Good Prose they share both practical editing advice and general narrative recommendations relating to things like structure, point of view, style and voice. Rather than just collaborating on a single seamless text, however, each intersperses his own thoughts amid the guidelines and examples. The resulting easygoing ramble on good writing is as entertaining as it is useful. It is hard to avoid aphorisms in this sort of book, and Kidder and Todd are not afraid to include several. For example, in discussing where to start a work, they caution that "the heart of the story is a place to arrive at, not a place to begin." In a discussion of authorial voice, they advise "if you can't imagine saying something aloud, then you probably shouldn't write it." Fortunately, they break the schoolhouse rules with pertinent quotations from many nonfiction writers (from Montaigne to David Foster Wallace) and personal commentaries on Kidder's own books. When thousands of books, tweets, 'zines and blogs confront readers every day, perhaps the best advice Kidder and Todd have for writers is to first ask themselves: "Who am I to be writing this? Who asked me? Who cares?" Honest answers here might mercifully cut down the clutter. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan. Discover: An entertaining, useful ramble about good writing by a Pulitzer Prize-winning master and his longtime editor. Random House, $26 hardcover, 9781400069750

The alumni speak

From Steve:

I am working on a project to create concerts in August at the Panama Hotel inspired by history mentioned in the novel Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet.

4Culture provided significant grant funding and I set up a blog at http://holdenontooscar.blogspot.com/ to chronicle my progress. Hope you can attend!

In April I will find out if I was accepted to a Biography Fellowship at CUNY. Even if that doesn't pan out, the process of applying helped focus my book project.

-Steve Griggs
http://stevegriggsmusic.blogspot.com/

From Viv

Along with a friend, I just started a new Meetup: Seattle Social Media Meetup. We are having our first meeting on Wednesday, February 6th. The meeting day will always be the first Wednesday of the month.

This group has been needed for a long time so people are jumping on it pretty quick. We have only had it up 2 days and have not publicized it anywhere yet, but had 10 people join just last night! It will be a collaborative, supportive, informative group. We plan to have a speaker each month. (I know this won't mean much to all of you, but we are modeling this after the Seattle WordPress Meetup which is a phenomenal group.)

Starting this group is directly aligned with my writing. I made the decision to spend this year focussing on building a platform; a following of fans. As part of that, I decided to set the book off to the side while I focus on blogging and social media. The writing and research I am doing on the blog will feed into the book eventually. But I realized I needed to "chunk out" the process and decided to make social media my first focus.

Over the holiday I focussed on getting my blog up and running solidly on self -hosted Wordpress plus invested the time to really learn Twitter. I launched my new plan just a week ago and have been blown away by the increase in traffic - to my blog and Twitter. The numbers may not look impressive yet but that is a big increase in followers and I also had a big leap in subscriptions. It is quite exciting! Twitter: @ejbrowne Blog: DancingUpsideDown.com

Hope to see some of you in February 6th.

Viv Ilo E. Veith
Cell: 206.696.8904
Twitter: @viviloveith
vividlyclear.com