In class last week we discussed query letters and the daunting hurdle of "clip" submission without any published clips. In addition to starting a blog, there are a few other ways to publish and start building clips online. The two that I've found easiest are (1) Examiner.com and (2) guest posting on a blog. If you click on the link to Examiner.com above, it will take you to a list of topics the site is actively seeking in the Seattle area.
If you see a topic you like, apply. The application process is not onerous and there is no posting frequency requirement (although you have to post once every month or so if you want any chance of getting paid some day). If you don't see a topic in the Seattle area that interests you, you can check the National listing or another region.
The best way to start guest blogging is to ask a blog you would like to write for if they post guest blogs and then ask to submit. If you are connected to the person with the blog, this becomes much easier, but most bloggers are happy for the chance of supplemental content especially if it puts a new and fresh spin on the bloggers' topic.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Consider the Editor
One of the many things I enjoyed about "Consider the Lobster" was imagining the look on the Gourmet editor's face when, having commissioned a report on a food festival for a food magazine, she got so much more. I found a brief interview with the editor about her experience editing and publishing the piece, and Gourmet readers' reactions to it.
Food Writing by John McPhee
John McPhee's 1979 book Giving Good Weight includes "Brigade de Cuisine," a piece about a chef and his wife. I particularly liked this sentence:
"The dacquoise resembles cake and puts up a slight crunchy resistance before it effects a melting disappearance between tongue and palate and a swift transduction through the bloodstream to alight in the brain as a poem."
Anyone hungry?
"The dacquoise resembles cake and puts up a slight crunchy resistance before it effects a melting disappearance between tongue and palate and a swift transduction through the bloodstream to alight in the brain as a poem."
Anyone hungry?
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Facebook Chain Post
This made me think of all of you....
There are some things that float pretty free of time, chronology, the book of history, and the lies of experts.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Best Worst Restaurant Review
I wrote my "place" piece on Outback Steakhouse. I had several setbacks and the end product, much like Outback Kookaburra Wings, was disappointingly bland. I think if I had read this brilliant restaurant review in Vanity Fair first, I might have been more inspired. The review gives great descriptions of the place, the food and the people. One of my favorite paragraphs starts:
Twenty minutes later, possibly under their own steam, the snails arrive. Vesuvian, they bubble and smoke in a magma of astringent garlic butter and parsley. We grasp them with the spring-loaded specula and gingerly unwind the dark gastropods, curling like dinosaur boogers.
I have found a new favorite writer and am committed to pushing my own writing a little harder.
Twenty minutes later, possibly under their own steam, the snails arrive. Vesuvian, they bubble and smoke in a magma of astringent garlic butter and parsley. We grasp them with the spring-loaded specula and gingerly unwind the dark gastropods, curling like dinosaur boogers.
I have found a new favorite writer and am committed to pushing my own writing a little harder.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Spring break fine reading
One of your three readings over the break is in the free New Yorker archives: "Candid Camera: The Cult of Leica" by Anthony Lane.
The Peculiar Qualities of English
"To write English well, it is generally agreed, is not to imitate, but to evolve a style peculiarly suited to one's own temperament, environment and purposes."
"No writer should fail to reckon with modern reading habits."
"It is not that modern people are less intelligent than their grandparents: only that, being busier, they are less careful."
"Imaginative readers rewrite books to suit their own taste, omitting and mentally altering as they read."
"We do not suggest that writers should indulge busy readers by writing down to them--giving them nothing but short messages simply phrased; but only that sentences and paragraphs should follow one another so easily and inevitably, and with such economy of phrase, that a reader will have no encouragement to skip."
-Robert Graves & Alan Hodge in The Reader Over Your Shoulder
"No writer should fail to reckon with modern reading habits."
"It is not that modern people are less intelligent than their grandparents: only that, being busier, they are less careful."
"Imaginative readers rewrite books to suit their own taste, omitting and mentally altering as they read."
"We do not suggest that writers should indulge busy readers by writing down to them--giving them nothing but short messages simply phrased; but only that sentences and paragraphs should follow one another so easily and inevitably, and with such economy of phrase, that a reader will have no encouragement to skip."
-Robert Graves & Alan Hodge in The Reader Over Your Shoulder
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