Great Stuff on the Writers’ Blogs, June 11 & 12, 2012

Monday was a travel day, so today becomes Two-fer Tuesday, as we get caught back up. Off we go, then…

• Well, that took a while. Lots of not-great (which is different from not-good) posts to work through before I came Keith Cronin’s The No-Moping Zone on Writer Unboxed, which is about dealing with rejections. His approach–well, Lauren Baratz-Logsted’s actually: give yourself a few minutes (like 5) to be sad–or celebrate good news–and then get back to work.

• Then there are two pairs of related posts, worth a look just for the different ways they address similar topics. We’ll start with best-sellers.
  • Nathan Bransford (@NathanBransford) wonders about The Randomness of Bestsellers, suggesting there are no clear reasons why one book becomes a best seller while another (or many other, similar ones) does not.
  • Kathryn Lilley “replies” (I don’t know if she saw Bransford’s post before writing her own) on The Kill Zone that she knows The REAL secret of best-sellers: they’re written like movies. She gives five specific elements that make her point. Don’t know whether she’s “right” but all of her commenters essentially agree.

• The second pair of posts has to do with how “busy” we say we are, and what to do about it.
  • Joanne Tobrakos (@JoanneTobrakos) posts an excerpt from her book It Takes an Egg Timer on Jane Friedman’s (@JaneFriedman) blog in which she asks There Are Two Kinds of “Busy.” Is Yours the Good Kind? She first challenges us to define what we mean by “busy”–as in occupied in a lot of productive work, versus distracted by too many diversions, then offers a few suggestions.  Maybe there are more and better suggestions for getting back to being focused in the book. The ones in the post aren’t anything new, to be honest.
  • The same is true, unfortunately, for Jeff Goins’ (@jeffgoins) suggestions in The Undistracted Writer’s Guide to…Uh, What Was I Saying? on Write to Done.
  • Maybe, to be fair, there just aren’t that many techniques and after a while, no matter what spin a writer puts on them, the same ones keep popping up.

That’s all for today then. Did you find anything better? Or what do you think about these posts?