Some Annotated Reading

This week I have been reading:

The Guncle by Steven Rowley. More to come on that when I finish.

A Peach by Any Other Name Is Just as Gross: My Terrible Fear of Fruit by Sheila Jackson at Serious Eats I'm continuing to check out Serious Eats as a potential market for my eating essays, and I was delighted to see that this one was written by someone who is not an award-winning food writer. I was also interested in this particular essay because I have a number of family members with fear of food, including fruit.

The Incredible Super Power of Flash by Dinty W. Moore at the Brevity blog. Moore, who is a big name in flash nonfiction writing, covers compression in this post, which I had heard of but forgotten about, and layering, which I hadn't heard of. I am reminded of how much work I need to do.

How-to at Medium: I read a couple of pieces by a guy giving advice on how to do well writing on the Medium platform. They were not very good. Medium is a very different writing world. Years ago, I read that there are two kinds of writers--writers who write to support themselves and publish through the New York City publishing world and writers who write to support their academic careers and publish outside the New York City publishing world. I think an argument can be made now that there is a third kind of writer, who writes and publishes on-line, where content about personal experience is king and craft takes second place. IMHO. I've also been reading up on Medium's boost program. You don't want to know.

Reading for a new project: Though I said earlier this year that I'm through with book-length projects, I'm toying with taking a shot at a mystery set in the late nineteenth century. I've read a bunch over the years. So now I'm reading up on things like attitudes toward French Canadians in the U.S. in the late nineteenth century, the craze for bicycling in the 1890s, and women's corsets. There were cycling corsets back then. Like sports bras but bigger.