branta

As someone who slings red ink for a living, let me tell you: grammar is an ultra-micro component in the larger picture; it lies somewhere in the final steps of the editing trail; and as such it’s an overrated quasi-irrelevancy in the creative process, perpetuated into importance primarily by bitter nerds who accumulate tweed jackets and crippling inferiority complexes.
John Gingerich / Litreactor

The Sins of Vanity (publishing)
(via Bark)

Authorsatwork.ca is a site where writers (presumably) can suggest spots they find conducive to getting things down on paper (or hard drive). It’s currently very Ontario-centric, but you can add a spot in whatever town you hail from and let the dinner/scribe bell be rung.

Although I hadn’t yet learned about saying no to the patriarchy, I was too shy and awkward to be a princess, and I ditched the plan of becoming one altogether when I read LM Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. I read the Anne books so many times that I felt as at home in turn-of-the-century Prince Edward Island as in 1980s suburban north London.
Samantha Ellis/The Guardian/Observer

Anyone who teaches literature knows that it can be really rewarding but also extremely challenging especially when you hear “poetry sucks” at least a few times a semester. Upon hearing negative poetry talk in the classroom I ask students what it is we use to mark the most important times—typically weddings, funerals, grads, births—in our lives.
Kerri Cull/The Book Fridge

At its most elemental, editing is a craft, but it is really an art, perhaps a dying one. John Cheever defined an editor as someone “who sends me large checks, praises my work, my physical beauty, and my sexual prowess, and who has a stranglehold on the publishers and the bank.”

I don’t care how modern your family is, there are just some things that you don’t want to talk about at the dinner table. But after a couple of glasses of spiked eggnog, your judgment might not be top notch. Hey, it happens to the best of us.
Hannah Classen/CBC Books

Apart from a few awkward adolescents who aren’t sure if they should be trick-or-treating or trying to get drunk for the first time, everyone sweats over their Halloween costume. It’s a great ritual, allowing us to act and dress up like someone else for a night.
Jesse Skinner/Toro

That’s where hiring a great freelance publicist with knowledge of social media and online reading communities comes into play, not someone to aggressively market your book so much as someone who can help spread the word on your behalf, and, where appropriate, make introductions that could result in meaningful coverage.
Samantha Haywood/Open Book Toronto

For almost every recent transaction I’ve made on Kobo, I arrived—inspired in the moment like many of us who live in a mobile culture, smartphones in hand—in pursuit of an indie title that I ultimately couldn’t find. As a self-diagnosed text fetishist, if I’m going to spend $10, $20, $30 on anything, it’s more often than not going to be a book. But if the mood strikes and I’m not in a bookstore, or the bookstore I’m in doesn’t carry the title I’m after, what does the mobile consumer do?
@bookmadam