The Nervous Breakdown/Print v. Online Periodicals

I am now a contributing writer at The Nervous Breakdown, which is an online pub you should be reading. My first TNB post is up today, and it's called "Ten ways to get Thrown out of Wilco." I hope you dig it, and I hope you comment on it.

TNB is one of those sites I follow regularly. It sort of represents my 21st century way of reading periodicals. The latest edition is always there for me online. I sign on when I want, read what I want, and I don't have to worry about the paper version finding its way into the recycle bin when I'm done.

Literary magazines aside, I can't remember the last time I paid for the print version of a magazine or newspaper. I might flip through one at a bookstore, and every time I get my oil changed they force a USA Today on me. But pay for a copy of a magazine from the rack? Doesn't happen. Buy a newspaper from the corner kiosk? Nope. Subscribe to a commercial magazine, even an excellent one? Probably not.

This runs completely counter to my reading habits with book-length stuff, where I won't accept any sort of electronic intrusion. I only want to look at a screen for so many hours of the day. The computer can't have everything.

Also, when reading something book-length, I don't want distraction, which is so easy on a computer.



See what I mean?

But what about you? What do you choose to read: print versions of magazines and newspapers? Electronic versions? Some combination thereof?

poll by twiigs.com

Yours in laying down the law,

Art



Try Ghost Notes, the award-winning novel, in print form for just $5.




Try Ghost Notes the Audio Book as an unabridged digital download.



Or try Ghost Notes the Ebook.

Your Writing Style and your Blog Writing Style

The New Yorker dishes on its own issues with its blog/web presence here. They wrestle with being the New Yorker and being in a world where the Internet is an important place to promote your wares. Namely, they're concerned about losing what it is that makes them great--"excellence, polish, depth"--while generating hits displaying pictures of people's pets dressed as literary characters.

(Poppy, as the Velveteen Rabbit, from the children’s classic of the same name by Margery Williams.)

Awww.

Leave it to the New Yorker to make me wonder about my approach to my writing versus my approach to my blog writing. Is there a difference?

Yes.

Way yes.

My fiction writing style is, I'd venture, more formal than my blog writing style, and it gets polished much more than the latter. My blog writing style is faster and looser, and it's where I'm more likely to shoot from the hip, as I did last week.

I'm sure I'm not alone in this separation. I'm of a generation that came up before the Web, and I think I value the printed word quite a bit more than the pixelated one. I love to screw around on the Web, but my real writing happens elsewhere.

The Web calls for a certain type of writing, namely the kind that keeps people from the easy distraction of the six billion other websites they have access to. I want you to stay and read, so I keep it light and fun. I'll even go cheap as necessary.



With book writing, I figure my audience has bothered to buy, or at least pick up, my book, which implies a certain amount of dedication from the get-go. I don't need to crush them with pyrotechnics. I expect them to give my prose a chance to work on them on a deeper level. That's the kind of writing I like to read, and that's the kind of attention I hope for from a reader.

But what say you? Do you draw a distinction between the way you write for the web and the way you compose your other work?

poll by twiigs.com

Yours in laying down the law,

Art



Try Ghost Notes, the award-winning novel, in print form for just $5.




Try Ghost Notes the Audio Book as an unabridged digital download.



Or try Ghost Notes the Ebook.