At Jennifer Castle’s blog she writes six lessons on her book’s six month anniversary. Her advice is thoughtful and heartfelt – good to keep in mind for those of us with a book out! I’ve copied her last two points here, but check out her website for the full post because its great – and her novel is absolutely terrific too. http://blog.jennifercastle.com/

Jennifer Castle:

5) There are many different measures of “success.” Way, way more than sales reports, or awards, or average user ratings. It’s so much simpler than that. There’s the one where you finally get to hold your finished book in your hand, and the one where you first see it on a bookstore shelf. There’s having someone tell you in person how much they loved the read, and the bookseller placing the thing front and center because they believe in it so passionately. Then, of course, there are the e-mails from readers telling you your book helped them deal with something tough in their lives, and then the other ones simply thanking you for writing it. (And now here I go choking up again.) When it all shakes down, the ultimate measure of success, I’ve learned, is that I’m able to continue doing what I love most. It feeds my soul and keeps my fingers on the keyboard.

6) In the end, it’s still about the writing. Yeah, as an author there’s a whole lot of other stuff I need to do, and it’s all fun and good and scary-addictive. But then I have to remind myself that no amount of Twitter followers or bookstore events or promotional brilliance is going to matter if I write crappy books. When all of the above has been lived through and learned from, it comes down to the place where I started: the work itself. This is the single most important thing I can give…and I plan to give good.

The book 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think by Laura Vanderkam is a challenging read for any writer. It’s challenging because it asks you to honestly assess how you spend your time, even suggesting you log your hours for 168 hours – the number of hours there are in a week. Then it reveals that, actually, you’re spending lots of the time when you could be writing doing other things. When you truthfully look at what those things are, you might find that there is more time for writing than you previously thought.

Check out Laura’s website: here

Adair Lara’s new book, Naked, Drunk and Writing is full of advice on how to write a personal essay or memoir. Two paragraphs in the opening of her essay What’s Your Angle? give a taste of her writing style and make me want to stop what I’m doing and craft an essay of my own:

Adair Lara: You can’t just come out and say what you have to say. That’s what people do on airplanes, when a man plops down next to you in the aisle seat of your flight to New York, spills peanuts all over the place (back when the cheapskate airlines at least gave you peanuts), and tells you about what his boss did to him the day before. You know how your eyes glaze over when you hear a story like that? That’s because of the way he’s telling his story. You need a good way to tell your story.

An angle is a way to tell a story. It is to the essay what a premise is to a book, or a handle is to advertising, or a high concept is to a movie (dinosaurs brought back to life for a theme park!). It’s a gimmick or twist or conceit that grabs the reader’s attention long enough for you to say what you want to say. Think of the angle as the Christmas tree. Once you have that six-foot pine standing up next to the piano, it’s pretty easy to see where the decorations go. Without the tree, what have you got? A lot of pretty balls on the floor.

You can read the rest here.