By Jackie Flaten
Our website went live today, thanks to the fabulous work of Mr. Cardoza at Kazoo Software — thanks, Joe the Genius!
The launch of Media Owls has impelled me to take a crack at this blogging thing. Apparently I’m a bit late in the game — at this point in world history I really ought to be tweeting. An article in the October Wired reports that “blogging is dead.”
Paul Boutin writes: “Twitter — which limits each text-only post to 140 characters — is to 2008 what the blogosphere was to 2004… Twitter operates even faster than the blogosphere… As a writer, though, I’m onto the system’s real appeal: brevity. Bloggers today are expected to write clever, insightful, witty prose to compete with Huffington and The New York Times. Twitter’s character limit puts everyone back on equal footing. It lets amateurs quit agonizing over their writing and cut to the chase.”
Easier said than done. In my very first carefully crafted Twitter post, I missed the fine print and proceeded to ramble away with great excitement, as is my wont. Brevity is generally not my strong suit. However, I’m quite capable of “murdering my darlings”, as James Patrick Kelly terrifyingly advised in 1995:
“It’s the nature of writers to fall in love with words, particularly their own. Clever turns of phrase excite us; we beam like proud parents when our protagonists take on lives of their own; a shapely plot twist can turn our heads. There is nothing wrong with indulging in the occasional fling-as long as it stops in draft. When time comes to make that final revision, however, you must harden your heart, sharpen the ax and murder your darlings.”
Read his delightful piece in full here: http://www.sfwa.org/writing/murder.htm
-jdf
Word Play 