this book<\/a> as part of a package for signing up with the Writers Digest Book Club. As part of the package, I paid something like a dollar for it plus shipping and handling, and undoubtedly it was the last book in the required allotment of four or five to get the free Writer’s Market<\/i> that year. To make a short story long, I don’t normally seek out this sort of book, but I got it, and I read it.<\/p>\nEssentially, it’s a little collage of writing ideas, some microessays about writing, and a lot of photographs. The style’s such that you can pick it up, flip it open, and have something to write or some lesson about writing. Numerous single-sentence mandates dictate that you should write about a particular topic or situation; other pages contain a single, often vertical, “horiscope message” that could serve as a plot. So there you have it.<\/p>\n
The author embraces the writer lifestyle, which involves teaching college classes, going on writers’ retreats, and “getting published” along with all the touchy-feely, grok-the-word crepe that festoons the lives of the lifestyle’s participants. Personally, I’m not all into that–particularly the last part, apparently–so I could do without it. Still, it’s an interesting little book, a quick enough read (since it’s probably under 10,000 words all told in its unnumbered pages), and maybe something from it has stuck in my mind and has been encysted into a pearl of a story or essay for the future.<\/p>\n
At worst, it’s book number 41 for me on the year and will add a small element of color to my trophy bookshelves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I bought this book as part of a package for signing up with the Writers Digest Book Club. As part of the package, I paid something like a dollar for it plus shipping and handling, and undoubtedly it was the last book in the required allotment of four or five to get the free Writer’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1138"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1138\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23088,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1138\/revisions\/23088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}