J.D. Salinger Dead at 91
Published January 29th, 2010 | 
One of the last great literary heavyweights of the last century, died the other day, of natural causes. J. D. Salinger, the notoriously reclusive literary legend who hadn’t published anything since 1965 and had rarely been seen since the 70’s passed away at his home in Cornish, New Hampshire at the ripe old age of 91. Although, Salinger had published a few stories in the 1940’s and had struck-up a friendship with Ernest Hemingway while serving in the Second World War, it wasn’t until the publication of his most famous work, The Catcher in the Rye, that Salinger earned his place in American literature.
Salinger began writing short stories while in high school, and published a number of stories in the early 1940s before serving in World War II. In 1948 he published the critically acclaimed story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" in The New Yorker. After the publication of Catcher, Salinger became at once a popular, influential and controversial writer. Since it’s publication, the famous novel has sold around 65 million copies, averaging 250000 copies per year. Salinger followed Catcher with a short story collection, Nine Stories (1953), a collection of a novella and a short story, Franny and Zooey (1961), and a collection of two novellas, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963). His last published work, a novella entitled "Hapworth 16, 1924," appeared in The New Yorker on June 19, 1965.
Although many film producers pursued the possibility of translating Catcher in the Rye for the big screen, Salinger refused to allow it due to an early bad experience with a screen adaptation of one of his short stories. Salinger was also famous for pursuing legal action to block unauthorized adaptations and derivative works base on his writing.
Free Your Mind
Published January 24th, 2010 | Mind maps are nothing new. A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea. Mind maps are used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing. There are several mind mapping programs available — one of the best is a freeware program called FreeMind, which has been available for almost two years. I discovered this wonderful tool, myself, a few months ago and even used it to brainstorm my NanoWriMo novel.
The screen, when you first open the program looks like this:
I chose "cars" as a topic because it seemed like the simplest way to demonstrate some of the features of the program. Starting here, I added a few "nodes" using [Insert]:
I added a second level in the hierarchy: Ford, Kia, and Nissan
I further broke the topic down by car model adding Ford Focus under "Ford" and Kia Soul under "Kia". I can break it down further still by adding the following topics to the hierarchy:
I added things like ford focus specs and kia soul photos. Notice these sub-topics are added as sibling nodes. There are a number of features to edit and dress-up a created mind map. Although it’s hard to see in the above picture, I added icons to mine to signify the importance of certain topics. In addition mind maps can be exported in a variety of formats including html, pdf, jpeg and png as well as xml and xhtml files. It’s also possible to add hyperlinks and graphical links connecting nodes. The developers are working on a variety of plugs-in for use on blog and content-management platforms.
Hopefully, as a writer, you can see from this little demonstration how such a tool can be of use when brainstorming characters and plots.
Cleaning Out the Filter
Published January 23rd, 2010 | The other day, I was cleaning out my humidifier filter it occurred to me that as writers, we have to clean out our own filters from time to time. When we write, we are tapping into some rather powerful forces. It’s black magic, I tell you. Just as the pressures of real life can infect our writing life if we let it, so too can our writing life infect our real life if we let it. That’s why it’s always helpful to clean out all that psychic residue in-between writing projects. How one does this varies from person to person, but it usually involves some form of non-writing activity allows the brain a rest from creative thought. For me, it often takes the form of a computer game, an exercise session and, sometimes, just closing my eyes and spacing-out for a while. Maybe your method of cleaning out the cobwebs involves sitting on your back porch smoking a cigarette, drinking a pint of ale. My advice is to find something, anything that allows you some peace of mind between your real life and your writing life. Take up yoga, or knitting, play a round of golf, whatever — because if you don’t, the dark magic will get to you sooner or later and you’ll wind-up a suicide or slicing off your ear.
