I was pleased this morning to receive an email from Aimee Moon, introducing me to an ambitious and wonderfully designed new online literary venture, Cavalier Literary Couture.

From Aimee’s email:

The site was designed to highlight texture and movement, and we hope that our bright and playful aesthetic messages well with our readers. We welcome fiction, non-fiction, and poetry  submissions, especially literary humor, poetry, and prose poetry. We also have a YouTube channel, which is available for any audio/visual clips that accompany submissions. Feel free also to check out our Twitter feed at CAVALIERliteri.

A bit more from the site’s “About” page:

Established by emerging writers in New York City and Washington D.C, CAVALIER LITERARY COUTURE is a literary venue and lifestyle brand that publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in a number of unconventional forms. In addition to our lavish print magazine, we provide an exciting social context and physical counterpart to the literary experience through our readings, online magazine, fabulous parties, and handmade accessories. Run by teachers, bankers, scientists, entrepreneurs, and scholars (as well as writers), CAVALIER LITERARY COUTURE aims to enlarge the literary community in America and create a splendid space for literature in the 21st century.

This look to be one definitely worth bookmarking.

I like Jane Smith.  I know her just a little, cyber-socially and cyber-professionally as well.  As it turns out, though, I haven’t been paying close enough attention.  I knew she was extremely helpful.  Her website, How Publishing Really Works, should be a mandatory stop on most everyone’s path to publication.  But Jane is also running another blog, one that doesn’t try to convince writers not to self-publish.  She doesn’t try to convince them to do it, either.  Nor does she tell them how to go about doing it or not doing it.  No, Jane likely realizes that there are plenty of pro-, con-, and how-to websites on the hotly debated topic of self-publishing, or its cousin, print-on-demand publishing.

What she’s done at, THE SELF-PUBLISHING REVIEW, is tucked a napkin under her chin and welcomed all self-published comers.  She’s eating the proof that is the pudding and telling us how it tastes.

In a segment of the industry that’s evolving in leaps, I can’t imagine a more relevant yardstick than an honest reviewer, holding every aspect of these books to the same standards as their big-house counterparts.  Jane Smith presses her expertise quite sharply to the weak points in everything from cover art to style, syntax, and story, but she never fails to praise where it’s earned.

After reading a number of her reviews with my coffee this morning, the overall picture for what’s out there in self-publishing is bleak-ish, but with a rise in the road up ahead.  You get the feeling that, probably more in nuggets than veins, there just might be gold in them there hills.

An Assistant District Attorney in Austin, Texas, writer, and aspiring novelist, Mark Pryor, has worked his blog, D.A. CONFIDENTIAL, into a research destination for writers digging up the net for legal verisimilitude.  It’s a one-stop shop for making sense of legalese and due process, and for also for gaining general knowledge and insight into what goes into the American justice process.

He’s peppered it throughout with tales of his own lawyering adventures while laying out a banquet of essays, book reviews, and expert interviews to provide food for the muse and maybe, just maybe, help the scribe to get it right. At least in the deviling details.

Stop by and say ‘hi’ and tell him, AuthorScoop sent you.

Many thanks to JK Evanczuk for sending along a link and description of Lit Drift, an incredibly rich and engaging new site for writers and readers. Here’s what she had to say:

Besides editorial content, we’ve got daily creative prompts, daily short stories, and a weekly free book giveaway called Free Book Friday. This week, we’re giving away a copy of Couch by Benjamin Parzybok. We also accept reader submissions.

Though she describes it as “brand-spanking new”, there’s already plenty of delightful stuff there for everyone (my personal favorite so far is Jennifer Blevins’ “Take Another Little Piece Of My Heart Now, Rilke“).

Head over and take a look. You won’t be disappointed.

Though only launched today in its Alpha form, 60 Second Recap has the potential to be a highly enjoyable and informative community for students and book lovers in general.

Hosted by the mysterious and quite likable Jenny, the site offers short videos on the plots, characters, themes, motifs and other assorted lightning rods for commentary of a growing collection of books.

Wisely, in my view, the site kicked off with a solid selection of classics: Great Expectations, Of Mice and Men, Romeo and Juliet, The Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby. But Jenny’s more than just a classic lit fan; new releases like The Carbon Diaries also get the recap treatment in the “Pick of the Week”.

If Jenny and the crew keep adding content and can build a vibrant community of commenters and uploaders, 60 Second Recap could be huge.

Give em a click.

(Thanks, Michael!)

If you’re on the lookout for a welcoming online writing community especially designed to kick start your muse, check out The Writer’s Block.

Created and operated by Mary Walkden, The Writer’s Block offers a variety of enticements to get your creative juices flowing. Mary explains:

We have a number of projects on the go. We are doing group novels in several genres. A member of the forum can sign up to write a chapter, take a stab at a genre totally foreign to him, and broaden his vision a bit while still having some fun.

We have several villages that we are ‘building’ with poems and short stories submitted by our members (one is an old west town, one is a maritime village, one is a ghost town) and now we have our ‘Emma project’, based on a poem about Emma’s Boarding House. The members are creating a three-dimensional view of Emma, writing shorts and poems from the view of her boarders, her neighbors, her family…

We also have photo prompts, first line prompts, subject prompts, a truth or dare thread that focuses on writing challenges at the dares, and even a Tombstone game where you write a poetic epitaph based on the name provided by the previous poster. It’s all about writing, about getting the muse to work.

One other thing we have done is offered private writing rooms. If a member of the forum wants one, we create them an office and give them the keys. They let us know who they want in there to crit. It has allowed the members to spread their wings a bit more, safe from lurkers and trolls. Its sort of like having a sandbox in your own back yard. Its still in the ‘let’s try it and see’ stage, but it seems to be working out okay.

Visit The Writer’s Block and, if you like what you see,  tell em AuthorScoop sent you.

Came across a link to this today at the Absolute Write Water Cooler (thanks, Lost Wanderer). Internet radio for writers. Dig it:

Writers FM broadcasts live across the Web, 24 hours a day. Featuring author interviews and great music, it’s your ultimate non-stop muse!

The live broadcast is easily accessible on the main page (requires Windows Media Player), and the site also features a fairly extensive archive of podcasts.

This is one of those addictive sites for anyone interested in the Arts, in history, in the progression of civilization.

Extracted from, and based on, A Book of Ages by Eric Hanson (whose stories and articles have appeared in McSweeney’s, the Atlantic and Smithsonian, among others), the site—like the book—is indeed a “collection of moments from famous lives — triumphs, failures, revealing anecdotes, odd incidents, crossed paths, missed chances, early and late masterpieces, mid-life crises and reinventions, great partnerships, changes of heart and changes of mind — organized by year of age.”

.

Check out the site here. Check out a sample and order a copy of the book here.

but I don’t know. Sometimes I think it is what it is, and all the nattering about subjectivity is dry ice in a bucket because you haven’t got a proper fog.

I am notoriously cheap, but I just bought a subscription to THE MISSOURI REVIEW. I’m now guaranteed to have a bit of good reading at some point every quarter, and perhaps a new yardstick with which to measure my own hopes and dreams. And my own failings. Yeah, that’s going to sting. But this is seriously good stuff.

The site previews (and post-views) their print mag. The current ‘Poem of the Week‘ is wonderful (and I’ve got a teeny little attention span, so you know it’s something special.) There are archived pieces available for download and all sorts of goodies - podcasts, blogs, essays. Today’s sci-fi offering from the archives is completely oddball and still riveting. That has to be good taste. Or else I just haven’t had enough coffee yet.

Enjoy the Site of the Day.

A quick note of appreciation to Carol Kabat for her kind words about AuthorScoop on her newly-launched blog, Return Engagement.

We wish her the best in her new endeavor and you can find a handy-dandy link to the site in our ‘Friends’ list on the right.

Pay her a visit and say something nice.

MacAllister Stone, owner and operator of Absolute Write, has created a sister site for avid readers called Written in Stone.

A link to the site has been added to our Friends category on the right, and we wish MacAllister the best of luck with her new project.

.

While digging around for some Dorothy Parker clips today (see below), I was pleasantly surprised to find The Dorothy Parker Society, which offers an astounding variety of media devoted to the author.

Most surprisingly, the site features 35 recordings made by Ms. Parker of her writings, in addition to a handful of videos related to her life and work.

From the site description:

Dorothy Parker made two full-length LP recordings of her work in 1964. A record company, Verve, asked her to read her poems and stories for a record called The World of Dorothy Parker (Verve V-15029). Her other LP is from Spoken Arts called An Informal Hour with Dorothy Parker (Spoken Arts 726). It is the best of the two: Parker reads more than two dozen of her favorite poems. It is from the latter that most of these audio clips are taken.

At the time of the recording sessions, Mrs. Parker was approaching age 71. Her voice ravaged by years of Chesterfields and Johnny Walker, this offers a peek at the real Mrs. Parker. She died three years after recording her work.

Special thanks to Jon Bradley Snyder of Spokane, WA, and Catherine Chodack of New Jersey for loaning me recordings of these 2 LPs. Note: The NAACP owns the copyright to these recordings, so copying them for commercial use or performance is prohibited.

The recordings require Real Player. If you don’t already have it, you can download the free player here.