Norman Mailer's Writing Routine

From Garrison Keillor's "The Writer's Alamanac":

It's the birthday of Norman Mailer, born in Long Branch, New Jersey (1923). He grew up in Brooklyn, went to Harvard, and then got drafted during World War II. He served in the Philippines, and although he didn't participate in much fighting, he got enough material to go home and write a novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), published when he was just 25 years old. It was a best-seller, it made him famous, and for the next 60 years he continued to publish books.

Mailer was incredibly productive, and stuck to a strict writing regimen. He said: "Over the years, I've found one rule. It is the only one I give on those occasions when I talk about writing. A simple rule. If you tell yourself you are going to be at your desk tomorrow, you are by that declaration asking your unconscious to prepare the material. You are, in effect, contracting to pick up such valuables at a given time. Count on me, you are saying to a few forces below: I will be there to write."

He wrote every day from 9 to 5, up until his death at the age of 84. For the last 27 years of his life, he shared a studio with his sixth and last wife, Norris Church Mailer, an artist and writer. They each had their own space. Mailer sat on a wooden chair looking out at the Provincetown Bay — he liked to be near water when he wrote — but he closed the curtains when he really needed to concentrate. Mailer and his wife ate breakfast and lunch on their own schedule, but they would meet up at 6 p.m. to drink wine and eat dinner.

The routine worked for most types of writing, but he couldn't force his novels. He said: "It's very bad to write a novel by act of will. I can do a book of nonfiction work that way — just sign the contract and do the book because, provided the topic has some meaning for me, I know I can do it. But a novel is different. A novel is more like falling in love. You don't say, 'I'm going to fall in love next Tuesday, I'm going to begin my novel.' The novel has to come to you. It has to feel just like love." He carried a small, spiral-bound notebook with him at all times, in case inspiration struck.

He wrote by hand — he usually wrote in the morning and then typed it up in the afternoon, or gave it to an assistant to type. He said: "I used to have a little studio in Brooklyn, a couple of blocks from my house — no telephone, not much else. The only thing I ever did there was work. It was perfect. I was like a draft horse with a conditioned reflex. I came in ready to sit at my desk. No television, no way to call out. Didn't want to be tempted. There's an old Talmudic belief that you build a fence around an impulse. If that's not good enough, you build a fence around the fence. So, no amenities. (But for a refrigerator!) I wrote longhand with a pencil and I gave it to my assistant, Judith McNally. She would type it for me and the next day I would go over it. Since at my age you begin to forget all too much, I would hardly remember what I had written the day before. It read, therefore, as if someone else had done it. The critic in me was delighted. I could now proceed to fix the prose. The sole virtue of losing your short-term memory is that it does free you to be your own editor."

He wrote novels, short stories, essays, and plays. His books include The Deer Park (1955), The Armies of the Night (1968), The Executioner's Song (1979), and his last novel, The Castle in the Forest (2007), the story of Hitler's childhood.

He said, "I become an actor, a quick-change artist, as if I can trap the Prince of Truth in the act of switching a style."

End of a Good Magazine

Your Church Magazine Ends 50-Plus Year Run

Publisher Christianity Today International to expand focus on church law, finance, and safety resources for church business administrators.

CAROL STREAM, Ill., Jan. 28, 2011 /Christian Newswire/ -- Christianity Today International (CTI) ceased publication of Your Church magazine and digizine effective January 1, 2011.

Launched in the 1950s, Your Church was acquired by CTI in the early 1990s and served as an essential resource for church purchasing, services, and administrative guidance. "We rejoice in the 50-plus years God allowed the Your Church ministry to prosper and the years God has granted CTI to minister to church administrators across the country through this storied publication," notes CEO Harold Smith.

In 2011, CTI will continue to serve executive pastors and church business administrators through focused energies on key publications and resources including, Church Law and Tax Report, Church Finance Today, ChurchLawToday.com, and ChurchSafety.com. In addition, prominent print resources such as the 2011 Church & Clergy Tax Guide by Richard Hammar will be available through YourChurchResources.com.

Two popular resources will also continue to support church leaders under the Leadership journal brand. Valuable purchasing information on church products and services can be found at ChurchBuyersGuide.com. Your Church's weekly e-newsletter will become the Church Management Update, a bi-monthly publication offering practical insights on church law, finance, safety, and more.

Christianity Today International ( www.ChristianityToday.com) is a not-for-profit communications ministry that serves the global church through print magazines, digital publications, books, websites, and blogs which together reach over 2.5 million people each month.

iPad Newspaper Debuts February 2

Murdoch's iPad newspaper The Daily to launch Feb. 2

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- News Corp.'s iPad-exclusive newspaper, The Daily, will launch next week at an event in New York City.

The company sent an invitation to reporters Thursday morning. The launch will take place midmorning on Feb. 2 at New York's iconic Guggenheim museum. News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch will be at the event, along with Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) Internet services executive Eddy Cue.

The Daily will be the guinea pig for Apple's new subscription option for purchasing iPad content. Until now, Apple has only let publishers sell individual issues, paralleling the company's model for selling apps.

The Daily plans to sell its subscriptions for 99 cents per week, News Corp. executive James Murdoch said at a media conference this week, according to Reuters.
News Corp. (NWS, Fortune 500) has been at the forefront of charging consumers for online journalism, including running a paywall around some content on the Wall Street Journal's site.

The Daily has been in the works for several months, but its launch date was delayed. AllThingsD said earlier this month that there were some technical issues with Apple's new subscription service, which will debut alongside with The Daily.

The subscription service will be "a new 'push' subscription feature from Apple, where iTunes automatically bills customers on a weekly or monthly basis, and a new edition shows up on customers' iPads every morning," AllThings reported.

Beyond the technical challenges, many questions are swirling around The Daily. Pundits and bloggers alike have wondered if the world is ready for an iPad-exclusive newspaper -- and if it even wants one.

Others wonder if iPad buyers are the type to buy subscriptions to newspapers. Still, that demographic is growing larger: Apple reported sales of 7.3 million iPads in the holiday season, for a total of 14.8 million iPads sold for the year.

CNN Investigates the FBI

As you think about your potential investigative projects, you might want to take a look at some of the reporting CNN is doing on their recent investigation of the FBI. It's not a very pretty picture, but it's an example of a news organization digging deep into a governmental agency and performing the "watchdog" role.

More here:

http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/01/27/siu.fbi.internal.documents/index.html?hpt=C1

New Christian Publishing House Debuts

From Publisher's Weekly:

New Christian Publishing House Debuts
By Lynn Garrett

Veteran Christian publisher Byron Williamson has announced the launch of a new publishing house, Worthy Publishing, which releases its first books this fall.

Over a long career Williamson has published many powerhouse Christian authors, including Sarah Young (her Jesus Calling, published in 2004, was the top-selling Christian book of 2010); Beth Moore (Get Out of That Pit); Frank Peretti (This Present Darkness); Emerson Eggerich (Love & Respect); and Max Lucado, who Williamson first published at Word in the late 1980s when he was president of its publishing division.

After Thomas Nelson bought Word in 1992 Williamson became executive v-p of the Nelson Publishing Group, where he developed the Countryman and Tommy Nelson Imprints. Williamson left Nelson in 1999 and founded Integrity Publishing for Integrity Media; it was sold to Nelson in 2006. While he waited out his three-year non-compete, Williamson did some author management—for Max Lucado and others—and packaged 11 books for Zondervan.,

Worthy is privately held and independent, and Williamson told the Daily this will make the house more nimble and less prone to the communication problems that can arise with publishers that are a Nashville-based division of a New York house. “The feedback we’ve gotten from agents and authors is that their relationship to a publisher can be complicated by those ties,” Williamson said. “And we’ll be able to make decisions in days instead of months.”

He added, “We are bringing ideas to authors and helping them shape projects, rather than waiting for them to come to us.” Half the books on Worthy’s first list originated with ideas from his team, he said.

Of the current climate in Christian publishing, Williamson commented, “Some of the older, more traditional publishers have struggled in the past few years, have changed hands, and have become vulnerable to losing authors. There’s a perception they are stale and have lost the entrepreneurial spirit, and we’ll be able to provide that. We will also do marketing and put some energy into it.”

Worthy’s fall list of 12 books includes titles by evangelical stalwarts Chuck Colson (The Sky Is Not Falling, Sept.), Gloria Gaither (A Homecoming Christmas, Oct.), and Stephen Arterburn (Walking into Walls, Sept.). The remainder of the list will be announced in March. Worthy will publish a variety of genres, among them fiction, devotionals, inspiration, Bible study, personal growth, and children’s books.

Staff of Worthy Publishing includes Williamson as CEO and publisher, Rob Birkhead—who held senior sales and marketing positions at Thomas Nelson and Integrity--as senior v-p of marketing , Dale Wilstermann—another Nelson and Integrity veteran--as senior v-p of sales, and Jeana Ledbetter—formerly a literary agent at Yates & Yates--as v-p of planning and author relations. Headquartered in Nashville, Worthy will announce the appointment of an executive editor in the next few weeks, Williamson said.

Spell checquer

Subject: Spell checquer

Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.
As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.

NYT: Pay Model Doesn't Show Traffic Decline

From the New York Times:

Under Pay Model, Little Effect Seen on Papers’ Web Traffic

By JEREMY W. PETERS
Published: January 17, 2011

While newspapers around the world are anxiously asking themselves what would happen if they started charging readers to view articles online, a few answers have started to emerge.

Steven Brill’s Journalism Online experiment, which developed a system that allows newspapers to charge their most regular online visitors, has analyzed its preliminary data and found on average that advertising revenue and overall traffic did not decline significantly despite predictions otherwise.

The sample size of Journalism Online’s data was small — about two dozen mostly small- and medium-size papers that had been charging readers for several months — so divining any potential pattern for large newspapers is difficult.

But the initial findings showed that newspapers found success with a pay model by setting a conservative limit for the number of articles visitors could read free each month, and by making clear that most readers would not be affected.

Journalism Online said monthly unique visits to the Web sites included in its study fell zero to 7 percent, while page views fell zero to 20 percent. No publishers reported a decline in advertising revenue.

Unlike a strict pay wall — which requires a subscription to view almost all editorial content — a model like the one Journalism Online employed does not choke off huge amounts of Web traffic.

“If you set this meter conservatively, which we urge people to do, it’s a nonevent for 85, 90, 95 percent of the people who come to your Web site,” Mr. Brill said.

Mr. Brill said most papers set a limit on the number of free articles readers could view from five to 20 each month. Papers charged a range of monthly subscription fees from around $3.95 to $10.95.

L. Gordon Crovitz, a former Wall Street Journal publisher who is helping run the project, said one lesson to be taken from the numbers so far is that readers were willing to pay for some, but not all, content online. Consumers “will pay for the few news brands they really rely on, if they use them a lot,” he said.

The newspapers using the Journalism Online venture were focused on local news and included The Commercial Dispatch in Mississippi and The York Daily Record in Pennsylvania.

With the exception of The Wall Street Journal, large American newspaper Web sites have so far remained free. The New York Times will become the largest American newspaper to employ a subscriber option for its Web site when it begins a system early this year to charge the heaviest users of NYTimes.com.

Tim Ruder, chief revenue officer of Perfect Market, a news media consultant, said that what worked for small papers would not necessarily work for large papers. But he added that since no larger national papers have switched from free to partial pay, it was difficult to make any guesses. “How well that success will translate to larger sites depends on many things, including the quality, nature and exclusivity of content,” he said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 21, 2011


An article on Tuesday about initial results of an experiment in charging for newspaper Web content misstated part of the name of a Columbus, Miss., newspaper that is among those involved in the venture, called Journalism Online. It is The Commercial Dispatch, not The Columbus Dispatch.