1) Martin, over at writeafirstnovel, wrote a post called "Frankenstein's writer." It was about this: "Just imagine, what if you could take all the bits you admire in other writers and combine them in yourself." So of course I had to write a comment that was over twice as long as the post. Maybe Santa will leave me some concision under the tree. 🙂

2) Laura Stanfill had an interesting post called "Two Sides of a Writerly Conversation." It's about two writers who had a fairly involved e-mail exchange over several months, in which they explored the many aspects of writing that they approach very differently. (As I say in one of my comments, I think it may have been easier to figure out what you're doing as a writer before the web existed, before there were so many resources out there to tell you that you're doing it wrong.)

3) The New York Review of Books is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, so they're publishing excerpts from significant pieces they've published over that time. This issue it's "Mary McCarthy on William S. Burroughs’s 'The Naked Lunch.'" It's fascinating to read an appreciation of the book that isn't filtered through knowledge of everything Burroughs did after that. It's like (this is the analogy that popped into my mind) reading a review of Star Wars from 1977, before we knew about everything that would come after.

4) I think Slate reposts this every year, and that's okay with me: "The Man Who Told A Christmas Story: What I learned from Jean Shepherd." Shep had an effect on my young brain that was probably comparable to Dark Shadows. For one example, here's a quote from the article (which is by Donald Fagen of Steely Dan, by the way):

Listening to Shep, I learned about social observation and human types: how to parse modern rituals (like dating and sports); the omnipresence of hierarchy; joy in struggle; "slobism"; "creeping meatballism"; 19th-century panoramic painting; the primitive, violent nature of man; Nelson Algren, Brecht, Beckett, the fables of George Ade; the nature of the soul; the codes inherent in "trivia," bliss in art; fishing for crappies; and the transience of desire. He told you what to expect from life (loss and betrayal) and made you feel that you were not alone.

In one of my posts about Moonrise Kingdom I talked about the number of hierarchies that we see on the island of New Penzance (and I didn't even list them all). Well, who trained me to see "the omnipresence of hierarchy"? Who do you think? 🙂