RIASS stuff:
Were still talking about the importance of quiet books'over on this post.
Review: Welcome to the Great Mysterious by Lorna Landvik'Rating: 
Writing, place and Anthony Doerr's Four Seasons in Rome'Rating:
Giveaway:'Safe Haven'by Nicholas Sparks'(US only)
Other bookish stuff:
Twitter is becoming a new platform by which to pitch agents (caveats applysee the article!)'The Pitch Madness event was so successful that it's now expanded to a regular challenge spread over four host blogs. In the follow-up, After the Madness, the bloggers workshop the pitches and talk about what worked and didn't. This month, however, Drake decided to take the pitch competition to the next level, taking September's'After the Madness'to Twitter for an online pitch party, dubbed #pitmad.
HP Lovecrafts advice to aspiring authors'(has anyone out there actually managed to get through a Lovecraft book?'At the Mountains of Madness'broke me) All attempts at gaining literary polish must begin with judicious'reading, and the learner must never cease to hold this phase uppermost. In many cases, the usage of good authors will be found a more effective guide than any amount of precept. A page of Addison or of Irving will teach more of style than a whole manual of rules, whilst a story of Poe's will impress upon the mind a more vivid notion of powerful and correct description and narration than will ten dry chapters of a bulky textbook.
On being a childrens author without having kids yourself'These days, I probably communicate more with young people than most parents do. I have had complex email conversations with teenage girls and boys in countries as far afield as Germany, France and MexicoGiven all of that, do I really need to have children of my own? I have all of the readers of my books to share with me their thoughts and fears. And I don't have to pay their bills or do their laundry.
On the craft of nonfiction'If youre not writing for a newspaper, go ahead and bury the lead (or the lede, as the newspaperfolk spell it)'because the heart of the story is a place to arrive at, not to begin.
The allure of the first novel Promising novel-writing careers end for other reasons, too, and can still make one feel a strange sadness. Theres a certain poignancy in coming across a copy of'Frederick Dunstans'Habitation One, a curious post-apocalyptic novel, in Dereks Bookstall in Preston, and reading in the author biography of Dunstans lifelong desire to be an author and that in 1983, when'Habitation One'was published, he was at work on his second novel. No second novel ever appeared.
On writing and privacy'The poems in'Stags Leap, the collection that has just won'Sharon Olds'the'TS Eliot prize, were written years ago, but not published until much later. The delay, Olds has explained, was to protect her family. The poems document the end of her 32-year marriage, when her husband left for another woman, and Olds promised her children not to write about it for at least 10 years. In the end, it was 15; the collection came out last autumn.
A new Aussie site for buying/selling used books
An interview with Edward St Aubyn'I don't remember the last time I cried over a book. This is not due to hardheartedness ' I often cry in movies, and I cry almost uninterruptedly in front of the news ' but due rather to the technical gaze that I bring to writing: I am always thinking about how it's being done and other ways it might have been done instead, which means that if something is deeply and effectively sad in a book, I would be more inclined to aesthetic bliss than to tears.
The Bachelor'contestants posed for Mills & Boon covers in a recent episode
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