Daydreaming is an important part of creative writing. Some of our best ideas and inspiration comes from daydreaming. It can be an integral part of the writing process. This also includes the ‘business’ of writing – sitting back from your novel and dreaming about it being published and sitting on the shelves of your local bookstore. This is healthy and can propel your writing forward. However, the dangers of daydreaming are lurking in the dark.

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Welcome to the Friday “Spooktacular” edition of Link Love! Actually it’s not, just business as usual. I’m not a big fan of Halloween (yes, I’m a Scrooge). Although I will be attending a Halloween party Saturday night, dressed as an unemployed writer. Seems fitting in this economy.

Halloween aside, the Chicago area keeps getting pounded with lousy weather and rain storms. While I normally enjoy the occasional drizzle and/or storm, this constant bad weather is starting to pick at everyone’s nerves. Most of us have forgotten what a blue sky looks like, or the sun for that matter.

Enough small talk. Here are a few great links from around the web for your reading enjoyment. Have a happy Halloween and, as always, a safe and weekend!

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Now that 2009 is coming to a close, we’re going to start seeing a lot of lists: Top books, top movies, top websites and so forth. I’m not a big fan of these kind of lists because my personal list for any given year would be a lot different than the lists that some of these literary organizations release at the end of each year.

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Ebooks are only a part of the digital revolution we are seeing in the world. Everything is becoming digitized; from literature to music and video. Computers are the new entertainment centers. Access to vast amounts of information is now at our fingertips and it’s only going to increase over time.

There’s one new literary magazine start-up that is helping take literature into the future. The quarterly publication is called Electric Literature Magazine. They are using more than just ebooks to help sell literature to a wider and more diverse audience.

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The marathon of writing is almost here. As you probably know, November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). The goal is to write an entire novel in one month – that’s 50,000 words! With only 30 days to complete your masterpiece you don’t have a lot of time (if any) to carefully think out your plot, characters, setting, etc. And forget about an outline. I think that’s the point of NaNoWriMo – turn off your inner critic and just write.

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I spend a lot of time on this blog writing about ebooks, publishing and writing fiction. While I love writing about those topics, there is one subject that I have neglected over the last year or so – poetry. During my college days I really dived into poetry in a big way, analyzing poems from the time of Shakespeare to contemporary poems written today. It took time to carefully read a poem over and over again, but the reward came in the form of an epiphany, one of those ‘Ah ha!’ moments when you finally get it from a poem finally understood.

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This is an update to an earlier post I wrote Race to the bottom: Amazon, Wal-Mart see who can sell the cheapest books. Now Target has entered the game and a lot of people aren’t happy about new release hardcovers being priced so cheap at these retailers. The first sign of protest comes from the American Booksellers Association (ABA), who wrote a complaint to the antitrust division of the U.S. Department of Justice.

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The exciting event this week, of course, has been the announcement of the Nook, the e-reader from Barnes & Noble. The Nook is a revolutionary step forward in many ways, which I described in my earlier post.  The Nook also adds much-needed competition to Amazon’s Kindle and the line of e-readers from Sony.

In the emerging ebook industry, we need healthy competition to ensure innovation, reasonable pricing and choice for consumers. I’m looking forward to reading the first reviews after the Nook is released in late November. My local B&N store already has promotional material for the Nook available for customers.

Other than that, it has been business as usual. Fall must officially be here, as the Chicago area has seen miserable weather over the last few days – cold, rainy, windy and very bleak. Winter is not too far behind. Oh well, at least it’s Friday, and you know what that means!

Have a happy and safe weekend!

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I have a confession to make: I’m a news junkie. I like to know what’s going on in the world. In the morning, before heading off for work, I’ll watch the morning news while eating breakfast. At night I’ll turn it on to make sure the world is still spinning. Over time, however, I have noticed there is an inverse relationship between news and creativity: The more news I watch, the more my creativity goes down.

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The Barnes and Noble Nook digital reader has officially been released. I know this news has been bubbling all over the interwebs for the last day or so, and I’m a little late. But I still wanted to jump in with my two cents (for whatever that’s worth). Overall, I think the Nook is great for the ebook industry. It is one more choice for consumers and gives much needed competition for all the other e-reading devices on the market.

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