Criticism, fiction and other writing
These are some blogs and personal sites that I visit regularly and that tend to be idiosyncratic, surprising or just good value. The list is a bit like a blog roll but I’m not going to call it that as I deliberately haven’t structured this site as a blog. The sites below aren’t the only ones I visit regularly. If a site has an RSS feed I’ll more than likely subscribe to that feed, unless I’m already following its owner on Micro.blog (in which case there’s usually no need to subscribe to the feed as well). I hope you’ll find something here that you find amusing, entertaining, informative or thought-provoking:
Brad Enslen
It’s become almost impossible to find what we’re looking for on the web, as opposed to what a marketer or advertising company thinks we should want. Brad Enslen argues that directories of sites and similar tools may be part of the answer.
Nicole Dieker
Dieker successfully self-published two volumes of literary fiction, The Biographies of Ordinary People: Volume 1: 1989–2000 and Volume 2: 2004–2016. That’s a significant achievement — most successful self-publishers write in genres such as romance or science fiction — and Dieker documented the process in detail as she was going about it.
Ted Gioia
Gioia writes clearly and informatively about jazz and other kinds of music. He also writes penetratingly about fiction, including series of essays on such topics as “Conceptual Fiction”, “Postmodern Mystery” and “My Year of Horrible Reading”
Florens Verschelde
Articles on web development and design, plus a few personal or political ones. I found this blog while looking for some simple CSS stylesheets that I could modify.
James Book Blog
Reading recommendations in a variety of genres from a bookseller of long standing.
Catrina Davies
Author of the forthcoming (July 2019) Homesick, about living in a shed. Her previous book was about busking solo from Norway to Portugal after her intended travel companion died.
John Battelle
Battelle wrote the book on Search, and a lot more besides.
There's a post on Medium in which I go into more detail about the retionale for this page. I’ll be adding more sites here as I find them, but I aim to do so slowly: i.e. to build up a useful resource over time rather than rush into compliling a long list of every site I can think of that readers just might possibly find interesting. I’ve delayed posting this page for a few weeks, feeling that I ought to wait until my list of recommendations is a bit more substantial but I’ve finally decided to post now and build up the list incrementally.
As of now, the list isn’t in any particular order. As it grows, I’ll think about splitting it into categories. I‘d encourage you to sign up for Micro.blog and see who I’m following there.
Posted by Art on 05-May-2019