NEWS

by Debi Staples

November is National Novel Writing Month

As November rolls around, budding novelists are priming their speed-typing and sharpening pencils in preparation for National Novel Writing Month.

Chris Baty of Oakland, California is responsible for this. Baty has been heading up National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in which participants, with motivation from cohorts around the world who are all connected through the website , complete a 50,000 word novel in the 30 days of November. Since founding the escapade in 1999, Baty claims he "has set a reassuringly low bar for budding novelists everywhere."
Writers around the world are cracking their knuckles, stocking up on coffee, and getting ready to write.

For more information, visit the NaNoWriMo website - http://www.nanowrimo.org/

Mayor Wins American Bookseller Association Award for Fiction

Mystery writer Archer Mayor knows many things: That ordinary people with everyday struggles make the best heroes; that the "good guys" and the "bad guys" may not be all that different from each other; that real drama is fueled, not simply by murders and car chases and gun fights, but by love and loss and desire.
And because Mayor knows such things so well, he now knows what it feels like to win the New England Bookseller's Association award for fiction (for his novel, "The Surrogate Thief").
He considers the award recognition of his 16-year effort to not put out a standard whodunit, turgid with hard-nosed cops who hit the bottle and their wives. For Mayor, who has a degree in history from Yale University, the process of writing is all pleasure.

"I love editing. I love rewriting. Writing is where I need to be," he says.

Political Publishing Renaissance

Political publishing is undergoing a significant renaissance, but needs to be wary of glutting the market, according to Judith Orr, Manager of London-based socialist bookshop Bookmarks.

Speaking at an SYP meeting on political publishing, Orr said that recent events such as 9/11 and the Iraq war had stirred up people's interest in world affairs to the extent that they wanted more information than a newspaper article could provide, and turned to books such as House of Bush , House of Saud (Gibson Square), by Craig Unger, or Michael Moore's polemics, Stupid White Men and Dude, Where's My Country ? (Penguin).

"In Bookmarks, we've seen a lot more young people getting interested in politics, and, in response to that interest, an explosion in publishing."

Martin Rynja, Publisher for Gibson Square, told PN: "I think it [ House of Bush , House of Saud ] might not have been quite as big a book as it is, now, after 9/11. People are reading and buying it who would not otherwise have thought about buying this book. There's a very interested readership, beyond the core of people who want to read anything about politics."

Christina Hamlett Wins Writer's Digest Award

Christina Hamlett, WOL's Screenwriter Editor, is going to need more wall space. Hamlett just added her sixth Writers Digest award to a growing collection. She shares this year's honors on WHERE THE BODIES ARE with screenwriting partner/actor/filmmaker, David Grad. Set in rural Mississippi in the 1960s, their new drama centers on a forger who escapes from a maximum security prison with the aid of a greedy guard.

Iran's Hard-liners Turn a Censorious Eye on Web Journalists

The recent arrest of several bloggers, online journalists, and Internet technicians in Iran has raised fears that the country's old guard is determined to muzzle dissent in cyberspace.

The Internet has become a refuge for liberal journalists since the hard-line judiciary closed scores of reformist publications over the past four years. The Web log, or blog, format - a cross between a diary and public commentary - has allowed dissident writers to reach a mass audience with less of the expense and oversight of print media.

Government efforts to curtail this new forum are seen in Tehran as linked to the ascendancy of hard-liners who wrested control of parliament from reformers earlier this year after elections that many moderates were banned from contesting.

"They [hard-liners] see all these websites, including blogs, as newspapers they haven't been able to crack down on yet," says Hossein Derakhshan, a Canada-based Iranian blogger.

New laws covering "cyber crimes" were announced last week by the head of the judiciary, Ayatollah Mahmoud Shahrudi. "Anyone who disseminates information aimed at disturbing the public mind through computer systems or telecommunications ... would be punished in accordance with the crime of disseminating lies," he declared.

At the same time, a judiciary spokesman said that people running unauthorized sites would soon be tried on charges including "acting against national security, disturbing the public mind, and insulting sanctities."

A foreign envoy in Tehran says: "My Iranian contacts are complaining that the size of the environment for free speech is getting smaller and ... that the electronic environment is now being concentrated on ... but it will be very difficult to stifle it all."