Writer. Contributing Editor at The Discarded Image. Digital Content Strategist. Here's where I publicly explore the books I'm reading, the projects I'm working on, and other current interests. Clippings 19: past lives of bookstores
Someone please lock me in this bookstore! Â El Ateneo is a former theatre in Buenos Aires, but apparently not the first bookstore to have a previous life in the theatre…or in the church, for that matter. Â Mirage Bookmark presents the most interesting bookstores in the world.
Speaking of booksellers, think books are too expensive? Scott Laming at BookFinder breaks down typical costs to explain why most of us writers, editors, and illustrators aren’t exactly rolling in the dough.
Are you following the Tournament of Books?  I’m watching with total impartiality, as I’ve read none of the contenders…yet.
Oh, and I have just joined a cult.  The Cult of Done, that is.  Here, from Bre Pettis via Girl Detective, is the “Cult of Done Manifesto”:
1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.
I think 2, 4, 8, and 10 are especially brilliant (which probably reveals too much about my current writing frame of mind!).  Do you need this manifesto, too?  Let me know which of these points speak most directly to you.  In the meantime, I’m off to get something done.
