Once a year, and sometimes twice, I pour myself a glass of wine and sit down to read Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style for a good laugh. This is the Bible of precise writing, the Art of War for students of concision. It’s the only writing manual in existence that can make 40-word AP bulletins sound windy and tangential. Anyone who’s ever taken a composition class has surely been ordered to read it, which (thanks to the authors taking their own advice) can be accomplished during a t...

As much as I love living in the Rockies, authors won’t find much on Colorado’s long list of perks that they can use to justify their continued habitation so far from publishing’s gravitational center in New York City. Yes, there are some well-regarded writers conferences in Aspen, Denver and even in my hometown of Fort Collins (where I’ll be presenting a couple of workshops in a few weeks; more about that at a later date). And when it comes to finding solitude in order to crank ou...

I have a friend who can be described as a cyber hermit, one of those increasingly unique people whose only online presence is a Gmail account that gets checked once a week or so. No Facebook page, no Twitter account, no personal website. If he were a barber or an office manager or some other professional for whom the Internet is merely a form of entertainment, news or distraction, this wouldn’t be such a big deal. As it is, though, his job is the same as mine — he’s a jo...

It’s been a busy holiday season, spent not before the fireplace in the glow of Christmas lights with a tumbler of whiskey in one hand and a new book with a freshly broken spine in the other, but hunched over my keyboard pecking out HTML and resizing photos as I built my new soon-to-be unleashed website.

When I wasn’t working out coding bugs, I was inhaling blogs, all sorts of them. Blogs on blogging, blogs on tweeting, blogs on freelancing, blogs on marketing. I read blogs I wasn’...