An interesting note from Anna Maria Cox’s review of And the Heart Says Whatever is this (*I have not read the book, I’m looking forward to it): “For my—admittedly self-interested—part, I thought the piece, while well written (the book is, too), missed a chance to examine not just Gould’s decision to go off the media cattle farm but also the existence of so many tender young things happy to take her place in the pen.”

Tender young things happy to take her place in the pen is the perfect distillation of what, frankly, I find to be the toxic lifestyle of trying to make even a living wage as a writer in a bloggy age. The way that writers are being shaped into content producers who are reacting reacting reacting and hardly ever living. The race to be the pithiest wit regarding a variety of things. The lack of a real Maxwell Perkins-like editor in your life, or even a newspaper editor, committed to making prose clear and snappy so you can improve. The staring at the screen for hours at a time until you go blind.

Anyways. That’s all. I’m truly surprised every time when I realize that there are many people who would like to be writers, and who happily sign up for jobs that are rather cruel in their treatment.