In this amazing short by UK filmmaker Tom Jenkins, a lonely desk toy longs for escape from the dark confines of the office, so he takes a cross country road trip to the Pacific Coast in the only way he can – using a toy car and Google Maps Street View. This is stunning.

Watch:

Oh, man. This is amazing. Gary Socquet over at The Nervous Breakdown has published an online advice column, answered by a part-man, part-bear. In his own words:

So people call me Garebear (Bear for short) not because it rhymes (that would be lame, and my friends are not lame) but because I’m actually half bear, on my mother’s side. A few years back I started an advice column for the lovelorn: as it turns out, you learn a lot about making relationships work when one of your parents is a bear. And, well, I just like to feel useful. I think you’ll see what I mean. Let’s dig into the mailbag, shall we?

My favorite questions/answers:

Dear Bear:
My boyfriend is my best friend, he’s smart and funny and sexy, but he’s not a giver: he never considers my feelings, never asks me how my day was, and in five years he’s never once told me I look pretty. What should I do, Bear?

–Unappreciated

Dear Unappreciated:

Are you pretty? Is it possible one of the qualities you left off the list of his many fine traits is “honest?” Have you ever considered the possibility that he’s just taking pity on you? I mean, you call him your best friend, but it doesn’t even sound as though he likes you all that much. You’re clearly very needy, you have limited self-esteem, and at this point the jury is still out on your looks – although, honestly, if he’s never once in five years said you look pretty, well, do the math. And count your blessings.

Dear Bear:

I’m following up to let you know I took your advice and talked to that girl at work I like. You were right – it was so easy! Turns out she got a new pair of glasses and she was asking people in the break room what they thought, and I said, “They’re librarian hot.” (No pun intended.) What’s my next move, Love Doctor?
(name withheld for obvious reasons)

Dear Scott:

Guh. Please tell me you didn’t . . . Okay. Shit. Okay. Your next move . . . your next move. Okay, here’s the thing: “no pun intended” is not an idiom. It means exactly what it means. It is intended to follow an unintentional play on words, like when you’re in a meeting and somebody asks the fat guy to “weigh in” on the topic. So I’d say your next move should be to tell her in no uncertain terms how much you love her boobs, and then say, “No pun intended.” Get it, Scott?

Distract yourself from work with some surrealism(ish) and read the whole thing here.

Better than a book trailer? UK publisher Walker Books has introduced a new type of book cover for the forthcoming YA novel Daylight Savings, which interacts with you when you mouse over it. Try it:

Pretty neat.

Rachel Walsh is a second year Illustration student studying at Cardiff School of Art & Design.  She was given the project: ‘“Explain something modern/Internet-based to someone who lived and died before 1900.” Her choice: explain the Kindle to Charles Dickens.

Walsh says:

‘All the books I made had the actual covers on them, and were the books Dickens wrote, his favourite childhood books, or books I’ve got.

There are 40 little books inside.’

Learn more about the project here. Via MHP.

Hans Zimmer’s work space gives me serious office envy. More than riches, this is what I covet as part of my dream to be a successful writer/filmmaker/storyteller–a badass work space.

Photos via Stuck in Customs.

Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing.

This week, we are giving away a copy of Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner. Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid, struggling to establish his sense of self and his relationship to art. Instead of following the dictates of his fellowship, Adam’s “research” becomes a meditation on the possibility of the genuine in the arts and beyond: are his relationships with the people he meets in Spain as fraudulent as he fears his poems are? Is poetry an essential art form, or merely a screen for the reader’s projections?  A witness to the 2004 Madrid train bombings and their aftermath, does he participate in historic events or merely watch them pass him by? In prose that veers between the comic and tragic, the self-contemptuous and the inspired, Leaving the Atocha Station is a portrait of the artist as a young man in an age of Google searches, pharmaceuticals, and spectacle.

James Wood of the The New Yorker called this debut novel “subtle, sinuous, and very funny.” Leaving the Atocha Station has also been praised by Paul Auster as “utterly charming” and by Deb Olin Unferth as  “beautiful, funny, and revelatory” in Bookforum.

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Coffee House Press.

Read more »

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

[Image via.]

I’m kicking off my November by eating leftover Halloween candy for breakfast and getting a head start on NaNoWriMo. This year marks the fourth year I’ve participated (and, uh, failed), and I don’t plan on stopping any time soon.

So let’s do this together. Gather your candy, get out of the gutter, and don’t make any excuses to write this month.

To inspire you, here’s a roundup of writing tips to keep you going. Some of them are old, some of them are new, some of them are serious, and some of them are totally insane. I’ll let you decide which is which.

.

Tip #1: Write slowly. NaNoWriMo is like running a marathon. Don’t sprint the first 2 miles and then spend the next 24 dragging your feet along and wheezing. That’s not fun. Most NaNoWriMo-ers aim for 1,667 words a day. Stick to that, even if you want to write more.

Tip #2: Do not place a photograph of your favorite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide. (from author Roddy Doyle)

Tip #3: Stop writing when the going is good. Hemingway has said this, along with a whole slew of other authors I’m forgetting right now. Once you get to word 1,667, even if you’re pumped and want to keep going, stop. It’s much easier to pick things up when you’re already in the moment, rather than sit down to a blank screen and have no idea what you’re going to write next.

Tip #4: Listen to Mark Sample, put on some pants, and move out of your parents’ basement.

Tip #5: Have you considered writing a sex scene or giving your protagonist large breasts? And more insightful tips from Laura Ellen Scott.

Tip #6: Only bad writers think that their work is really good. And most good writers think their work is really bad. So don’t be so hard on yourself. Even if you think your writing is crap, keep going. The nature of NaNoWriMo is to create one big, sticky mess that you’ll need to clean up later, so don’t stress if everything is absolutely perfect. The point is to get words on the paper, and to edit, edit, edit starting December 1. And, besides, it’s rarely as bad as you think.

Tip #7: And following Tip #6, I can’t stress this enough: EDIT LATER. EDIT LATER. EDIT LATER.

Tip #8: Read all these tips by Janet Fitch.

Tip #9: Write in your underpants (I realize that this directly contradicts Tip #4, but I don’t care.)

Tip #10: Make stuff up. Go outside your comfort zone. Then keep going. You’ve got nothing to lose.

Tip #11: Good writers copy. Great writers steal. Remember that.

Tip #12: Writing is freedom. Remember that too.

Tip #13: If an irate reader should break into your home, tie you to a chair and terrorize you with selections from the cutlery drawer, think back to your most recent novel. Was its point of view inconsistent? Did you at any time make use of the second person, or urban slang, even ironically? Did you attempt to underscore the significance of an action by describing it as having been performed “to the max”? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, accept what you have coming.

Tip #14: Tell all your friends that you’re doing NaNoWriMo. Maybe they’ll shame you into finishing.

Tip #15: But don’t actually show anyone any part of your novel while you’re writing it. This is your story right now. Don’t let anyone in. Save the story until the new year, at which point you’ve presumably given it a thorough shake-down and editing, to get a fresh set of eyes on it.

Tip #16: If you get stuck in a rut, keep writing. Don’t stop. Take your character to the park. Write about your dog. It doesn’t matter. If you keep writing, you’ll find the story again eventually.

Tip #17: The Guardian put together a series of rules for writers a while back. Read these. These are really good. Seriously: Part One and Part Two.

Tip #18: Find your writing ritual quickly, and stick to it. Do you write best in the morning? Evening? In your pajamas? Outside? Whatever it is, make sure you spend less time on “preparing your space for writing” than actually writing. Time spent making coffee, cleaning your desk, and thinking about how literary you are does not count as writing time.

Tip #19: Don’t follow any of these tips.

Tip #20: Come up with a way to reward yourself on December 1. This is going to get hard and ugly, so at least give yourself some sort of light at the end of the tunnel.

Tip #21: Back up your novel every day. I CAN’T STRESS THIS ENOUGH SO I WILL WRITE THIS IN CAPS LOCK. Imagine how upset you’ll be when your 30,000+ word novel-in-progress disappears because of accidental deletion or because you spilled your writer-coffee all over your computer. Sucks, right? So back that business up: email it to yourself, save it on Google Docs, save it to a flash drive, whatever. Do all three.

Tip #22: Keep yourself inspired. Look at the world through writers’ eyes: everything is material. You can also use writing prompts to keep you going. (Shameless plug: we’ve got a whole series of amazing, daily creative writing prompts that you might find useful.)

Tip #23: Following Tip #22: keep reading. Don’t be afraid about accidentally copying the writing style of the author you’re currently reading. You learn about writing from reading, so don’t stop learning.

Tip #24: Think of writing as you would surviving a zombie apocalypse. The two are more similar that you’d think. (via Erin Feldman)

Tip #25: Use this NaNoWriMo report card to measure the progress of your novel (or the progress of your procrastination. Whatever.)

Tip #26: For the love of God, have fun at least most of the time.

Let’s add to this list. Share your writing tips in the comments below, and follow us on Twitter (@litdrift) for more writing tips throughout the month.

Deckfight also has this thing called “Deckfight Press,” which is a literary e-chap press. We find some writers, turn out some short books by them, in PDF form & digital formats. Our new one is by Mel Bosworth & Christy Crutchfield called The Five Lost Senses of Carl.

Deckfight has this thing called Deckfight Press, a literary e-chapbook press. They churn out really good material, by really good writers, for free. Their latest is The Five Lost Senses of Carl by Mel Bosworth & Christy Crutchfield.

Download the free PDF with awesome art.
Download the free epub/other digital editions.
Buy it for the Kindle just because whatever.

Also, if you missed it: it’s free. We like free stuff.

I geek on poetry in unexpected places (for example: this). Even more, I love poetry that was never supposed to be poetry. Suddenly: oops, you’re a writer.

Case in point: The New York Times‘ Alan Feuer digs into the NYC Craigslist Missed Connections and finds poetry in the listings from Occupy Wall Street. The words are copied verbatim, with only line and stanza breaks added. The titles are the subject headlines.

Beautiful Asian

I was all dressed in blue for a reason.
Standing in front of Capitol One Bank
at 6 av at about w39 st
on Sat Oct 15 late afternoon.
I was with my work partner
standing in front of the Bank entrance
when you and a friend stopped
and asked us a question.
I thought you were so beautiful
that I was speechless.
The Occupy wall Street march
was coming up the Street
and you asked us a question about it,
and then all too soon
you were gone and the air
seemed a little cooler
as if the Sun had suddenly
gone behind a cloud.
If you recognise yourself
please please please
get back to me so that
I can at least know
if you are attached or not

You are a Cop

I was only visiting the city
during the protest
was with my mom
in Time Square
we chatted about why
I was visiting
and where I was from.
I wanted to ask you
for your number
for a good last hoorah before I left…
but I chicken out.

Hoyt/Schermerhorn G

This weekend.
You had
an occupy wall street poster.
I had
a book.

Librarian at Occupy Wall Street

You seem pretty great.
It seemed like a bad idea
to even attempt to flirt
when you’re trying to do
something substantive like that,
so I thought I’d just post here.
Just in case you might see it.

Occupy Rosa Mexicano

Hi Rebecca,
Do you want
to
get
a
drink sometime?
Jonathan

More here.