Around the traps

There's been a fair whack of writerly stuff written around the traps these last few days.

• Jay Kristoff advises on the benefits of sucking up every grain of despair when the manuscript you're working on is rapidly morfing into a pile of crap.  A little bit of hate, he reckons, may make you a better writer.
• Patrick O'Duffy responds to the perennial question writers have to ask themselves: What's the damned book about? He looks at the distinctions between premise and theme, and makes the point that the "premise is the hook that distinguishes your work from all the other bait out there."
• Michael Pryor desribes how writing is like magic, and how he got involved in learning conjuring tricks as a result of his writing.
• Over at Alan Baxter's site, Foz Meadows has written a fine guest post about Piracy and Free Content, and the implications of this for writers.  Foz has since added to her thoughts about this on her own site.
• The View From Here has posted some great articles recently.  I particularly enjoyed Catherine McNamara's piece about interlinked short stories and whether these constitute a novel.
• Oh, and with magic in mind, and never having thought much about the work of voice artists before, I was gob-smacked to hear this demo of Kevin Powe's work.  (You can also find Kevin's KAPOWE! blog here.)