Lit Bits & A Bit about Wholesale Immersion in All Things Writerly

• Is it just me, or are there a shocking number of literary events happening in our fair city these days? Despite all the madness at the LA Times (more after I've got two full Sunday of the new format under my belt), it seems that independent booksellers & local literary journalists are really stepping up their game.  April has been packed with excellent readings and if you check the LA Readings of Note column to the right, you'll see that May is looking equally divine.
• This week alone has been nuts, per my listings at LAist.
• Tonight: A.M. Homes discusses The Mistress's Daughter at  Vroman's. Be there or be...something less cliche than square.
• A little love for the Young Adult Fiction LA Times Book Prize Nominees is also up at LAist...I did my best, but I guess my best wasn't good enough (so here we are back where we were before/seems nothing ever changes/we're back to being strangers/wondr'ing if we ought to stay or head on out the door...) Sorry. Brief cheesy pop (embarassingly so) 80's interlude. Its been that kind of day and its only noon. Good grief.
• As you may know, but which I've done a pretty good job of not talking about because I hate those kinds of brides (and you know the kind I'm speaking of), I'm getting married in September. Kind of weird to type it, but there you have it. Part of this wedding prep involves working out a bit more than your average obsessive reader/writer usually has time for (read: none). So I've been rising each morning, turning on my iRiver (take that iPod) and listening to one Bat Segundo Podcast each day.  This has had the lovely effect of me actually wanting to get out of bed early, wanting to jump on the treadmill. It is excellent to pair such drudgery with the words of my favorite writers.  Also: While I had listened to several of the Bat's 'casts over the last year, it is only when you consume one (sometimes two) a day over the course of a week, that you really begin to get the wow factor of all the Bat has time to do. I mean, the intros alone are sort of other-worldly.  So - my hats off to the Bat and his mysterious creator. I'm only one week in and I have more than 109 days of working out to do, so please, please: more podcasts soon?
• Still loving Matthew Sharpe's Jamestown. Also eagerly awaiting my chance to start reading Antoine Wilson's new book The Interloper. Plus Jon McGregor's latest So Many Ways to Begin.  I do wish I could mainline this stuff. It would be easier, no?
• What I've always been told, what I always knew to be true but didn't put into practice until recently: giving yourself wholly over to every kind of literary pursuit, literally becoming one with all things bookish (by this i mean reading the best works written by the best writers, talking about the relative merits or non-merits of these works with people who care about literature just as much as you do, identifying what works and doesn't work in these celebrated works, thinking & critically discussing these points, opening your narrow focus to include still more writers and thinkers and ideas) leads to the holy grail for any serious writer -- better writing. My work has reached a new level that I'm both happy with and challenged by. I feel it is directly attributable to the raising of the bar that is inherent whenever you place yourself in the arena of such discussion and when you place your work alongside the very works you fall in love with and/or despise and see how you stack up. You cannot help but want to make your own work better, more ambitious, more of everything you find you love in the work you are consistently reading.  I know. Nothing new. And you're not really the audience that needs convincing. But when you see the effects of this hard work (this reading and reading and reading while also trying to write and write and write), it is powerful. So powerful that I advocate it for all writers, knowing full well I'm not the first to do so. I just never took that advice seriously. Now that I see how my reading & critical discussions of this reading has informed my own work - I want to shout it from the skyscraper-tops. Read. Widely. Now.