virtualDavis

Julie Roads is a writer, a blogger, a speaker. Writing Roads proclaims her wares, and her blog captures the whims and woes of the writing/copywriting/momming existence. Julie Roads is on twitter too, if you want the even more unfiltered soundtrack. And the website design? Clever and organized albeit slightly cluttered. In a good way. Like a writer’s desk…

Aaahhh yes… This was too good to pass up. I’m going to pass along a Talk to the Newsroom snippet from New York Times Executive Editor, Bill Keller’s response to a reader’s complaint about badly written news leads. Read. And then re-read. And then print it, pin it up next to your desk and read it again every day. Am I speaking to myself? Perhaps.

Q. The colorful lead is the bane (or at least one of the banes) of my time spent with The Times. So often, I have tried quickly to get the gist of a story (this happens in the Sports section more often than in the news sections) only to find that I must read something like ‘it was a dark and dreary night’ before finding the point, or the score, or even a notion of what the article is about.

Whatever happened to the inviolate rule that a lead was 35 words or fewer, telling us where, why, what or who? (Peter C. Boulay, Bronx, N.Y.)

A. As the sun blazed above the snow-lacquered peaks of the Hindu Kush, the weary editor flipped down his clip-on sunglasses and booted up his laptop.

It had been a long week, a soul-sapping, disorienting and yet strangely satisfying week.

Past the simple campsite where he awaited his digital connection to the modern world flowed all the human mystery of the East: the women shrouded in burqas of azure, or possibly cerulean, he was not too good on blues; the camel-borne warlords draped with belts of bullets; the shoeless boys in filthy ‘I Heart New York’ T-shirts; and all the rest, all separated by semicolons and swaddled in colorful clichés.

The computer flickered to life. The keys clicked. (Bill Keller, New York Times Executive Editor, Bill Keller)

Back in the Adirondacks. Life is good. Though rainy and foggy like my last entry. A nice weekend though. And end of week. Balmy in NYC. A couple of magnificent runs in Central Park. Another in Montclair. On Thursday we went to a splendid evening at the New York Philharmonic. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4, Piano Concerto No. 3 and Symphony No. 5 with Lorin Maazel conducting and Gianluca Cascioli tickling the ivories. Though somehow that expression seems to better fit Fats Domino…

Bought a car on eBay in the hopes that it will solve the mobility, mpg, affordability equation. Time will tell. It’s a cute little Subaru Outback Sport. Green. 30+ mpg and AWD so I’m pretty optimistic. Off to take a two night Defensive Driving Course tomorrow so that my points will be reduced after the speeding ticket in Colorado this summer. Insurance company zing-ed me for that. That and the fact that I’ve been out of the US for several years and not insured. Aaargh. Apparently they’ll drop my rates in six months, but only if I remember to ask them. You better bet I’ll remember!

Going on a full week of good writing sessions. Editing first half dozen chapters of the never-ending-novel in the hopes that I can sustain this focus and manage to continue to prioritize it. Send positive vibes my way. Oh, and my shipment from Paris finally arrived, so I’ve spent two days trying to unpack and find places for all this stuff, wondering which things to keep and which to trot out for eBay-ers to consider for their collections. Need to lighten the load. Hoping that eBay might serve as a good matchmaker. Updates to follow.