We're at the point where we are starting to grow but still seem constantly strapped for cash. Every upstanding businessperson knows that there's only one solution to keep us growing: Interns, interns, interns!

So if you're looking for long hours of hard, anonymous work, if you're dream is to talk on the phone with a writer who is pretty ticked off that his book isn't in the Tacoma Barnes & Noble, if you'd like nothing better than to spend your summer trudging to the post office to mail off elaborately packaged cans of coffee or if picking up my egg salad sandwich on your way back from Office Max to stock up on padded envelopes sounds like almost too much fun, then don't hesitate to give us a buzz at 206-784-4700.

In all seriousness, we have an array of potential positions and assignments to offer ranging from low pay to no pay. We're looking for production people (web designers, graphic designers, editors, proofreaders), marketing and sales people and maybe an MBA student or two who want to show us all the basic business mistakes we make every day (and lord knows, there are a lot of them). At this point, none of these positions are full-time (I believe it's illegal to have full-time nonpaid interns, is it not?), but you never know — if we keep on this pace, we'll be able to add staff in the not-too-distant future.

Also, while some of our jobs require people to be in the Puget Sound area, others could be done from Timbuktu. Don't let geography dissuade you.

So call us, send your resume to me at bruce at chin music press dot com, and we'll take it from there.

OK, if you can't tell already, I'm pulling all of todays links from the Kottke site which was guest-blogged (quite spectacularly) last week by Joel Turnipseed.

The last link from this batch from me is going to be his interview with Jessica Hagy who I guess is known for her bloggo-meme-exploded index card site. I had never heard of her or seen her index card site but she apparently got an agent and book deal with Penguin because of it. This is the internet at it's best: someone using an out-of-the-box blogging tool (blogger) with standard templates -- in other words: a minimal amount of energy on the part of the content producer to engage with technology -- producing consistently solid content regularly, and coming out way, way on top. It's nice to see that high quality content and good ideas coupled with a little bit of luck are still able to rise above the muck out there.

Already five days late on this one: November 1st marks the start of National Novel Writing Month. I love that simply the declaration of a period of time as being "novel writin' time" is enough to push us would-be writers over the edge into actually completing something. There's a whole psych 101 class on deadlines, procrastination and goal setting wrapped up in this project.

What attracts writers to New Orleans? Jason Berry and Christine Wiltz will be discussing this very question this Friday on a panel at the Tennessee Williams Festival.

Much has been said about the loss of so many gifted musicians in New Orleans because of the broken levees. While this is true and it's not clear if they will ever be allowed to come back, the literary scene, on the other hand, is thriving. Perhaps tragedy draws out the writer in all of us. Jason and Christine will riff on this theme with the guidance of moderator Ralph Adamo this Friday at 10 am.

Steve 1: Heller
A nice interview with hyper-prolific design writer Steven Heller. Perhaps the most inspiring bit about his life is the sheer amount of productivity he manages to pull off. On what would otherwise be a burden of a schedule to an average Joe:

You’ve managed this freelance career on top of a full time job for 30 years, you’re co-chair of this MFA program, you answer emails lightning-fast and I’m pretty sure you have a life, too...can you divulge for freelance writers some of your Steven Heller time management secrets?

I don’t think it’s a matter of superb time management as much as filling up time. Without getting Freudian or Jungian or Marxian (Groucho that is), I make up for my deficiencies by appearing to be prolific. Everyone works at their own rhythms, which, if we’re lucky, is in sync with our interests and curiosities. You at UnBeige post six items a day — and you probably do a lot of legwork to do that — for some that’s a tremendous amount of work. But it’s your job, and your passion. I simply do what turns me on (and turns off some of the demons and voices raging in my head). I also like being able to tally up accomplishments, and these come in waves. This year my wave is establishing new MFA programs at the School of Visual Arts, like the brand new MFA in Design Criticism (to be chaired by Alice Twemlow) and a few others that are top secret at the moment. Next year, maybe it will be knitting large scarves.

OK, to make up for the reviews and articles I referred to yesterday that weren't online, here's a good interview with Jason Berry from the Jackson Free Press in Mississippi that ran before Thanksgiving.

Sometimes a movie has the feel of a play or a novel reads like a screenplay, but I had never come across a TV show that feels like a novel until I started watching HBO's "The Wire," which wraps up its fourth season this Sunday. If you have the time to watch each hour-long episode (there are 50) in order, do it. The writing and acting are incredibly sharp, and the format is similar to a John Sayles movie, with story lines from every level of society woven together. But where Sayles bumped up against a two- or three-hour limit for a feature film, "The Wire" can expand over 50+ hours. Great stuff.

And of course, like all good things, there is a Chin Music connection: Method Man of rap fame, who plays Cheese Wagstaff.

Finally, yes, we are guilty of silence when it comes to another famous Chin Music TV connection: Kramer from Seinfeld. I think Kramer needs to get a bit part on next season's "Wire" as a dope fiend who gets the bejesus beat out of him by Cheese. That would bring the Chin Music energies back into alignment.

Back from a 10 day jaunt to Hanoi. Beautiful city. Lots of coffee drinking and book reading ensued. One incredibly delicious hamburger was consumed. Pho? 10 bowls or so.

Finally sifted through 600 articles from a variety of feeds. Here's a few of the more interesting bits I bumped into:

Beautiful NYTimes infographic summarizing a very complicated series of Middle East relationships in a single image.

Design Observer has some words on the great Pentagram co-founder and brilliant designer Alan Fletcher, who recently passed away.

DO also announces the results of their Winterhouse Awards for Design Writing: congratulations to Thomas de Monchaux and Katherine Feo.

Khoi Vinh interviews the articulate and talented artist Louise Ma. Part of his ongoing series of monthly archive illustrations.

Sydney has commissioned a photography project much in lines with the work of Ken Kitano in an attempt to "provide a representative male and female “look” for the 160,000 residents of Sydney’s City of Villages." Two things are a bit unsettling about this: 1) no mention or credit is given to the photographer. And 2) it would have been nice of them to reference some prior art in the project.

Susan Larson has a great piece on Jason Berry in today's Times-Picayune. She gives us a glimpse of the man, not just the writer — a sure sign of a skilled profiler.

Sara Gran has a very funny piece about being a writer in Brooklyn in The New York Times.

Thanks to Colleen for the tip. and if you don't know Sara Gran's work, there's no better place to start than with Colleen's review of Come Closer on our Voices of New Orleans blog.

Remember our semicolon debate late last year? No issue gets writers as riled, it seems, than whether the semicolon is a "transvestite hermaphrodite" (Kurt Vonnegut) or a much abused and underused tool. Michael Tomasky wrote: "If I were linguistic emperor, not only would semicolons be mandatory, but we’d all be writing like Carlyle: massive 130-word sentences that were mad concatenations of em dashes, colons, semicolons, parentheticals, asides; reading one of those Carlyle sentences can sweep me along in its mighty wake and make me feel as if I’m on some sort of drug. What writing today does that? Some, maybe even a lot, in the realm of literature; but not much in nonfiction, alas.”

I got both those quotes from Craig Conley's inspired A Semicolon's Dream Journal, which I found after he left a comment on our blog. I've just skimmed his site, but also enjoyed his Inflationary Lyrics. This is the sort of site I could waste all day on. But really ... a "transvestite hermaphrodite"?

We spent the Thanksgiving weekend proofing the final draft of Do You Know... and, as usual, much of the time was used debating arcane points of punctuation and style. Is there a difference in the nuances of "mama" and "mamma"? The dictionary doesn't give us any, but we know that words live beyond the pages of Webster's. Do you hyphenate "African American"? How about "category-four hurricane"? The questions went on and on. And with only one exception, the four of us proofing the final draft found common ground. That one exception was the use of the semicolon.

I love the semicolon; Yuko does too. David Cady dislikes it — so does my brother Dave. The battle lines were clearly drawn, and they are clearly drawn in the literary world as well: We have Gore Vidal, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Evelyn Waugh on our side. They have Donald Barthelme, Ernest Hemingway and E.B. White on theirs.

I was all set to write a lengthy ode to the semicolon when I found that it had already been done recently by Timothy Butterworth of the Financial Times. In his splendid piece, "Pause Celebre," he argues that the semicolon is embraced in Britain and considered part of "punctuation's axis of evil" in the US. He also argues that the semicolon has a political bent these days. And while he has been accused of stretching his case, who can argue that the Bush administration prefers nuance to simple declarative sentences? No one, of course. Isn't it time, then, to bring the semicolon — the much abused punctuation mark — back with a vengeance, giving it new life in the way @ was resurrected with the advent of email? (And, no, winking emoticons are not enough for the semicolon; it deserves so much more.)

The semicolon is a half note to the comma's quarter note and the period's full stop; it draws together what the period — and the dash — separate. It is all about individual style; the writer forces a half breath and refuses the full stop. The writer draws attention to himself; and he bathes in it. My favorite use of the semicolon cited in Butterworth's piece is from literary critic F.L. Lewis: "... a writer should be able to vary his length; like a bowler."

Go ahead; call it a sentence fragment. But the semicolon is coming back; you heard it here first.