Friday Links

Happy Friday! What has your week brought you? What are you hoping for this weekend? I suspect a good number of you are hoping for warmer weather, given what’s been going on on the east coast. I’m wishing you all sunshine and milder temperatures, or at the very least some time to burrow under a cozy quilt with a mug of your favorite hot beverage and an excellent book.

To kick the weekend off right, I’ve got a nice assortment of links today. I hope you find them inspiring and/or helpful. I feel like they lean strongly toward the self-help aura of January, but a couple address important issues that can hit you any time of year. Enjoy, and have a wonderful weekend!

Navigating Stuckness – One artist’s dissection of the stages of his career and the path he’s taken, both the high points and the low.

Year of ‘Reading Women’ Declared for 2014 – An article on the wave of people dedicating themselves to making sure women writers and writers of color get more attention. I’m going to have more to say about this next week.

Staff 5s 2013 – Powell’s Bookstore’s annual lists of the year’s top five books from their booksellers. Always fun because the range of tastes practically guarantees you’ll find something intriguing you hadn’t heard of before.

On One Writer and Depression, AKA Life in the Black Pit of Hell – Bestselling author Alyssa Day talks candidly about her fight with depression. A really important read.

Things They Do Not Teach You in Writer School, #17 – Author Marie Brennan on figuring out how much story you have, or how long your book might end up being.