Famous Writers with Dogs: Enid Bynton

Writers need inspiration somewhere in life, and for many that inspiration comes from their pet dogs.

This is a running series where we post pictures of famous writers with their canine companions--the cute, the cuddly, the creepy. And that's just the writers.


Today:  Enid Bynton

That's right. That's how all the best writing occurs. Outside on a couch, with a typewriter plopped on your lap, two backseat writers draped over you, and Fido performing deep tissue massages.

That death glare Fido gives Nosy Nancy, though--it's almost like he's holding Enid back from lashing out.

Masochists and people with writer's block, rejoice! There's an app for that.

The Most Dangerous Writing App isn't shy about patting itself on the back with self-naming itself, and it's not shy about ruining an artistic moment of inspiration that requires a person to pause and ruminate on the possibilities of phrasing.

But that's not the point.

The Most Dangerous Writing App is an open source app that uses a fogged screen and a countdown clock, all in hopes of forcing one to write. If you pause for more than five seconds, everything you wrote is lost, deleted, gone. The fogged screen serves as a focus to simply write as well, forgiving typos and grammar in favor of decidedly placing words on screen--even hot messes in a hazy condition.

You're allowed to endlessly backspace, if you even have an idea where you are on the screen (it's fogged, remember?), but at some point you don't focus on the snafus. You channel your inner James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and slap wildly at the keys in hopes that some nugget, some string of words, a phrase, a sentence sounds like poetry, the beginning of a novel, the ending of an opus, the breaking of your heart.





photo: Wired.com

Leave the gun. Take the cannoli...and the archives.

The late Mario Puzo's estate is auctioning off a wealth of material associated with The Godfather author.

The collection includes--but isn't limited to--a 744 page draft of the novel, handwritten outlines, the 1965 Olympia typewriter Puzo used to create the epic, and letters he wrote to Francis Ford Coppola, the director of the movies that forever made us an offer we can't refuse. (The auction actually includes the working movie script that quotes that line as well.)

The 45 boxes of archives will be sold as together, with a pre-auction estimate of $400,000.

And you thought getting killed over your cannoli was expensive.

Tom Hanks created a typewriting app that is a bestseller on iTunes.

Oscar winner Tom Hanks recently released an app on iTunes that mimics old typewriters for individuals writing on their iPad. The app, called Hanx Writer, is free (with available upgrades starting at $2.99) and creates the noise and visual back and forth of a typewriter arm on the iPad's screen.

Hanks is a huge proponent of typewriting as a cog in the writing process, as he noted last summer in an op-ed for the New York Times. "Everything you type on a typewriter sounds grand," he wrote, "the words forming in mini-explosions of SHOOK SHOOK SHOOK. A thank-you note resonates with the same heft as a literary masterpiece."

Don't worry though. While typewriters are notorious for lacking a delete or backspace key (how do you delete ink smacked on a page?), the Hanx Writer includes that one modern convenience.




photo: iTunes / Hanx Writer