Jim Freeman

Now here’s something interesting for those of you in the business of writerly endeavor. It has all the essentials of fraud, a touch of gaming the system and a link to ChatGPT. It is, of course, another example of the rich bribing their kids into admittance to top...

“Give me a home where the buffalo roam” is the refrain from a nostalgic song about the old West. It’s tie-in to ChatGPT is the sense of randomness—that thing that both buffalo and humans share and artificial intelligence lacks. Fiction is a delicate thing because of...

If that sounds a little off-the-wall to you, consider for a moment what writing is and what it accomplishes. As I have said many times, for me, when the facts are scattered like feathers in a pillow-fight, it’s writing that grabs each feather out of the air and nails...

(Guardian UK) The writer Martin Amis, who has died aged 73 of oesophageal cancer, delighted, provoked, inspired and outraged readers of his fiction, reportage and memoirs across a literary career that set off like a rocket and went on to dazzle, streak and burn for...

Ah well, that’s the common complaint of those of us who struggle in the writer’s world and are not Stephen King. The Hollywood crowd, those who write for the screen or tickle Stephen Colbert’s audience, are unhappy once again and who can blame them, Malibu is an...

Now there’s a question that will stretch the mind. Have all the books that will ever be written already been written and what we’re waiting for is someone to put the proper letters in the proper order? Twenty-six letters in the English alphabet and a hundred million...

And like other crafts, there are lots of ways to approach it. I’ll tell you mine and maybe it’ll be a help to you…and maybe not. For one thing, I treat writer’s block as if it was a myth, which I think it is. Staring at a blank page is just taking yourself too...

Take climate change for an instance. I’ve written about that a bit, but we ought to be out in the streets, raging about our comprehensive governmental unwillingness to do a damn thing, while California alternatively burns down or slides away in floods. This is not ‘a...

Once you get old enough to be a ‘gaffer,’ it’s all the rage to complain about the younger generation. My parents did it, theirs did as well and it probably goes back to the cave men. Not that I consider myself a gaffer, but I’m old enough to rate. Fact is that kids...

“I’d like to know you naked, so I could better understand you dressed / Clothes get between us, hiding what’s behind your eyes and mine,” I write, in a poem named Tulsa. These lines perfectly reflect the tone of a collection that exposes my poetic side, revealing far...

I'm told by women who have read it that Letters From Ceilia is the best book they ever read about a young woman's business life and choices. Being both a man and the author, I take that as high praise. I claim that the best thing about reading fiction is that it...

Yeah well, the news is full of robots taking over the world and will the next great novel be written by artificial intelligence. Seems to me the future is written into the name. Are we willing to settle for 'artificial' intelligence when what we actually want is the...

It’s nasty, time consuming work, with companies over-specifying what they need and applicants over-promising their skills. That sets up way too many useless interviews and a huge waste of resources while the job remains unfilled. “We’ll pay you a decent wage, along...

If a member of my sales staff has eight or ten bids for work out there, he’s in trouble with me. There’s comfort in having  lots of possibilities and comfortable sales people are not out there generating more leads—they’re comfortable. So if you manage salespeople,...

The thing about company culture is that it doesn’t make it happen by stating you have one. The culture we belong to has to do with our tribe (and I mean by that our close friends and associates), our background and history and the way we were raised. In the same way...

In business, you’re likely engaged in either a finite or infinite game. Think professional sports: The finite game is winning this Saturday’s soccer game. The infinite game is soccer itself—it will be around as a sport whether you win or lose. It’s hard to do work...

Instead of watching the videos of Tiger Woods winning a major tournament, suppose you could be Tiger, see through his eyes and feel his heartbeat as he sinks the final putt for the win. EVOKE does just that. It can seat you at a fine restaurant in Paris, put you in...

I got to thinking this morning what it means to me to be a writer and whether what it means for you is all that far different. Who are we writers? Why do we bother, when some 5,000 books a day are published and millions of blogs as well? The chances of being heard in...