Aspiring authors love to spend large amounts of time and money seeking advice on "getting published" or "breaking into print". It's funny and tragic that they so seldom ask for advice on how to improve their writing, which is why publishing houses relegate the slush pile to unpaid interns, if they deal with it at all. Two weblogs recently came to my attention. The first, Fiction Bitch, is, on

Flannery O'Connor once said "Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher." Having survived a university fiction writing program myself, I'm ambivalent about what such programs can do for aspiring writers. In a sense, the program was