A stocking-stuffer collection of holiday-themed columns by the well-known and well-loved Salon.com advice columnist, Cary... More > Tennis, such as "Please Mom, not another dress shirt" and "I'll be alone for Christmas—merrily!" < Less

Salon.com advice columnist Cary Tennis runs writing workshops in San Francisco. Sometimes brilliant ideas seem to leap from... More > one mind to the next, and everyone is writing about the same thing. One day no one could write about anything but their hair, and this book was born.

The "Energy in the Room" series was inspired by the madcap editorial meetings of Salon.com's dot-com-boom days, when founder David Talbot would stuff all the staffers into a room and ask what everyone was thinking. "If we were thinking about something, the reasoning went, then others were thinking about it as well," Tennis writes in the introduction to this book. "We ran on instinct. We went on the energy. It was fun and it was successful."

Voilà! The Energy in the Room! The Internet has changed, but if you put writers together in a room, crazy things will always happen. That's the Energy in the Room! < Less

Salon.com advice columnist Cary Tennis runs writing workshops in San Francisco. One afternoon, he distributed a number of... More > sentence fragments, or prompts, suggestive of the nodal points of a fictional person’s life. Each person in the room wrote from these prompts.
The result was strangely story-like, yet surreal.

So the group decided to make a book of it, to test the limits of what is deliberate fiction and what is accident, or synchronicity, and to demonstrate how the mind makes narrative of the barest outlines of form. < Less

Salon.com advice columnist Cary Tennis runs writing workshops in San Francisco. One afternoon, he distributed a number of... More > sentence fragments, or prompts, suggestive of the nodal points of a fictional person’s life. Each person in the room wrote from these prompts.
The result was strangely story-like, yet surreal.

So the group decided to make a book of it, to test the limits of what is deliberate fiction and what is accident, or synchronicity, and to demonstrate how the mind makes narrative of the barest outlines of form. < Less

Salon.com advice columnist Cary Tennis runs writing workshops in San Francisco. Sometimes brilliant ideas seem to leap from... More > one mind to the next, and everyone is writing about the same thing. One day no one could write about anything but their hair, and this book was born.

The "Energy in the Room" series was inspired by the madcap editorial meetings of Salon.com's dot-com-boom days, when founder David Talbot would stuff all the staffers into a room and ask what everyone was thinking. "If we were thinking about something, the reasoning went, then others were thinking about it as well," Tennis writes in the introduction to this book. "We ran on instinct. We went on the energy. It was fun and it was successful."

Voilà! The Energy in the Room! The Internet has changed, but if you put writers together in a room, crazy things will always happen. That's the Energy in the Room! < Less

A stocking-stuffer collection of holiday-themed columns by the well-known and well-loved Salon.com advice columnist, Cary... More > Tennis, such as "Please Mom, not another dress shirt" and "I'll be alone for Christmas—merrily!" < Less