I don’t know if anyone reading this remembers Al Capp’s old strip, about a hillbilly family in the backwoods wilderness of Dogpatch, but I do, and I’ve been reading reprints on comics.com for a couple of years now.
The reprints have been from the fifties, then last week they switched back to the start of the strip. While Capp’s writing style is still recognizable, the differences are startling.
The later strips are cartoonish in style; the earlier work is much more realistic. And the characters and situations are a lot less outrageous—the opening plot (Li’l Abner goes to stay with a wealthy relative in the big city) so far resembles a lot of City Slicker Meets Country Bumpkin stories I know of.
Nothing significant, but it’s interesting to see how the strip changed (and improved—Capp was a lot funnier as he went more over the top).

A review of Elmore Leonard’s “10 Rules of Writing” says the following: “Good writing is not about the writer (and the way he sounds or the size of her vocabulary), but about the story. The writer must remain invisible.” I’m not sure if the “invisible” part is a quote from Leonard or a statement by the review, but either way, bunk.

This is a viewpoint I run into a lot in how-to-write articles and books: (which I still read, though less than I used to): To be good, writing must be simple and plain, devoid of any words or phrasing that make the reader conscious that a writer is involved. Just pure story, straight into the brain.

I don’t consider this to be a rule of good writing, it’s simply a stylistic choice. Even before I started writing (which makes me much more aware of other writers’ technique), I liked writers who could play with words: Raymond Chandler’s elegant yet hardboiled prose; Lord Dunsany’s poetic short stories (”The Gibbelins eat, as is well known, nothing less good than man.”); P.G. Wodehouse’s goofy, giddy fiction; or H.P. Lovecraft’s horror fiction, wildly overwritten by normal standards, but HPL made work.

I’m not that sort of stylist myself, but I enjoy many such writers who are. So to Mr. Leonard or the reviewer, I’d say, keep your hands off those who like to play with words.

My short story “Others Must Fail” is now available for free download from the online magazine Semaphore.

http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/ has an excellent breakdown of why they’re striking (the newest post just now, scroll down if it’s not).

While I’ll miss my shows if the strike runs long, my sympathy is, unsurprisingly, with the writers. Kfmonkey (screenwriter John Rogers) makes a good case that fairness is on their side too.