Google has unveiled a whole new set of tools for video chats on the Google+ social network.

As you can see by the Google+ Hangouts dashboard icons embedded above, you have new options. If you select the “Screenshare” icon, you can select any open window on your desktop to share with other people in the Google+ Hangout. If you have a Google eBook open on your desktop, everybody in the video can read the book along with you–perfect for a long-distance bedtime story or video book club.

If all the participants click the “YouTube” icon, you can share a video. The “Google Effects” icon allows you to pick funny hats, facial hair and other silly visuals. You can also share a manuscript in progress in a video chat by selecting “Google Docs.”

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Over at the fan blog dedicated to his work, director Joss Whedon wrote a letter thanking his fans for their dedication.

His powerful community of fans delivered last weekend, as Whedon’s The Avengers shattered box office records and earned $207 million during its opening week. The director’s message to his fans was an inspiring tribute to the creative life. Check it out:

When almost no one was watching, when people probably should have STOPPED watching, I’ve had three constants: my family and friends, my collaborators (often the same), and y’all. A lot of stories have come out about my “dark years”, and how I’m “unrecognized”… I love these stories, because they make me seem super-important, but I have never felt the darkness (and I’m ALL about my darkness) that they described. Because I have so much. I have people, in my life, on this site, in places I’ve yet to discover, that always made me feel the truth of success: an artist and an audience communicating. Communicating to the point of collaborating. I’ve thought, “maybe I’m over; maybe I’ve said my piece”. But never with fear. Never with rancor. Because of y’all. Because you knew me when. If you think topping a box office record compares with someone telling you your work helped them through a rough time, you’re probably new here.

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How much is an email newsletter worth? Letter.ly lets you build an email newsletter and decide if you want to charge readers for the newsletter subscription.

Currently, paid newsletter subscription prices range from 99-cents per month for “Brutal Film Reviews” by Jeremy Galen to $9.97 per month for “Fundraising Kick” by Marc A. Pitman.

Here’s more about the service: ” Payments through amazon. Publish letters as often as you want by emailing your secret email address. Subscribers can reply to your letters to privately comment back to you. If you want to give away subscriptions to friends/supporters, simply enter the email addresses that should get free copies in your dashboard. You can add your Facebook or Twitter accounts; we will publish the subject of your emails with a link to subscribe. When you want to get paid, simply click cash out. You have total control over your subscribers… So you can unsubscribe people if you want.”

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Ohio State University researchers have released a study about “experience-taking,” the psychological term for the moment when readers find themselves “feeling the emotions, thoughts, beliefs and internal responses” of a fictional character when reading.

One part of the experiment involved 82 undergraduate students who were registered to vote. They read different versions of stories about fictional voters coping with problems as they tried to vote on Election Day–some were written in first person, some in third person.

Check it out: “The results showed that participants who read a story told in first-person, about a student at their own university, had the highest level of experience-taking. And a full 65 percent of these participants reported they voted on Election Day, when they were asked later. In comparison, only 29 percent of the participants voted if they read the first-person story about a student from a different university.”

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The writing and note-taking company Evernote has acquired Penultimate, the makers of a handwriting app for the iPad–preparing for a world when more writers use tablet computers instead of paper.

To help our readers find the best stylus, AppNewser rounded up six highly recommended styluses that work on all devices with “capacitive touch screens.” These work on everything from iPhones to Android tablets to iPads. Do you have a favorite stylus?

Above, we’ve embedded an image of the Boxwave stylus, a $15 tool for your device.

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The next time you need to research a book or a new writing project, you should use the YouTube Time Machine to explore the time period in your work.

The online tool will let you find videos that range from 1860 until the present, traveling back in time with over 10,000 videos discovered through YouTube’s vast archive. You can also email the founders (hello [at] yttm [dot] tv) a video to show how you used the tool.

AppNewser has more about the app version of the online tool: “the app lets you choose a year and play videos from that time period. It is a great way to find television commercial, sports videos or music videos from your childhood.”

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Amazon Studios will now accept pitches for comedy and children’s series, hoping to add one project a month to the company’s growing slate of projects to develop for its instant video viewers.

The company will pay creators $55,000 if they distribute the series, along with “up to 5 percent of Amazon’s net receipts from toy and t-shirt licensing, and other royalties and bonuses” for the work. If any children’s writers in the audience apply, keep us posted on your progress.

Here’s how to apply: “To submit, a project must have a five-page description, along with a 22-minute pilot script for comedies, or an 11-minute pilot script for children’s shows. Within 45 days of submission, Amazon Studios will either extend an option on the project for $10,000 or invite the creator to add the project to the Amazon Studios site. If a project is not optioned, creators may remove their idea from the Amazon Studios site or leave it to get community feedback.”

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What’s your favorite creative writing handbook?

Today’s guest on the Morning Media Menu podcast was journalist and author Tom Bissell. While talking about his new book, Magic Hours, Bissell shared the creative writing book that he made all his creative writing students read–an unexpected title about the art of film editing.

Check it out: “I have a really weird one I use that I’ll pass on to the GalleyCat audience: Michael Ondaatje‘s series of  interviews with the film editor Walter Murch. The book is called The Conversations. It’s about art and mostly film editing, but the stuff that they talk about in film editing is so incredibly applicable to fiction writing that I make all of my students read that book. It is a hugely helpful primer on what thinking like an artist means and what thinking like a creative person means and ways to avoid hackneyed thinking as a creator.”

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Journalist and screenwriter David Simon has published his first blog dispatch. His new site is called “The Audacity of Despair.”

After holding on to his website for many years, the creator of The Wire opened his site to share his online thoughts. In his introduction, Simon included a stern warning for all creators who write for free on the Internet. Check it out:

Anything that says content should be free makes it hard for all writers, everywhere.   If at any point in the future, this site offers more than a compendium of old prose work and the odd comment or two on recent events — if it grows in purpose or improves in execution — I might try to toss up a small monthly charge in support of one of the 501c3 charities that I soon hope to list in the How To Help section.  And yes, I know that doing so will lose a good many readers; but to me, anyway, the principle matters.  A free internet is wonderful for democratized, unresearched commentary, and it works well as a library of sorts for content that no longer needs a defense of its copyright.  But journalism, literature, film, music —  these endeavors need people operating at the highest professional level and they need to make a living doing what they do.  Copyright matters.  Content costs.

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How many hours did you spend writing last week? Multiply that times 52 and you will have a rough idea of your annual dedication to the craft of writing.

In the rambling and inspiring video embedded above (contains a bit of swearing), novelist Yuvi Zalkow speculates that it will take aspiring authors 10,000 hours of writing to master the craft. What do you think?

I also see how we writers are so compelled to obsess over the accolades we think we deserve before fully maturing our writing chops. And so this video turned into a talk about the need to write. To write a lot. Without doing a lick of research (or even bothering to read his book), I swiped Malcolm Gladwell’s notion that it takes 10,000 hours to master a particular craft. (Don’t quote me on this!) I just love the idea of that number because it is a damn big number. And I think it is roughly true. It takes a long time for most of us mortals to get good at writing. (Via Reddit Lit Videos)

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