I like to listen to music when I write. I used to hate this, but now that I write first thing in the morning, it helps get me going. I like also not to have to worry about what sort of music I want to listen to. Usually when working on a short story, I … Continue reading On Finishing a Book I’ve Been Working on for Four Years, Part 3: Animal Songs
297 pages. 92,874 words. 81 footnotes. Thanks for your patience.
Taxidermist Carl Akeley is considered by most taxidermy folks to be the father of modern taxidermy. Taxidermy. Taxidermy taxidermy. Certain words when you write a whole book become very easy to type. Taxidermy. Can’t remember the last time my fingers in that pattern didn’t hit their targets: Taxidermy. Certain words’ meanings begin to fade as … Continue reading On Finishing Up a Book I’ve Been Working on for Four Years, Part 2.
(With apologies to A. Peterson’s On Editing a Novel series.) “The home stretch” is a baseball metaphor, right? Far be it from me to be familiar with baseball metaphors, but I think this is where I am. In, on, or at least facing the home stretch here. Two-to-three thousand more words and I’m finished. Carl … Continue reading On Finishing Up a Book I’ve Been Working on for Four Years: Part 1
With little fanfare other than a daily Tweet about it, the comedian Josh Fadem has been writing a short story every day for a year, and then posting it to his blog. On the whole, the stories are funny, sometimes bawdy, and sometimes sad or even heartbreaking. Often uplifting or inspiring. One of my favorite … Continue reading “I Still Have to Write a Story Today” ? An Interview with Josh Fadem
It’s been a bad-news year. It’s been a great newsyear, which usually amounts to a bad-news year. You all know why. As I’ve slacked on the output on this blog of late, I want to do a personal 2013 recap thus far. JANUARY I was in Boston for the MLA conference, interviewing for only one … Continue reading 2013
I. Spend enough time in a creative writing program and you’ll pick up the idea that Middlemarch is consistently chosen (by those who choose) as the greatest novel ever written. It’s not true. My favorite thing that Jane Smiley wrote in her 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel is that Middlemarch is merely the … Continue reading George Eliot, George Eliot – On Moral Writing
I’ve uh…I know I’ve written about this before. Consider it a kind of therapy to get myself in some sort of “Zone” wherein I can just finish the damn book I’ve been writing without any more dickering. But as you may remember, I did NaNoWriMo last November, getting 50K words written in 30 days. Turns … Continue reading Endgame
Amanda Nazario is a writer, DJ, dogwalker, and artist living in New York. She grew up there, right on the upper-west side, and as a native she’s somehow reached her thirties without ever learning to drive. With such public transportation, who would blame her? Now she’s going from never once driving a car to driving … Continue reading Third-Person Blogging – part one
Given what Ball had given The Cupboard, I’d assumed all this time this would be a language-driven book. Or if not a language-driven book, much like something written by a Lish devotee, than an image-driven one. A Ben Marcus novel, or maybe like a Djuna Barnes one. Imagine my surprise to read this morning a … Continue reading Samedi the Deafness, Jesse Ball