Mrs. Dalloway Meets Emma Bovary While The Sun Also Rises. Salter, James (1975/1995). Light Years. New York: Vintage. If you enjoy lyrical writing, fine descriptions, acutely observed personalities, this book is for you. It’s an impressionistic portrait of two main characters, … Continue reading
Zombie Professor Williams, John (1965). Stoner. New York: New York Review of Books, 278 pp. This is a well-written story of an average man who lives an average life. William Stoner, son of farmers in Missouri, goes off to college … Continue reading
Musical Revelations Winter, Robert, & Martin, Robert (Eds.) (1994). The Beethoven Quartet Companion. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 300 pp. There are few finer pleasures in life than to listen to a recording of Beethoven’s string quartets, while reading … Continue reading
I just completed the first draft of my first entirely non-genre novel. It’s 78,000 words, and there’s not a single dead body in it. That makes me nervous, even though that was my intention from the start. As I store … Continue reading
This is the latest post in my series documenting my writing process. Since returning from a writing conference in July, I have focused all my attention on rewriting a novel finished some time ago, called Being Ruby. I did this … Continue reading
Creativity and Consciousness Adams, W.A. (July, 2014). Creativity and Consciousness. RoSE – Research on Steiner Education Vol.5 No.1 2014. ISSN 1891-6511 (online at http://www.rosejourn.com/index.php/rose/article/view/187/198). In this article, I proposed that creativity is a natural phenomenon, part of the very structure … Continue reading
Too Subtle For Words Briante, Susan (2011). The Market is a Parasite that Looks Like a Nest. Chicago: Dancing Girl Press. 16pp chapbook. www.dancinggirlpress.com. Susan Briante gave a poetry reading for the U of A Poetry center (http://poetry.arizona.edu/), in the … Continue reading
It Was A Dark and Stormy Tale Vann, David (2011). Caribou Island. New York: Harper-Collins, 293 pp. This is a dark, unrelenting story set in a dark, unrelenting land. A long-married, long-bickering couple try to build a log cabin by … Continue reading
Wealthy Drunks Swan About Europe Hemingway, Ernest (1926). The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner’s Sons. This was Hemingway’s first novel, written shortly after a visit to Spain, where the novel is mostly set. It famously features vividly colorful descriptions … Continue reading
Advice for the Experienced Writer Long, Priscilla (2010). The Writer’s Portable Mentor: A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life. Seattle, WA: Wallingford Press, 349 pp. My shelves are heavy with how-to-write books, some helpful, some inspirational, most inert. … Continue reading