Wright, Stephen (994). Going Native. New York: Dell Publishing. Writing For the Sake of Writing This widely praised novel is more like a collection of very loosely connected short stories. The writing is interesting, some of the sentences hallucinatory. That’s … Continue reading
Life’s Three Great Pleasures Considered Nickles, Sara, & Shacochis, Bob (Eds.) (1994) Drinking, Smoking, & Screwing: Great Writers on Good Times. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. 200 pp. This anthology of stories, essays, and poems (many of them excerpts from larger works) recalls a time … Continue reading
I’ve written a half-dozen posts reflecting on the process of writing Chocotle, a seedling novel. Previous posts are somewhere lower in the stack. I’m writing this one sooner than I expected, because Chapter 7 slammed shut after only 10 pages. … Continue reading
This is the latest post in the series on my writing process during the long struggle to create Chocotle, which wants to be a novel. It now has 23,000 words, which is 25% to 33% of a modest novel. I like … Continue reading
I like to sample pop music in very brief doses, just to have a sense of what the young people are thinking, and because, well, the Beatles are dead, man. I catch bands appearing on late night shows like Colbert, … Continue reading
This is the fourth or fifth post about the process of writing “Chocotle,” a someday novel. I thought it would be interesting for me, and maybe also to others, to document the process of writing it, in parallel with the … Continue reading
I realize now that these writing process notes are upside down. A blog is a stack of articles – last in, first out (LIFO, we used to say in another life; as opposed to FIFO, which is a queue). So … Continue reading
Wacky People Doing Wacky Things Toole, John Kennedy (1980) A Confederacy of Dunces. New York: Grove Press. The main character, Ignatius J. Reilly, is a modern-day Don Quixote, a manic, tragi-comic, delusional soul who believes, or at least pretends, that … Continue reading
Eye of the Beholder Saramago, José (1995). Blindness. New York: Harvest. A man sits in his car at a traffic light, staring at the red, waiting for the green. The light turns green and the cars around him roar ahead. … Continue reading
My back yard is open to the desert – no fence. I like it that way. Reminds me that I live in a certain terrain. My house is not an insular platform or barricaded station, but part of an ecology. … Continue reading