A friend was horrified to read the first writing assignment in her just-started class. It read, “Write a story about a 20-something telling his/her parents, who are having their own marital problems, about an impending marriage to a much older … Continue reading
I’ve heard about this happening to other writers. You’re almost at the end of your masterwork when a book comes out with great fanfare and it’s the book you’re just completing. I’m within ten thousand words of finishing my android … Continue reading
I was listening to a lecture on linguistics and the subject was Proto-Indo-European, (PIE) the prehistoric ancestor of English and many other languages. Words in the PIE language are derived from comparative analysis of all known existing and historical languages in a … Continue reading
You never think it will happen, but it happened to me. I just finished a chapter for my new novel, I’m reading it over, and bink! the screen goes black. The computer is dead as a stone. I push the … Continue reading
Pathetic though it is, my favorite part of the day is to check my log of words written on my current novel. I don’t count words written on emails, book reviews, blog posts, edits, and miscellaneous sketches that I write … Continue reading
I recently reviewed on this site, Palahniuk’s Rant: An Oral History of Buster Casey, which I liked enough to consider nominating it for group study, but I hesitated because it’s so vulgar: both puerile and prurient. A long-running joke, repeated … Continue reading
I’m happy to announce that my characters are awake again and chattering like children in a playground. I knocked out a short chapter and now I sit at 41K words, just past dead center. One reason I was able to … Continue reading
I enjoyed the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference, got some good feedback on my work, met some interesting people, learned a few things about myself and the writing life. It wasn’t the best conference I’ve ever been to. There were lots of … Continue reading
I should really set a novel in Bakersfield, CA, as the reality stretches beyond my imagination. It is a strange place, largely agricultural, but also an oil town, with at least one major refinery and many, many grasshopper pumps in … Continue reading
Last day of the writers’ conference at Mendocino, CA. I was workshopped today. What thrilled me about the critique of a chapter from my detective novel is that they bought the world. Lots of comments and suggestions were made about … Continue reading