Monday Musing: A Quote
Last night, I found myself reading an old interview with John Irving (The World According to Garp, In One Person, and one of my all-time favorite books, A Prayer for Owen Meany), and he had this to say: “Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep searching for casualties. The […]
Monday Musing: It’s Good? Really?
Sorry I’m late. I do like to try to be consistent, but I overslept this morning and it was a crazy day where we all of us had to be out of the house early so something had to give and it was the blog. If you missed my 6:30 or so appearance, my apologies; […]
Beards
Hey, did you see this story make the rounds recently? It seems that, due to a phenomenon known as negative frequency-dependent selection, the more common beards are, the less desirable they become. In a sea of clean-shaven men, the one guy with the beard is likely to get the positive attention, and when all the […]
King’s Rules
I’m going to be honest here: I’m getting close to full of reading ‘writing rules’ on blogs, forums, articles and such. It’s not that I feel like I’m so superior, so skilled, so AWESOME that I don’t need the advice; it’s just that I think I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve found what works […]
Some Numbers for Friday
This post was inspired by a recent thread on Absolute Write. It’s already sunk to page 2 or 3 of the forum threads, so I won’t link it here. Let’s throw out a few numbers, just for fun: 41 239 5.8335 307 8.7728 367 13.11 This ‘table’ shows the chapter count, total manuscript pages, and […]
Monday Musing: Fresh Eyes
While every writer has their own particular process they follow, one finds almost universal* agreement on one thing: It’s good to put your manuscript aside after finishing that first draft, let it stew for a bit, and come back to it 6 or 8 weeks or so later and read it again with ‘fresh eyes.’ […]
On Rushing
Back in the long ago, shortly after I started this blog, I made a vow: I wouldn’t be that guy. You know the type—the one that, after he gets the agent, is constantly playing The Agent card. Kind of like this: I haven’t had an agent very long, and I’ve done fairly well, so far, […]
Echoes
While writing this weekend I listened to One From the Vault, a commercial release of a Grateful Dead concert from August, 1975. The show was notable in part because it was one of only two times the band played Bob Weir’s short instrumental, Sage & Spirit: Sage and Spirit by Grateful Dead on Grooveshark Sage […]
Upset in the Potterverse
What was the biggest story of the weekend? Was it the decision by the grandmasters in Punxsutawney, PA, that Phil would see his shadow? Nah. Six more weeks of winter was an easy call this year. Maybe it was the laugher of a Super Bowl? Uh, no. How about the revelation from J.K. Rowling about […]