I’ve been trying to do double duty on my book. As I mentioned last week, with the first edit done, I’ve been doing a second one. This involves reading my book aloud into Garage Band and listening to the playback the next day. Because the book is a planned trilogy, I’ve also begun writing the […]
Until I sat down to watch Joel and Ethan Coen’s Raising Arizona last Saturday night, I hadn’t seen the film since I was a kid. I remember it being on HBO during my youth. I’m not sure how old I was, but I remember my dad laughing at some of the jokes. Some of the […]
“Creeper” is the perfect example of a story where I pulled the trigger too early and sent it out for consideration before it was ready. I workshopped it and made cuts after workshopping. Then I submitted it a few places, and I thought it was good, but it got rejected, and the rejections came quickly. […]
The energy thing seems to be evening out during the week, but the drain is still hitting me good midday on weekends. Yesterday, I woke up cheerful. Oddly happy, though I didn’t get to bed until ten-thirty. None of the family was up yet, so I came down and did some recording on the novel. […]
So here we are. I got a good night’s sleep, and the neuroses demons disappeared. They’ll return at some point, maybe even tomorrow. I have no doubt of that. But I listened to playback on my book again and made a few edits, and I’m optimistic again. Then, too, I mentioned that I was waiting […]
It’s no secret that writers are a finicky, superstitious, irritable, irascible bunch. I try not to play up this stereotype, and I do so mainly by keeping quiet about it while it’s going on. But yesterday was a bit more intense than others, and to some extent it was typical in a fashion that even while it’s going […]
Maria is one of my oldest stories. It’s one that taught me a good lesson in submitting, mainly about submitting and revision. I wrote this story in the spring of 2009. Submissions were about to close for most magazines, and I shot it off to AGNI on a lark. I’d been reading a biography of […]
I’m winding down the first edit of my novel, and this is exciting for me. The book, which was a little north of 300 pages when I finished drafting, is now 271, which I’d expected. During my first edit, I usually cut between 10 and 15% of the content. The next step is to start over […]
Blood Simple begins with a shot of the Texas landscape and a voiceover. “Now, in Russia, they got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else. That’s the theory anyway. But what I know about is Texas, and down here you’re on your own.” Simple is right, if you’re going by plot. A married […]
All too often, sex writing is bad writing. There are, of course, various theories about why this is. On a recent New Yorker fiction podcast, Michael Cunningham mentioned that he thought it was because desires are so different. What’s sexy to me, isn’t necessarily sexy to you. To an extent, I agree. But I have […]