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Nouveau Retro: Big Daddy
Brief post today… Worked way later on writing-type stuff than I’d meant to. (So I guess that counts as an excuse, huh?) In any case, this one has decidedly nothing at all to do with writing. Sometime back in 1991-92, I got a very curious gift from my brother. It was a cassette tape (I [...]
Seeing, Not Seeing
From whiskey river (originally published [PDF] in Beloit Poetry Journal, Fall/Winter 2004/2005): It Wasn’t Death She Saw But life: skin dancing with flesh like silk curtains that swirl in the wind above her mother’s window up up now puff! and in again Or breath — is the wind breathing? She’d been playing in the grass when it [...]
Getting It Out of My System (1)
[In a post a few days ago, I started to nose around my "issues" with writing mysteries, thrillers, and the like. This is the perfect time do something I really don't like to do, much -- to lay out the story behind one of my formative experiences as a writer: the publication, in 1992, of [...]
Biweekly Algonquin
When I first moved down here in 1993 to be with the woman who would eventually become The Missus, among the things that excited me (as opposed to the things I dreaded) was her writing circle. At the time, she was enrolled in a graduate creative-writing program. She had met numerous other writers through that [...]
Writing to Deadline
I have always had a weird affinity for the cartoonist Jack Ziegler, whom I first encountered in The New Yorker. He’s not their most prolific contributor — these days, you might find his work once in every three or four issues. Time was, though, when he put in an appearance weekly. And for whatever reason, [...]
Upsetting the Apple Cart
I’m going to go out on a limb here and… …no, I’m not going to write a post about posts which begin with long-dead metaphors, posts whose authors should really know better. Though I, or somebody, probably should. What I am going to say is possibly heretical and, well, possibly something I should keep my [...]
Publisher Seeking Authors: The New Frontier
At the Dennis Cass Wants You to Be More Awesome site, in a thread about dispensing with the whole query-an-editor/agent process, member Paul Mikos pointed me to an experiment by publisher HarperCollins UK. The experiment goes by the name “authonomy” (a cute neologism I’m still trying to make up my mind about). From the authonomy [...]
Short Fiction: Modem Operandi
One thing The Missus has always said about my writing: if it amuses no one else, it amuses me. Personally, I think she exaggerates. It doesn’t all “amuse” me. [wounded sniff] But one story, well, I really enjoyed writing it. And it still makes me grin to re-read. Like many stories I wrote in the [...]
The Boy, The Boy’s Mother, The Two Trains
His time as a boy had passed many years ago. But, he suspected, he would always and forever be The Boy. His mind would ever run like two trains on two parallel tracks at once, one inside his head and the other outside, the trains always synced up, The Boy always and effortlessly stepping back [...]
