Hey friends - I've been away for awhile, mostly blogging at the Brevity lit mag site, and writing a couple of books.

- If you're still in the Despair stage post-election, you might like this blog post in particular: Chop Wood, Carry Water.
Inspired by kathrynrose and about how to move on in our creative work in the face of the unthinkable ( Read more... )

This morning in Kuwait, the party at the next table left a wreckage of half-eaten waffles mired in strawberries and whipped cream. I looked over and longed to take just one bite.

Slightly embarrassing…but more ‘silly.’ And I didn’t.

When Chita Rivera walked into the afterparty of the song and dance show celebrating her career, I had the ( Read more... )

That Writer. Every writing group or class has one. The person who talks too much. Who comes in stoned, or just high on life. Who interrupts the teacher we’ve all paid big bucks/gone through a tedious application process to hear. Who comments as if they themselves are the teacher. Who says things like “Well, you know what Flannery O’Connor said” as ( Read more... )

I always watch for the tortoise. The back wall of the writing studio is mostly a floor-to-ceiling window about eight feet wide, one vast sheet of glass holding the Florida scrubland outside. There’s a white dirt road behind a strip of live oaks and sumac and Spanish moss, and once, in the middle of an afternoon workshop, I saw a tortoise stumping ( Read more... )

TPA-JFK-CDG-DXB“We ask all passengers to please remain seated and keep your seatbelts fastened. Crew remain seated ( Read more... )

FEEDBACK FEEDBACK FEEDBACK SOMEBODY TURN OFF THE MIKE ( Read more... )

So a lot of us around the LJ write short, personal pieces. Sometimes diaries, sometimes literary.

When you're feeling literary, here's a fascinating short article about how using the "I" perspective, even in a journalistic piece, can give greater meaning and perspective to the work.

In AWP 2014: Truth and First Person Journalism, Samantha Claire ( Read more... )

This is Part Three of a new series on the technical elements of writing.
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In the Eight Point Structure, the character starts in Stasis (“this is how things are”), and the plot goes into motion with a Trigger. Just like pulling the trigger on a gun, something big and dramatic happens. It may not be a large physical action, ( Read more... )

This is Part Two of a new series on the technical elements of writing ( Part One is here). I’ll note that this information is expanding itself as I write, so in the interests of readable posts ( useful! personal! brief!), I won’t always get to everything I said I’d get to in the very next post. Today we’ll get to one of the two plot structures I ( Read more... )

This is Part One of a new series of posts on the technical elements of writing.
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I’ve mentioned to a couple of my writing friends lately that I’ve used a spreadsheet to map out the plot of the book I’m working on.

Most of them respond with, “Hmmmmm…” which I think means, Way to be ( Read more... )