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Spinning
The earth is spinning on its axis at 1000 miles an hour while it whips around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour. And I can’t keep up. I know what you’re thinking. I don’t need to. The earth is going to do its thing regardless of my thing and thanks to the magic of physics, we don’t even have to hang on. But I’m not here just for the ride. I want to stand on the leading edge and see the sunrise before it knows its colors. I want to stick my toes out as we cross into autumn, feeling the bite of the coming cool just ahead of…
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There Will Be More…
Yeah, it’s been an unusually long wait between posts. Your expectations of brilliance must be sky-high by now. Allow me to pop that hot air balloon for you… *POP* There. Now I can safely write a middling post of questionable lasting value. Surely one of my 87 partially-completed drafts will do. Stay tuned. Or better yet, do some channel flipping. I’ll let you know when I’ve said something [potentially] meaningful here.
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Safe Distance
[Usually I write about writing. But what is writing about if not life? This post is a window into mine. Don’t look too hard for the writing wisdom here. Sometimes the story is enough.] Like so many others, we couldn’t turn away. At first we eyed it with simple curiosity, my 18-year-old son and I – the fire teasing above the horizon, peering down the foothills at the houses below. But then the wind picked up the fire dripped down the mountainside like angry red tears and the curiosity fell away, replaced by unvoiced fear. We had been watching from a ridge a half-dozen miles away – a safe distance –…
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Listen Carefully, Your Manuscript Stinks
Your manuscript doesn’t speak English. (Or American. Or Australian. Or Esperanto. Or whatever you call your native tongue.) It speaks Manuscript. This is why all the threats you sling at it in your native tongue go unheeded. (Well, that, and the fact that it doesn’t like being threatened. It can read your tone even if it doesn’t understand your words.) And while yelling at your manuscript may help release existential angst (Cue “Shout” by Tears for Fears), increased volume still doesn’t result in increased comprehension. When you’re having a novel crisis, it could be simply because your novel is truly awful. (Give it hemlock.) Or it could be that you’re…
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Publishing: 10 Years from Now
You’ve read everybody else’s predictions. You’ve heard from the experts. The insiders. The pundits. Well, goody for you. Those prognosticators may have knowledge. They may have expertise. They may even have credibility. But what they don’t have…is a really good imagination. So forget all those boring predictions and trust mine instead. They’re based on years of…okay, fine. They’re not based on anything at all. I just made ’em up this morning. In ten years… Those infinite monkeys with their ubiquitous typewriters will have successfully written Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and subsequently declared it “notably inferior to The Tempest.” Then they will throw feces at each other. 73 percent of people…
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First Impressions: Common Sense Advice for Writers
Long before Twitter made the under-140-character limit de rigueur for quotable quotes, someone said “You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression.” This is good advice. What it means in practical terms is that if I greet my new boss with “I sure hope you’re not the same as the old boss – she was a real witch, and I don’t mean witch but I’m trying to be polite by replacing the letter ‘b’ with a more acceptable letter” or “Is it okay if I drink heavily on the job? Because I can only work drunk since this place really sucks” I’ll probably miss out on that…
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Soon, But Not Yet
As most of you probably know, Real Life has been rather difficult these past few weeks. My premie granddaughter, Ayla, has been fighting for life since she was born on November 11, sixteen weeks early. I’ve been spending much of this time focusing on the needs of my young son, his equally-young girlfriend and their tiny, beautiful little girl. Sadly, it looks as though her fight is nearly over. Until things settle down here, I just can’t find a lot of emotional energy to write witty, wise things for this blog. However, this blog and its associated community of loyal subjects are important to me. I have a dozen posts…