My apologies to both of you who stumbled into this blog last week looking for something new, only to see the same old tired posts. Why so quiet around here lately? Could be that the weather has finally broken from the Arctic blasts that plagued the early spring in Portland. There’s waist-high grass to be mown, fences to mend, the ongoing jihad against dandelions… Read the rest of this entry »
Now and again, it’s a good thing to step away from the keyboard. Friday brought a break from the daily grind for my two favorite words: road trip. I packed up my truck and headed up I-5 into Washington. Destination? The 2008 Writers Retreat at the Dumas Bay Centre in Federal Way. Beginning Friday at noon, writers from around the area collected at the Centre for two days of talks, workshops, and panel discussions on a variety of writing-related topics. Read the rest of this entry »
My wife knocked me awake around 11:30 last night, wearing a worried frown and fleeing the room. Of all the pleasant ways to be awakened, this is pretty damned low on the list. The living room walls were pulsing with red and blue light as I stumbled into the front of the house in my bathrobe. Looking out, I counted nine police cars gathered on my street corner, including a canine unit. Read the rest of this entry »
Today is a personal first; I’m a guest blogger on one of my favorite sites, Writing Forward. In keeping with National Poetry Month, the topic for today is what fiction writers can learn from poetry. Check it out here
I broke one of my own writing rules this morning, which is never copy and paste from an older manuscript. I was trying to get at the heart of a pivotal scene in the current draft of Last Thursday, my current novel-in-progress, and some of the words I was tapping seemed mighty familiar. On rereading the first version of the scene, I found a lot about it that still felt relevant, prompting me to drop a pile of words into my latest take. Then I read the previous chapter as a segue into the new one—and remembered why I don’t do that. Read the rest of this entry »
Maybe it’s just Monday morning talking, but I feel like delving into dark territory. Did you ever daydream about where you’ll be and what you’ll do when it all falls apart? Call it what you will; global economic collapse, Armageddon, the big one, they’re all faces of the same nameless beast that lives in our belly. Coiled inside each of us lies fear that everything we know might someday simply cease to be so. It’s not as if it’s unprecedented—my grandparents lived through the depression, and their tales from those days still haunt me from my comfortable perch in the twenty-first century. At the risk of tempting fate, riffing on the consequences is fertile ground for story ideas. Read the rest of this entry »
My writing partner and I have a running joke, based on a New Yorker cartoon. It shows two doors; one marked heaven with no waiting, and one with a long line and a sign reading books on heaven. The first time you stroll down the writing aisle at a reasonably well-stocked bookstore, you might be tempted to run screaming into the food court. So many books on heaven! How do you know where to begin? I’ve read a truckload of them, and in this new segment called “five minute reviews”, I’ll try to give a little insight into which ones I found most valuable. Today’s entry is one of my all-time favorites, A Writer’s Guide to Fiction (Writer’s Compass)
I get some of my best ideas from my twice-monthly critique group meetings. Last night, I was commenting on the manuscript presented by one of our members and noted that the main character remained unnamed for the first 45 pages. The author responded, “why do you need to know that?” It’s a damn good question, and took me a moment to answer. Read the rest of this entry »
Technically, this isn’t a quirk of English, but of English speakers misunderstanding a Spanish phrase. “Let’s settle this right now, pardner, mano a mano.” You can see the tumbleweeds, hear the keening of the vultures circling overhead. An empty street, save for two gunfighters, hands poised at the ready… Read the rest of this entry »
I had in mind several writing topics on which to blog today, but I put them all aside. Tomorrow, more talk of writing. Today, it’s fitting to pause and ponder the words of an inspirational leader on the 4oth anniversary of his death. The message is just as clear and relevant now as it was then.
