Category: Writing
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Waiting for the muses
I think it be fair to say that the computer programming has become an obsession, and it’s definitely crowded out most of my reading. But I continue work on the writing. I’m feeling a little unmotivated. Late-stage revision can be hard for me. You can’t change too much, so the process of revising often feels…
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Using Typora to write a book
Hello friendly people! I’m busily at work on my Princeton press book (working title: What’s So Great About The Great Books?) It’s going gangbusters. Love the book, having so much fun. Writing this book is so pleasurable it almost feels wrong. I do run into missteps occasionally, but I’m chipping away at it each day.…
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Last year I committed myself to doing whatever writing I could publish without having an agent
Hello everyone. I got my COVID booster a few days ago, and today I got dizzy and fell down several times. Not a pleasant experience. But I assume COVID is an even-less-pleasant experience. I am also going through edits on another piece that is going to appear in the Chronicle of Higher Education sometime next…
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Giving up on Envy, but not on judgement
A friend of mine made his first professional short story sale yesterday. It’s been an immensely long time coming. (( In the science fiction world, one marker of whether you’ve ‘made’ it is whether you’ve sold a story to a journal that pays ‘professional’ rates, which is the rate set by the Science Fiction and…
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Being a writer is great, if you can afford it
It’s a truism that all the fun and meaningful careers tend to be competitive and poorly compensated. I’ve been seeing a therapist lately, and when my insurance sends me the amounts they pay him, I’m consistently shocked: it’s less than I bill as a freelance writer. But writing corporate blog posts is not at all…
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Got my 1600th short story rejection
The other day I got my 1600th short story rejection. It’s taken me a very long time! I used to rack up a hundred rejections in nine months or so. But I see that I logged my 1500th more than two years ago! I know, I’m such a slacker. It wouldn’t have happened at all…
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When should I revise something?
I recently read a critically acclaimed (and quite good) novel that was horribly overwritten. I could’ve gone through with a red pen and cut twenty thousand words of internal rumination without seriously harming the plot or character development of the book. To be honest I felt a little sorry for the author. Because the book…
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If you’re bored by it, don’t write it
I was going to write today’s blog post about how to organize your reading life. I had some trenchant observations to offer, apropos of my reading a few books of literary criticism. But instead of writing that post, I sat here staring at the blank screen for fifteen minutes. Lately I’ve learned to listen to…
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Feel free to just summarize the parts that bore you
You know what’s awesome about novels? You can just write, “They had sex, and it was awesome” Or “then they fought with swords, and the bad guy died.” Or “Three weeks later, he’d climbed down from the mountain.” In fact, you can even skip MUCH longer or more uncertain processes. You can write, “He was…
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Until the voice is solid, the plot doesn’t matter
Still doing my thing where I work on a number of projects simultaneously (it’s possible I’ll one day refer to this as my ‘really stupid way of working’ period). Anyway on one of the projects I was spinning my wheels, trying to figure out the main character’s backstory, but ultimately I realized that the problem…