Writing
My decade in love, friendship, and publishing
If you dislike my novel, you're really not alone!
Six played-out teen contemporary tropes (most of which I've used!)
If your revised manuscript still has the same events in the same order, then what's the point?
The most difficult part of writing is finding the heart of longing
Some advice from aspiring writers on finding the heart of longing
If you're bored by it, don't write it
Advice for genre-influenced writers who are applying to MFA programs (part one,two, three, and four)
How my MFA program ushered me into class consciousness
Writing a novel in eight days (parts one, two,three, four, five, six)
I guess it’s not really surprising that young adult fiction might have an ageism problem
Every writer needs a friend who's more successful and who's willing to validate their own bitterness
Oftentimes a work in progress will contain an empty space you need to fill
How to move away from writing boring work
The Bad-Lyrical style is a fungus that lies mouldering at the back of literature's refrigerator
The third novel (parts one, two, three, andfour)
Seventeen hundred short story rejections (1600, 1500, 1400, 1300, 1200, 1100, 1000, 900, 800, 700, 600, 500, 400 and 300)
Today I wrote my one millionth word of crap
Status anxiety
The statistics of inspiration
What do you do when the writing isn't easy?
I've just freed myself from the tyranny of duotrope
On becoming a worse writer
Where I get my stories from
Why I am going to stop giving out writing advice (2012)
Why I am loathe to give writing advice (2011)
Revising the novel
The worst-case scenario for my writing career
Reading
There should be a National Coming-Out Day for people whose favorite novel is _Atlas Shrugged_
My decade in love, friendship, and publishing
I don't think reading books is likely to make a person smarter, happier, or more economically productive
Five classics that ought to capture you from page one
Let's Talk About Love: A Journey To The End Of Taste, by Carl Wilson
The Feminine Mystique(part one and part two)
The Pursuit of Love, by Nancy Mitford
Getting tired of all the oppression-based critique of narrative art
Nothing in my life has been more rewarding than reading books from the canon
Writing Fiction, by Edith Wharton
The Whisperers, by Orlando Figes
The Second Shift, by Arlene Russell Hochschild
The Warden, by Anthony Trollope
Story of the Stone, by Cao Xueqin
In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust
I am an Elizabeth Gaskell super-fan
The Palliser Novels by Anthony Trollope
World of Yesterday, by Stefan Zweig
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William Shirer
Working, by Studs Terkel
Genji is a rapist
Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mother is a literary masterpiece
Euripides is the bomb
Rahul reads Shakespeare
The Hunt For Red October might be the most uncool book in the English language
Why Video Games Matter
The main thing I've learned from Banned Books Week is that book banning is a pretty minor problem
I Write About "My Stephen King Problem"
The Collected Poems of Phillip Larkin
I know I love novels, but I'm not sure why
What does it mean to be against the canon?
Confessions of a Pick-up Artist Chaser
The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene
Does anyone actually enjoy cliffhangers? (A Dance With Dragons)
Authors who I've read in depth
The first and last novels that made me cry
Stranieri, by Tristan Gans
Chicklit novels
Life is too short to waste time on boring books
Against Interpretation, by Susan Sontag
God's Harvard, by Hannah Rosin
The Pillow Book, by Sei Shonagon
If you die and leave me with your brilliant unfinished manuscripts, I will burn them
Comedic novels
Adrian Tomine's Optic Nerve comics
Fun Home, by Allison Bechdel
The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
The joy of short novels
Crime novels with interesting structures
Woman as financial vampire
Old School, by Tobias Wolff
And The Band Played On, by Randy Shilts
The Sportswriter, by Richard Ford
Some pretty awesome plotless novels
The poverty and evanescence of literary acclaim in SF
Why I am deeply suspicious of Malcolm Gladwell
The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
The first science fiction novel
Do you folks enjoy reading poetry?
Anatomy of a literary pageturner
Bleak House, by Charles Dickens
A Journal of the Plague Year, by Daniel Defoe
Vanity Fair, by William Makeapeace Thackeray
“If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy.”
Wired Magazine
Farthing, by Jo Walton
Red Plenty, by Francis Spufford
Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys
Burmese Days, by George Orwell
Horatio Hornblower, by C.S. Forester
Rahul's Question: Where are all the bad books?
Making Friends
How to make friends even when you're not attractive, charming, interesting, or charismatic
I'm not an expert in making friends; I'm an expert in fighting loneliness
The first step to gaining friends is to stop hanging out with people you don't actually like
Don't listen to all the terrible clickbait friend-making advice out there
Making friends isn't an easy or mechanical process
The easiest, and often best, way to make friends is to befriend an "includer"
Other
Why I think critics overpraise ambitious, but mediocre, films
Notes from the first week of an MFA program
On being back in DC
I don't believe in moderation
The Beardmancipation Proclamation
The second season of the Game of Thrones
The Game of Thrones television show is superior to the books.
Thoughts engendered by my return to computer gaming after an absence of two and a half years
We should all stop being so self-deprecating
The Television / Refrigerator Axiom