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Category Archives: Reading

Poets wanted

The Dana Foundation is holding a contest and wants you to be a part of it. Send original brain-related poems to poetry@dana.org by Tuesday, March 15. As with many things poetry-related, the prize is only minor glory (your work posted on Dana’s blog in April, National Poetry month) and small treasure (one of Dana’s books, [...]

Posted 13 February 2011 † nickyp § Brain science § Just fun ‡ Comments (0) °

Writing Resolutions for 2011

This year, I will: • write consistently more than 50 hours per month (12-15 hrs/wk) • spend 2 hours or more every week marketing my work • write 3 or more short stories and pitch them to publishers • research and plot out a 2-book regency-set series • finish city short stories, and see if [...]

Posted 01 January 2011 † nickyp § Thinking ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

Writing Successes 2010

This past year, I: • spent 543 hours writing (not web-surfing or sitting, but writing) • spent 108 hours doing volunteer work • saw some of my neuroscience reporting reprinted in arts and education journals • finished 1 print-worthy book (!) • built up ideas for 3 short stories and 1 novella • traveled to [...]

Posted 31 December 2010 † nickyp § Thinking § Writing ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

G. Helen, R.I.P.

My maternal grandmother died earlier this week, only days after her 103rd birthday. She was a long-distance grandma, but reliable, and she loved sending and receiving letters, which meant I practiced writing from an early age. This is my favorite childhood photo of Grandma Helen, sharing one of our favorite things to do–reading. I also [...]

Posted 20 April 2010 † nickyp § Thinking ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged:

Second draft hurtles into view

So, after a sluggish start and some mild howling about the first draft of my Manchester story, I managed to build a weekend’s-full of space to get down to reorganizing and shaping this behemoth. This is the revised sentence-for-scene outline, all 15.5 pages of it. It took me 17 hours over two days and the [...]

Posted 07 April 2010 † nickyp § Learning § Thinking § Writing ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,

How the reading is going

So, book club started the year with FIFTH BUSINESS, by Robertson Davies, this first of his Deptford trilogy. I read it in two days, enjoying the flawed narrator and the epistolary structure. This reads like a mature writer’s work, with hard-edged wisdom amid the old-fashioned storytelling. But I have never thought that traits that are [...]

Posted 06 February 2010 † nickyp § Books § Writing ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , ,

Midnight’s Children

I found Salman Rushdie’s breakout novel all it was cracked up to be, though it did take me about 50 pages to fully commit. It is dense and circular, eschews some common internal punctuation, and has a fantastic story bedded in sharp detail and joy in the wordsmithing. For a dense book, I read it [...]

Posted 21 December 2009 † nickyp § Books ‡ Comments (0) °

Writing in the present tense

So, in clearing the decks for National Novel Writing Month, I’m crash-reading NORTH AND SOUTH by Elizabeth Gaskell, and, no surprise, it’s not working. Gaskell’s writing demands a slow read, tasting all her clear phrases and cogent observations. And I know I said this earlier about MARY BARTON, but it reads so darn modern, I [...]

Posted 31 October 2009 † nickyp § Books § Writing ‡ Comments (1) °

House of the Spirits of Oscar Wao

In what is building into a series of wild word-joy novels of oppression, the bookclub I’m part of followed up THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS by Isabel Allende with THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO, by Junot Díaz. I read this book, with its geek-speak, footnotes, multiple somewhat-unreliable narrators and real-life magic in two [...]

Posted 12 October 2009 † nickyp § Books ‡ Comments (0) °

Bronte’s Shirley

I just finished Charlotte Bronte’s SHIRLEY, which makes reference to mills, their owners and workers and strikers, in 1811-1812. I started it to learn about the history and thinking of that time, to use as reference for my new story, but ended up caught up in the story and the original yet universal characters. At [...]

Posted 07 September 2009 † nickyp § Books § Learning ‡ Comments (0) °