You might wonder at the idea of a newspaper publisher being the hero of a regency-set novel, but once I learned of John Walter II and what he did, I knew I had to at least try to tell the story. Newspapers in the 1700s and early 1800s practiced a form of “advocacy journalism,” a [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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November is National Novel Writing Month! More at nanowrimo.org
