Recent Posts
Asphalt Jungle Gym
Once there was a see-saw. Three see-saws, actually, that strode across a bar wearing peeling red paint that exposed dull gray metal. Beneath each see-saw seat were indentations in asphalt where many a child was dropped, his seat slamming to the ground and more often than not sending a shock wave through the unfortunate child’s ...
Electricity Within the Woods
The reason I haven’t written a memoir is because my life hasn’t been that exciting. I’ve never ridden a train in Budapest. Never climbed Mount St. Helens while it spouted ash and lava. Never been drunk and stoned while facing life and death in a gutter in a city whose name I couldn’t pronounce. The ...
The Importance of Character
One of the oddest stories I’d ever had to critique was about the unexpected death of an elderly woman. The characters walked around the corpse as if it was simply a tacky looking table- something to talk about in passing, but nothing so important that it need distract from their very important problems. The writing ...
Preventing the Revision Blahs
One of the questions raised in the creative writing class I teach is: how do you prevent becoming sick of your story as you revise/edit/improve it? Excellent question. As someone on my third rewrite of the same novel…a novel I’ve spent over 300 hours on editing alone…the only answer I have is you’d better really ...
