From the category archives:

Ye Olde Writing Life

A spoonful of sarcasm helps the medicine go down

January 1, 2010

From Cracking the GRE, a test-prep manual by Doug Pierce:
You will also see a fourth, unidentified, experimental section on the GRE. This section will either be Math or Verbal and will look exactly like the real Math or Verbal section . . ., but it won’t count toward your score. ETS [the company that administers [...]

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Guessing a book by its cover: spontaneous collaboration

December 24, 2009

Inspired by his holiday #cnftweet on Twitter, @spitballarmy and I are making a list of typical (and atypical) gifts identifiable through their wrapping.
Check out the booty as it grows under the tree over at Fred’s blog. And come add your own!
Have a safe, happy, scary-clownless holiday season, everyone.

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Stewart Copeland talks writing, his memoir, and the Police: My guest post at WordWebbing

November 3, 2009

Day 3 of NahNoWriMo, and already I’m behind on my official unofficial word count—but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing.
A couple of months ago, the Friday Project offered bloggers the opportunity to pose three questions to Stewart Copeland as part of their Strange Things Happen advertising blitz. Three questions isn’t much, but I wasn’t [...]

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NahNoWriMo Day 1: 2198 down, 47,802 to go

November 1, 2009

Happy first day of NahNoWriMo, everyone.
This morning I took advantage of the extra hour on the clocks to get started on my word count early in the day, but I can see already the disadvantage that certain nonfiction writing has with this kind of writing marathon: the burden of research. Even those details of events [...]

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NahNoWriMo: Like NaNoWriMo, only Nah

October 30, 2009

In a couple of days, thousands of crackerjack crackpots will start putting fingers to keyboards to spend four weeks spewing out 50,000 spontaneous words in the global November marathon that is NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. (Yes, I’m fighting the urge to add a hyphen.)
Every artist needs an excuse/incentive to do their art thing now and then, [...]

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Too pooped out to party

October 21, 2009

I’m happy to report (as I should have done sooner) that my surgery a couple of weeks ago went well, with no surprises, dramas, or complications. Discomfort has been more of a problem than pain, but the biggest issue has been an inability to get a decent night’s sleep—which over a couple of nights wouldn’t [...]

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Diagnosis: Your writing has a tumor

October 5, 2009

A swollen, unnecessary mass of words has invaded your otherwise healthy body of text.
It’s subtle. It’s small. You might not even feel it. But it’s there, and it has to go.
“But it’s not cancerous,” you say. “It’s benign.”
Cancerous prose is so much easier, isn’t it? Easy to spot, easy to remove, no doubts or rationalizations: [...]

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10,000 words, 65 writers, 1 exquisite corpse

September 29, 2009

(What’s an exquisite corpse?)
Sixty-four raging renegades and I will be pulling together to write a story over the next few weeks to be published in No Colony and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Maybe. Who knows. The whole thing could go down in a blaze of bullets and grey smoke.
No matter: for $10 and 150 [...]

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Strange Things Happen: The Green Flag

September 29, 2009

Today is my eighth wedding anniversary. (Hi, honey.)
Today is also the official U.S. release of Stewart Copeland’s Strange Things Happen: A Life with The Police, Polo, and Pygmies. (Hi, Mr. Copeland.)
Which means that today is also the official U.S. in-print debut of the Green Flag. (Hi, Flag.)
I’ve known this day would come for months. I’ve had evidence [...]

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