Posts tagged as:

writing

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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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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Good Reads: Week ending October 3, 2009

October 3, 2009

I’ve been meaning to post a set of articles that I’ve read and found noteworthy each week. Today seems as good a time to start as any.

When Writers Speak: “Like most writers, I seem to be smarter in print than in person. In fact, I am smarter when I’m writing.” (Arthur Krystal)

The news teaches me [...]

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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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Feel

July 23, 2009

Sometimes I forget.
When I was a kid, I used to freak out when things went wrong. Seriously freak out. Tears, uncontrolled shaking, heaving. Full-blown panic attack. My inability to draw could turn any science project into a scene from Medea.
Even now, my freak-out tendency can pop up at unexpected times. A tortellini tragedy years ago [...]

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Fail = win

July 4, 2009

Yesterday I submitted a personal essay to an online pop culture magazine.
It wasn’t great.
I worked on it for weeks, reading, researching, and writing, changing the approach, editing, and rewriting; but I just never quite hit a stride. Parts of it sound okay, but the overall flow, well, isn’t. The middle is thin. I rewrote the [...]

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Appropriation is the sincerest form of flattery

June 5, 2009

My friend foobella has decided that my article on stewartcopeland.net embodies her Police reunion tour experience so well that she no longer has to write about the experience herself. Which is enormously flattering. Cheating, but flattering.
Thank you, foobella.

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Strange things happen: I have a byline on the Official Site of Stewart Copeland

June 3, 2009

A 2999-word summary of the flag that ate my life.
Eventually the page will feature photos of the flag’s appearances around the world, but the site’s redesign is still a work in progress, so I’m waiting until it’s finished before I send the link to my three aunts as my mother would have wanted to do.
But [...]

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