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“What’s that, you say? Please send you my six volumes of unpublished gothic poetry? I’d be delighted!” To the unpublished writer — and maybe there’s another level here we’ll call underpublished — life on the other side of the divide can seem like a place of rarefied air. This can lead to some erroneous assumptions about [...] They found a dead man in the New Mexico wilderness the other day, lying peacefully beside a cool stream. He went out for a run and never came back. It probably wasn’t news where you live, but where I live in Colorado, it was top-headline material in the Sunday paper. It should’ve been an April Fool’s [...] “No, my lord! If we don’t let him go now, how will the enemy know when, where, and how to attack us?” Even though life doesn’t always seem to proceed with anything resembling logic, fiction generally has to. If it doesn’t, the wires start to show, and it becomes obvious that you’re just making it [...] This is for the ones who despair. This is for the ones gripped by the feeling that it will never get better. That they will never get better. I promise you this much: It can. And you might. That’s the best guarantee you’re going to get. Can and might. There’s only one certain guarantee, and that’s [...] [What do you get when you cross a Storytellers Unplugged deadline with an exhausted writer who’s just finished a near-30,000-word novella that ran several thousand words more than expected? Today we get a redux: the very first column I did here, in June 2006, and which I recently tapped as supplemental material for a multipart [...] We all have certain foibles whose antidotes we can’t be reminded of too often. One of mine is perfectionism. I can’t really say when it started, but for years I’ve wrestled with periods of self-imposed expectations so acute that they verge on paralyzing. Putting something down becomes excruciatingly difficult, because, well, what if it doesn’t measure [...] “Begin with the end in mind…” Sound advice, that. Sound strategy. The rationale being that if you don’t know where you’re going, how in the name of Zeus can you be sure you’ll actually get there? Where, exactly? The end of an as-yet-unfinished novel comes to mind, for starters, but that’s just one entry on a [...] "I meant to do that." There are a lot of places where I and everything else in sight don’t make for a comfortable fit. Where the drummer has one rhythm going and my feet twitch to some other cadence entirely. Most people will eventually cop to the same. Once we drop our pretenses, we’re all [...] Gomez has a simple job in life, but he gives it his all. What do you get when you mix our hottest August on record, a proclivity toward summer lethargy (for which, come to find out, the Japanese have a name: natsubate), and weed allergy season? For starters, me behind on just about everything. Hence [...] Kevin Bacon playing "6 Degrees Of Moral Repugnance" It happens to all of us: A work is rejected or critically thrashed on the grounds that the main character isn’t sympathetic enough. Maybe the entire disagreeable herd of them aren’t sympathetic enough. Of course it’s a highly subjective complaint, and maybe even misses the mark for what [...] |
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