Tag: writing
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The notebook
In a perfect world, I’d have the One True iPhone app that would somehow take any of my stray ideas and easily catalog them in one place, that would let me collect all of these random thoughts and later develop them into sketches that got inserted into stories. That app would have to use something…
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Marathon
It’s been a while. I’ve been busy working on this NaNoWriMo book writing marathon. It’s day 15, and I should be at 25,000 words, and I’m just shy of 32,000 words, which is good news. The bad news is I took yesterday off, I barely picked at things today after sleeping in, and I go…
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NaNoWriMo, day one
So there’s this thing called National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. It’s a contest of sorts, where writers have one month to write a 50,000 word novel. There are no prizes or judges, and there’s no real anything except motivation to throw together a book as fast as possible. This isn’t anything new; I tried…
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A roundabout appearance in the Times
My writing pal Michael Stutz out in Ohio had a brief appearance in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago. What makes it interesting is he’s describing some of our late night phone calls back when I lived in the warzone of Astoria. Check it out: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/nyregion/14diary.html?_r=1
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Automatic writing
I haven’t been writing in a while. I still feel like my last great writing project was Rumored to Exist, which shipped in 2002. Everything since then has been a greatest hits or a remix or a collection or something that I started and then watched die on the vine. I’ve managed to get a…
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Surge, Vault
One of the 200-some odd reasons my writing throughput and/or quality has dropped considerably in recent years (and I’m talking reasons in my head, not real, quantifiable reasons) is that Coca-Cola stopped bottling Surge soda. For those of you who don’t remember or never experienced it, Surge is/was a citrus soda that originally was called…
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Zappa and experiments in form
Not much is going on here. The Zappa book I am reading is Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa by Kevin Courrier. I’m about 200 pages into it, and I like it so far. I think in some sense it fails to be critical about Zappa’s shortcomings, but it does give a different perspective…
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Biological anomaly
I want to talk more about writing, but today’s been weird. Not today, or the events of today, but some biological anomaly. Maybe I’m depressed, or maybe it’s poor diet. It’s one of those weird in-between states where I’m talking to someone about something and it reminds me of a movie, and it takes me…
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persona, content
I’ve been thinking more about content, which I babbled on about yesterday. There are a few conflicts involved in all of this, so bear with me. Yesterday, I talked about content and method versus character and setting and plot. It might be helpful if you read yesterday’s entry, but for now, I’m going to ignore…
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persona
I’m at the point in my writing cycle where I’m overanalyzing how writing works. I often need to break apart stories and books and try to find what makes them readable, desirable, and functional. Although I feel that Rumored to Exist is a good book in many places, I don’t know how it will stand…