the dark age
My elegant universe
Sometimes you don't plan a thing for your weekend, and the weekend just rises up to meet you, and everything is just...wonderful. My weekend was like that. No big, spectacular plans. Just a succession of small, pleasant moments. Any one of them would have been the highlight
Ideal reader
Yesterday Squish asked to read The Dark Age. She didn't mean the short story; she has read that a couple of times, including once yesterday. She knows the backstory, that I wrote the piece during a time in my life when I felt I was missing out on
A little book
In March, when I finished major work on the third draft of my in-progress novel, The Dark Age, I printed a copy, then set it aside to breathe a bit. I'd always intended this novel to be a slender little affair, and it very much isn't
For every novel, a font of its own
I've been a designer for nearly as long as I've been a writer, and there's little I love more than a great font. Which is why it can be painful to encounter manuscript submission guidelines that require something like 12pt double-spaced Courier or Times
Neither here nor there
* To my amazement, waking early, then doing a medium amount of work on Project A, then a small amount of work on Project B, seems to be working. (On weekends I do a large amount of Project A, and stick with small amounts on Project B.) * Sea of Tranquility [https:
Leaving a little want-to
I've just spent the weekend putting miles on my keyboard. My hands don't hurt, but they've gotten clumsy. More and more words came out with transposed letters. My word count plummeted. I developed a headache from all of the screen-staring. There haven't
Dear Mrs. Gruhn
Recently I received a letter in the mail from my high school creative writing teacher, Mrs. Gruhn. We've been in touch here and there the last few years, but it's been a little while since the last time. In the letter, she hoped my writing was
The books on my desk
A couple of years ago, taking a cue from Austin Kleon [http://fromyourdesks.com/2011/05/19/austin-kleon/], I squeezed a second desk into my study. In Steal Like an Artist, Kleon wrote: > I have two desks in my office—one is “analog” and one is “digital.” The analog
Quotation marks
There's something wonderful about a story that dispenses with quotation marks. As I mentioned before, I've just finished In the Quick [https://amzn.to/3sf5N7I] , by Kate Hope Day. Not a quotation mark to be found in Day's novel. Cormac McCarthy's The
Little novels
I've just finished reading In the Quick [https://amzn.to/3fYG8ez], by Kate Hope Day. It's a slim novel, with fifty-three chapters, many of them quite short. Some of my favorite novels over the last two years have been "little" books. Jenny Offill'