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 of the
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 hers. "When
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 that. I don't think
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 New Roman. Don't get me wrong,
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 been many happy writing stretches in the last
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 going well, and that
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 desk
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 Road [https://amzn.to/3soIN6b], Kent Haruf's Plainsong
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's The Dept. of Speculation [https://amzn.to/