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May 24, 2018
In Praise of … Reading Widely
I wonder if other writers feel a particular dread I sometimes get when I’m working on a new story or poem. It happens when an idea, or an approach, or a certain trope comes into my mind, one that suddenly ...
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March 17, 2014You Are God
Writing is all on the page. Take most other arts: film, music, painting, and what goes into the making of each – the processes, the materials, the effort, are not obvious, are not laid out bare. There’s ...
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May 10, 2018
In Praise of … Celebrating Success
Ours is a household that celebrates everything. Each year my wife and I mark the following occasions: the anniversary of our first date (March 19 – she gets roses, and we go back to the restaurant where ...
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March 10, 2014Travelling for Research
Travelling for writing research is an exciting way to make your work genuine and also justify a vacation, but the timing of such travel can be difficult to determine: when in the writing process should ...
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May 21, 2018
In Praise of … Performing Your Work
A passion for public speaking, for public performance, has been with me even longer than the passion for writing. I trace it back to when I won a public speaking competition as an elementary school student ...
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March 28, 2014If Not DRM, What Then? (Part II)
A few people, some of them writers, have written to me, wondering about the fuss surrounding DRM. They very much want their work protected from copying, and didn’t realize a kind of hysteria exists ...
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March 14, 2023Don't Bother Saving The Cat
When it comes to books about memoir writing, there are a select few that I would recommend an aspiring author read, including BIRD BY BIRD by Anne Lamott and THE ART OF MEMOIR by Mary Karr. But when I ...
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March 03, 2014
Standing in the Light
Well hi. This is me standing nervously in the spotlight, governing my nerves. The light is blinding, I cannot see you out there, but in this bath of white energy I see dust motes floating, falling slowly, ...
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March 14, 2014
The Reading Rulebook
I used to go to a lot of public readings of poetry and fiction. Then I had kids, and rarely went, but recently, due to changing circumstances, I've been out to a few more, and what hasn't changed are ...
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June 03, 2019I Promise You, It's Fiction.
Full disclosure, I had another post planned to kick off my Writer in Residency here on Open Book but I decided to change topics after seeing a write-up/review of my forthcoming short story collection. ...
