December 2009
10 posts
I wanted to run up to the woman reading Ethan Frome on the train and tell her, “Please, please don’t let this ruin your faith in literature. Ignore the praise on the back cover. I’ve never actually met someone who liked this. You don’t have to pretend.”
November 2009
13 posts
Blue Moons
The in-and-out strikes again. While the good feedback just keeps on coming, it’s hard to smile and yelp “Yes!” when I’ve just realized there are two glaring logical impossibilities on which my plot and ending hinge. You know, not the, “Oh, drop a detail in here” sort of logical impossibilities, but the fully metastasized “This involves godlike levels of...
Well, hello, sixty-thousand word milestone.
Crossing Guards
“But that’s fiction for you: it taunts you with the spectre of what you cannot do yourself.” - Zadie Smith on “novel nausea”
I’m fairly certain that I’ve crossed a bridge into a new place. This blog, while not only acting as real-time therapy, has been where I chronicle the incredible journey I’m on with this book. While there are occasional...
Wall Street Journal interview with Cormac McCarthy:
How does the notion of aging and death affect the work you do? Has it become more urgent?
CM: Your future gets shorter and you recognize that. In recent years, I have had no desire to do anything but work and be with [son] John. I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go...
…not that I - or anyone - needed Manhattan-bound service at 8:10am on a Thursday morning or anything. Thanks, F train.
Tuesdays and the Jackal
Criticism is a really odd thing. It’s not odd in the sense that it’s unexpected, but what’s odd about it is what it can do to you, especially when you realize that it’s the first time you’ve really ever experienced it.
Writing is always something that’s clicked for me. This is no surprise - I’m a writer. Two and two generally tends to make four, or at...
“If I was 27 and trying to publish my first novel today, I might be tempted to shoot myself.” -John Irving
I have never before experienced fear of confronting my own work. It is horrifying.
Soiled Truths on Suburban Stoops
Is there such a thing as reaching down too deep for the sake of a character? Remembering things from your own life that scared you so intensely, shook you so vividly that you reach a point at which you’ve hurt yourself so much just by recalling them that they’re too viscerally painful to rehash? Do you just have to tell yourself it’s a risk, that it’s therapy,...
A Rose by Any Other
The only way surefire way to stop yourself from going (too) crazy about one piece of work? Make sure other projects exist to remind you that you’re “a writer,” not “the person who wrote X.” As I’ve written before, I’ve never been much of a short story person - more someone who writes in really vivid, disconnected vignettes and never quite makes a...
Christian and Paige and Holly and Kieran: I really really love you, but you guys are driving me a little nuts right now.
(No one mentioned the part where editing a novel turns you into the crazy writer who talks to her characters like they are real. We’ll chalk this up to part of my intellectual charm. Ahem.)
Ten Thousand En Queue
For a portion of the world, today kicks off National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo, by its remarkably un-succinct nickname). I suppose for people who feel like they have a novel in them and need to pull it out, it’s a nice (albeit grueling) kick in the pants, and I hope it turns out some awesome first drafts from some of its participants.
While I do have a second novel in me (only a...