Sorry for the slow week of postings, but I’m up at Goddard and all of my writing time is focused solely on my creative thesis, which — holy shit! — must be complete and in my advisor’s hands by August 18th. I’m in a decent place with the novel. I’ve got about 300 pages written, [...]
Every semester, Goddard asks its students to write a self-evaluation of their performance. For some reason, I’ve never posted them to Fluid Imagination, but I can’t for the life of me think why not. I mean, I try to be pretty open with everything, so why not publish this stuff too?
So, without further adieu, here [...]
I said at the end of my last Adventures in Writing column that I wanted to write at least 15,000 words in the month of April. I also said I’d give you an update come the beginning of May.
Well, it’s May 2nd…so time for the update. Let’s go to the numbers.
First, let’s take a look [...]
Near the end of Bill McKibben’s Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America’s Most Hopeful Landscape: Vermont’s Champlain Valley and New York’s Adirondacks, the author comes across “a truly giant white pine” (119) from which hangs this hand-lettered sign:
On this site in year 1845 this pine tree, a sapling of twelve years, was transplanted by [...]
Things have been slow here in Poultney-town, but with the snow melting, the mud squishing, and the sun getting more face-time than an Asian paraplegic at a college open house, the bustling months of summer are right around the corner.
Most of my days and nights are still spent in this godforsaken home-office, and while I [...]
In his novel, Brave New World, Aldous Huxley writes, “The hands of all the four thousand electric clocks in all the Bloomsbury Centre’s four thousand rooms marked twenty-seven minutes past two” (Huxley, 146). I want to know the story of the man or woman whose job it was to synchronize those four thousand clocks. In [...]
In his novel, The Blue Flowers, Raymond Queneau develops two parallel stories. The first concerns the Duke of Auge, a member of the French aristocracy who possesses an inexplicable talent for immortality (his story begins in 1264 and ends, though not with his death, sometime in the 1960s), while the second focuses on a [...]
I haven’t given you an update on my thesis since January 11th, almost two months ago exactly. In that time, I’ve completed chapters five and six and brought my total word count to 65,907 words, which equals about 229 printed pages and 206 paperback ones (averaging 300 words per page, and leaving space for chapter [...]
[Editor's Note: In celebration of his blog's 7th birthday, Neil Gaiman convinced his publishers to put one of his books online for free. The idea, I think, is that either people will start reading the book online, and decide they like it enough to buy it; or they'll read the whole thing online, and like [...]
As I mentioned last week, I am teaching a class in short-story writing this semester entitled Once & Again: A Workshop in Creative Revision. This week’s class was relatively uneventful, from an outside perspective. If you had shown up in the middle of it, you would have seen five students (and one dashingly handsome teacher) [...]
Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Harper Perrennial Modern Classics) by Annie Dillard
Kyle has read 21 books in the last 12 months.
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