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, [...]
From Caleb Crain’s How Is the Internet Changing Literary Style?: “Good evening. In my talk tonight, I would like to raise the question, How is the internet changing literary style? The question has at least two aspects. First, Which traits of style change when writing goes online? Second, What are the forces that cause these [...]
From Slate’s Has modern life killed the semicolon?: “The 1737 guide Bibliotheca Technologica recognizes ‘The comma (,) which stops the voice while you tell [count] one. The Semicolon (;) pauseth while you tell two. The Colon (:) while you tell three; and then period, or full stop (.) while you tell four.’ Lacking standards for [...]
My (hopefully) final Goddard residency begins on Friday. In anticipation of that event, I thought it might be a good time to finally write that post I’ve been meaning to write. Specifically, a short little guide to the websites I find indispensable to my creative writing process.
The main tools you already know about. I wrote [...]
Let’s just put it right out in the open. Writing-wise, May was not nearly as good a month as I hoped or needed it to be. In the last installment of Adventures with Writing, I said my goals for May were 20,000 words, 55 hours, and a 13% word increase in my individual writing sessions. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
From Neil Gaiman’s Journal’s small news things: “The Graveyard Book is so close to being finished I can taste it. All the writing’s been done and now it’s a matter of typing it and reading it and fixing it. (Interestingly, and rather to my surprise… it’s going to come in at about 67,000 words.” [I'm [...]
From the NY Times’ Celebrating the Semicolon in a Most Unlikely Location: “In terms of punctuation, semicolons signal something New Yorkers rarely do. Frank McCourt…describes the semicolon as the yellow traffic light of a ‘New York sentence.’ In response, most New Yorkers accelerate; they don’t pause to contemplate.”
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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