Posted in essay, grad skool, writing on April 30, 2008 | 2 Comments »
This is insane. I’m a week out from deadline and I haven’t got an angle. I’ve got these three books with male protagonists, each wrestling with their place in the world: Susan Beth Pfeffer’s the dead and the gone, Chris Crutcher’s Staying Fat For Sarah Byrnes, and Neal Shusterman’s Unwind. Two of them [...]
Posted in grad skool, process, reading, the man behind the curtain, writing, tagged fads, popular vs literature, writing on April 28, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Kids come into the bookstore all the time with requests, usually a specific author or the title of a series. There’s a lot of word-of-mouth with kids books that the adult book world would kill for. For some books, it’s almost as if a title cycles through a particular season. One kid in the third [...]
Posted in VC, grad skool, non-fiction, school days, the man behind the curtain, writing on April 21, 2008 | No Comments »
It sounded simple: spend a couple of weeks putting down diary entries my main character might have written that would give insights into his thinking and feelings. And since that would be a cinch, why not finally write the text of that picture book biography I kept talking about. And, hey, since that shouldn’t [...]
Posted in poetry friday, school days, tagged fill-in-the-blank, found poem, friday, high school, notes, poetry on April 10, 2008 | 3 Comments »
After posting last week’s Poetry Friday entry I was out and about when I saw a bunch of cards blowing around in the street. Some poor kid from the nearby high school lost a couple dozen of their study notes for class, notes penned in green marker, crammed into 3 by 5 card that had [...]
Posted in (not) writing, poltics, tagged bush, fear, golden gate bridge, government, homeland security, politics, protest, terrorism, war on terror on April 8, 2008 | No Comments »
So I’m looking at the footage of the protest on the Golden Gate Bridge yesterday. You know, the “Free Tibet” banners that were hung from the bridge? Nice to see a bit of the old home, remember just how politically active the Bay Area is compared to the rest of this great nation.
But… wait. Isn’t [...]
Posted in (not) writing, art, music, writing, tagged Add new tag, beatles, cobain, crossroads, dylan, elvis, hendrix, inspiration, lennon, muse, picasso, revision, warhol, writing on April 6, 2008 | 3 Comments »
Do I keep revising the pages I have so far… or do I begin from scratch (again!) hoping to pin down the elusive “voice” of the main character?
The crossroads is the place where young blues musicians would meet Old Scratch and hammer out a deal for fame and fortune, or just the ability to play [...]
Posted in poetry friday, tagged friday, poem, poetry, poetry friday, war on April 3, 2008 | No Comments »
Last summer I managed to keep up with Poetry Friday but didn’t feel I had the stamina to go year round. But it’s National Poetry Month and I don’t feel like I can ignore it so I’m sort of double-dipping and doing a PF post both here and my other blog. Both poems [...]
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