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Showing posts from August, 2010

I Should Be Born

Like I've said before, I really love the confluence of music and words. There's a song I recently discovered by a band called Jets Overhead that's just plain addictive, and I want to share the earworm joy. First, let me set the scene that I've been seeing in my head. In a sprawling abandoned factory complex, a group of people have gathered in the one building with electricity. It's dusk. An orange glow lines the skyline to the west, over a broad brown river. The factory site goes right up to the water, where a concrete dock juts out into the slow current. Behind the occupied building, a single mercury vapor floodlight casts a cold light into the deepening darkness. A person leaves the building, looking for two others who hide in the darkness. I Should Be Born by Jets Overhead The last verse especially reminds me of Leah and what she faces in that scene, which is the climax of the story. If you struggle in logic and feeling Generational gaps are revealing D

A Redefinition

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I started this blog with the idea that I'd post pieces of writing that weren't good enough to leave in a finished, publishable work—the proverbial darlings that writers kill. It seemed like a good idea at the time. It doesn't anymore. For one thing, I'm not sure I want y'all reading bad writing when I know its bad and have already surpassed and/or replaced it with something better. Kind of makes me look worse than I actually am. It's embarrassing. For another thing, I'd rather just write about what's on my mind. That's what I've actually been doing lately. I want to write about cool things that I discover while researching and thinking about my current and future projects. For example, I've been reading about witchcraft trials in the early 1300s and the great famine of 1315-16, and I'm wondering about how certain nobility who died in that year actually perished. I've been looking into epi-genetics, parasites, gene modification

Throwing It All Away

I have a 98,000 word novel that took me a year to write: three months for the first draft plus nine months of revision. It's all about to become one of those proverbial darlings that I must kill. Only a handful of people have read it, and no one else ever will. Say your goodbyes! I'm holding the delete key to its head right now! Here it goes—BANG! It's dead! All that work, early mornings, late nights, hours pondering and agonizing and wracking my brains while staring at a blank screen—gone in the blink of an eye. Alas, poor book. I knew it well, Horatio. *sob* Whoa, I'll stop there. Honestly, I'm just trying to make myself feel sorry for myself. Starting an entire book over from the beginning seems like it ought to be a difficult thing to do. It should feel arduous, sacrificial or something besides exciting. But I'm just excited. I've got a book that still has a lot of things wrong with it, and I'm realizing new things all the time. This a chance

Radio Lab says I'm a genius.

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So it must be true. If you want to hear it for yourself, listen to this . You may be a genius, too. If you don't have the time or inclination to listen to the show, or you've just listened to it and missed the part where they said, "This conclusively proves that Ben is a genius," I'll explain myself. It's an interview with Malcolm Gladwell . His theory about genius is that it isn't so much a result of innate ability as a love of what one is doing. Let's pause and let that sink in. The more I've thought about that over the past week, the more I've come to believe that he's right. He cites a couple of examples for his theory, but most of my thinking about this has been more personal. I can relate to what he says about love. I love writing. I looove writing. When I'm not writing, I'm usually thinking about it. When I have setbacks, like my critique group says I've gotten something completely wrong in one chapter and I realize