Today I’m in the spotlight at The Poetics Project, thanks to Amanda Riggle who did the interview and posted it. She asked some really good questions about the writing process and some of the decisions that went into The Girl at the End of the World. Head over to The Poetics Project and have a…
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I’ve been blogging here for six months now. I enjoy it–find it fun and challenging to think of topics, and it’s nice to run up against an idea and be able to put together a little informal essay on the topic and send it out for the world to see. But at the same time…
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When Jon Stewart interviewed Christopher Walken on The Daily Show recently, he asked Walken if he’d ever had to give one of those fake 555 phone numbers while acting in a film. Stewart’s point was that every time a character uses one of those numbers, it pulls viewers out of the movie. These aren’t real…
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As another round of student papers (the final set for this year) gets ready to come at me, I’m gearing up for looking at more careless mistakes: seemingly random uses of their, there, and they’re; sloppy pronoun references; uses of “now and days” or “now in days” instead of nowadays. Then there are the students…
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Anyone who’s given writing a shot knows it isn’t easy. The key to doing it, though, is just to do it. You have to have to write. You have a story that has to come out–a compulsion, an obsession. It’s in your blood, or it’s bleeding out of you as the old line about sitting…
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