December’s mania is the Season of Giving. Thank you to Susan Johnston of The Urban Muse for promoting the Writers’ Emergency Assistance Fund. This fund is a 501(c)(3) charitable trust made up of donations from writers like you to help freelance nonfiction writers in times of acute financial distress. As… Read more“Linking to the Writers’ Emergency Assistance Fund”
Tag: editor
Linking to Moby Dick
I’ve mentioned before my addiction to the Hugh Laurie characterization of P.G. Wodehouse‘s quintessential dingaling, Bertie Wooster. Bertie is everything hopelessly one-sided about the British upper classes: white, male, rich, privileged, and a complete brainless gorm. He’s melodramatic, narcissistic, and self-glamorizing to the point of insanity. He’s also, fortunately, good-hearted,… Read more“Linking to <em>Moby Dick</em>”
Pulp Rag: Getting the ghost tiger by the tail
A friend and I decided this morning that I should write a ghost story for the holiday season, a sort of Christmas Carol where Scrooge turns out to be right. Let’s talk today about premise. We were going on and on about how much we just love converting our living… Read more“<em>Pulp Rag:</em> Getting the ghost tiger by the tail”
Pulp Rag: Explicating the gnat
Let’s explicate that piece of Carson McCullers dialog. There’s tons to learn from it, but today we’ll just focus on conflicting agendas and how she rings such a realistic, poignant note by keeping her characters firmly and clearly grounded in their separate agendas. Doctor Copeland: “I will not be hurried…. Read more“<em>Pulp Rag:</em> Explicating the gnat”
Pulp Rag: Weighing point-of-view techniques
So let’s talk some more about Point-Of-View. Because this is quite a sticky widget. The simplest, commonest, most straight-forward POV is third-person limited. And there’s a really good reason for this. Because it WORKS. Once upon a time it was first-person limited. However, first-person got kind of beat to death… Read more“<em>Pulp Rag:</em> Weighing point-of-view techniques”
Being in the right place at the right time
NaNoWriMo has come and gone, and there are now millions more written words in the world than there were a month ago. Aspiring writers all over America—all over the planet—are sitting in front of their masterpieces wondering what they have to to do to them before they can start querying… Read more“Being in the right place at the right time”
Pulp Rag: Hunting the lonely heart with Carson McCullers
The actual writing is what you live for. —Raymond Chandler Let’s talk about plotting and Point-Of-View. Carson McCullers was only twenty-three when she published The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, her classic story of the fragility of human connection—nearly a child prodigy. Within the amorphous struggle to understand life, as… Read more“<em>Pulp Rag:</em> Hunting the lonely heart with Carson McCullers”
Linking to Millicent Dillon
This week we’re linking to an excerpt from a novel by Millicent Dillon, A Version of Love. I know who Dillon is because in 1995 I stumbled across her biography of Jane Bowles in a bookshop in lower Fillmore in San Francisco, A Little Original Sin, introducing me to the… Read more“Linking to Millicent Dillon”
Talking about a small, good thing
Today we’re linking to the New Yorker publication of the original version of Raymond Carver’s famous short story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” as edited by the famous editor Gordon Lish. If you don’t know who Gordon Lish was, you will learn. Take note, all ye… Read more“Talking about a small, good thing”
Hey, Craig!
the Craig Bartlett interview
I met Craig Bartlett in 1980 on the The Evergreen State College Cooper Point Journal, where he was staff cartoonist and photographer and I was production manager. We were young, barely 20, and following in the footsteps of Lynda Barry and Matt Groening, who’d been running the Cooper Point Journal… Read more“<em>Hey, Craig!</em><br> the Craig Bartlett interview”