Tweet Yesterday I told a story about my rites of passage, about the moments in my life when I grew up. They were turning points in my personal history, and both of them significantly changed my plot. Today I want to tell you a little bit about the ways writers capture that slice of the […]
Tweet I’ve talked before about arguments I lost to my dad (the expert debater) back in high school. I can vividly remember the last of those. Well…not the last argument I lost to my dad (which is, God willing, still many, many years in the future), but the last argument I lost in high school. […]
Tweet This week I’m talking about inviolable writing rules (and ranting against the storytelling in The Da Vinci Code). Yesterday I provided a list of rules that I said you should never break, then I admitted that most books break at least one of those, and I closed by saying, “Well, fine, you can break […]
Tweet Okay, first things first, I keep forgetting that I’ve got readers who have never taken a Creative Writing class. If you missed out on that (and, I guess, Latin classes too), then yesterday’s post ended with a much more mysterious cliffhanger than I intended. And, worse, I’m not actually going to get into detail […]
Tweet One lazy Saturday a couple months ago I emerged from a couple hours of writing in the office to find Trish sitting on the couch in the living room watching The Da Vinci Code. She’d seen it before — I’m pretty sure I went to see it at the theater with her — and […]
Tweet I’ve been investigating document types for a while now, and this week I’ve been talking about grant writing — the common name used for writing grant applications. It’s enough of a complicated process that it does have its own name (albeit a slightly confusing one). It’s not that writing grant applications is puzzling. Virtually […]
Tweet This week we’re talking about getting paid for your writing, and yesterday I mentioned that copyright was originally created to promote creative expression — that basically the government established an artificial monopoly to an intangible good, and they back it up with (legal) force. They earnestly believed a system like that would encourage young […]
Tweet Yesterday I talked a little bit about how I got paid to write — both the method that paid me $200 to do something fun, and the method that has paid me…well, considerably more to do something tedious and practical. And, really, that’s the issue. It’s easy for my bosses to evaluate the value of my […]
Tweet I’ve already told the sad story of how I graduated, gave up on my dream, and took a day job. I’ve also since admitted that it wasn’t really all that bad, thanks to some dedicated friends — including one who came to Tulsa to work with me. That was Toby, and before he came […]
I’ve admitted recently that I’m a little broken, but I’m getting better. After years of living with crippling anxiety, I finally started trying to improve.
