So, tomorrow comes the merry month of May, and that means the beginning of BoNoProMo. (Confused already? Click here, or, for the real thing, there.) The rules, Lisa Borders says, are supposedly simple: “that you schedule a minimum of ten hours of writing time a
week; that you stick to that schedule unless it’s truly impossible; and that,
if you don’t get your work done, you analyze what went wrong and do your best
to create a more workable schedule the following week.”
But let's go ahead and complicate things, breaking them down a little before building them back up.
May has thirty-one days. No wimpy February-without-a-leap-day-exactly-four-week-month to work with here, so there's Complication One. And since a number of BoNoProMo participants have decided to stay away from Facebook for the duration, meaning there's no easy place to post my schedule and then the success, failure, and analysis of what I did right or wrong when I did/didn't meet that schedule. Complication Two.
(Side note: Easiest part of the whole thing for me? Analysis of failure. Practice, y'know.)
And then there's Complication Three. Actually doing the writing.
Still, with the exception of Complication Three, it's all manageable. This blog right here will be where I'll be posting my schedule and updating the week's results. (Guest writer updates welcome, Lisa Korzeniowski.) The thirty-one day thing? Break it down, and the goal is 1.43 hours a day, or 44.29 hours for the month. (Note to self. Investigate the feasibility of scheduling a two-day, no sleeping, writer's retreat, at the end of May.)
So, let's play. Part one is the schedule.
Schedule for Week 1. (Which is May 1- 7 for me, unlike people taking off that weekend for the Muse and the Marketplace conference. Me, I hope to come home from the Muse and, in a fit of inspiration, scrawl out a few words before falling asleep exhausted and, quite possibly, drunk.)
All writing to be done in the evening unless otherwise noted, although I may try some daytime writing on the weekends after the Muse.
May 1 - 1.0 hours. I hope one and a half hours will be my typical writing day, although I may end up having to ease into it with a smaller number at first. Hard to take the old jalopy from zero to sixty, I know, but I'd like to try and push it. Preferably downhill.
May 2 (Friday, first day of the Muse) - 1.5 hours.
May 3 (Saturday, second day of the Muse and a get-together night for the members of my writer's group) - 0 hours.
May 4 (Sunday, final day of the Muse) - 2.0 hours.
May 5 (Monday, day after the Muse and time that I'm taking off from work to decompress and recharge, introvert that I am, as well as to write) - 3.0 hours.
May 6 (Back to work) - 1.0 hours.
May 7 (A week from today, and what should be time for update blog one, the first week's recap. Note that in my BoNoProMo, blog writing time definitely counts.) 1.5 hours.
Which if my math is right, brings me to a total of ten hours, and which, with the schedule complete, also brings me to Part Two (a.k.a. Complication Three, for those of you paying attention). The writing.
It all comes back to the writing, doesn't it?
And that's the part that scares me.
Happy BoNoProMo-ing, and thanks for reading.
Stephen
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
Sunday, April 27, 2014
Still Pain, Some Playing, and What the Heck is a BoNoProMo?
Well, it's been a month and a half since my last blog post, and we are clearly into the postherpetic neuralgia stage, which is to say, my silly nerves think that I still have shingles, and they don't hold anything back in letting me know that. All day, every day. And despite my brave posturing back in March, I have to admit I haven't been doing all that much writing, or that much exercising, either. However, 'not all that much' is indeed better than nothing. All is not lost.
My exercising is usually running, except when New England's Spring imitates Winter, sending the wimp that I am inside to find a free elliptical. It took me a while to get back into the habit, but now I'm scheduling myself for an exercise session every two to three days, and for the past week that's a schedule that I've been able to stick to.
The writing is harder. (For me, it always is, as I'll use exercising as an excuse to not write.) There has been some rewriting, which definitely counts, of a longish piece for taking to my writer's group, of another piece now in the very last stages of final polishing before submission, and, most recently, the tightening up of a flash piece for an audio submission to the Drum. (The Drum has open author recordings/ submissions at the Muse and the Marketplace conference, which I will once again be attending next weekend. This year's Muse is the culmination of Grub Street's Lit Week 2014.) But aside from a couple of aborted first pages, and an idea or two jotted down on a subway trip, I've written nothing completely new in quite some time. And I've gotten completely out of the habit of daily writing.
That, my friends, is something I'd like to try and change. Luckily, I won't be doing it alone.
In her Grub Street blog, the wonderful writer and teacher Lisa Borders has proposed a month-long challenge for writers with day jobs, writers who want and need to create a schedule that works with their lives, but who need that extra push to actively put writing front and center in every day.
She's given this challenge, declared for the month of May, the rather ungainly name of BoNoProMo, for Boston Novel in Progress Month -- but writers not in Boston can participate, and in my case, rather than work on the rump of a novel I started back in November, I intend to be working on creating a few new short stories (as well as polishing up and sending out some pre-existing works). Call my version BoShoStoProMo, or better yet, don't.
Here's the challenge. Ten hours of writing a week. I'll confess, that scares me. Even when I WAS writing daily, it was 30-60 minutes a day, not 85.71 minutes a day (and yes, I've done the math).
Thirty-one days in May. The countdown from 310 hours begins on Thursday.
Anyone else want to play?
Thanks for reading,
Stephen
My exercising is usually running, except when New England's Spring imitates Winter, sending the wimp that I am inside to find a free elliptical. It took me a while to get back into the habit, but now I'm scheduling myself for an exercise session every two to three days, and for the past week that's a schedule that I've been able to stick to.
The writing is harder. (For me, it always is, as I'll use exercising as an excuse to not write.) There has been some rewriting, which definitely counts, of a longish piece for taking to my writer's group, of another piece now in the very last stages of final polishing before submission, and, most recently, the tightening up of a flash piece for an audio submission to the Drum. (The Drum has open author recordings/ submissions at the Muse and the Marketplace conference, which I will once again be attending next weekend. This year's Muse is the culmination of Grub Street's Lit Week 2014.) But aside from a couple of aborted first pages, and an idea or two jotted down on a subway trip, I've written nothing completely new in quite some time. And I've gotten completely out of the habit of daily writing.
That, my friends, is something I'd like to try and change. Luckily, I won't be doing it alone.
In her Grub Street blog, the wonderful writer and teacher Lisa Borders has proposed a month-long challenge for writers with day jobs, writers who want and need to create a schedule that works with their lives, but who need that extra push to actively put writing front and center in every day.
She's given this challenge, declared for the month of May, the rather ungainly name of BoNoProMo, for Boston Novel in Progress Month -- but writers not in Boston can participate, and in my case, rather than work on the rump of a novel I started back in November, I intend to be working on creating a few new short stories (as well as polishing up and sending out some pre-existing works). Call my version BoShoStoProMo, or better yet, don't.
Here's the challenge. Ten hours of writing a week. I'll confess, that scares me. Even when I WAS writing daily, it was 30-60 minutes a day, not 85.71 minutes a day (and yes, I've done the math).
Thirty-one days in May. The countdown from 310 hours begins on Thursday.
Anyone else want to play?
Thanks for reading,
Stephen
Sunday, March 16, 2014
Playing Through the Pain
I didn't want to write this blog post today. In fact, I didn't feel like writing anything today.
That's nothing new. I haven't written anything of substance outside of the day job for the past eight weeks or so. It's not that I haven't had the time to write, or been blocked, or any of the other reasons I usually use to not write. (If you're a regular reader of this irregular blog, you've heard them all before.) No, the reason I haven't been writing, or doing much of anything outside of the aforementioned day job, is because I've been sick. Sick and tired.
More specifically, I've been in pain, and constant pain wears you down. And the medicines they give you for constant pain may help, a little, with the pain itself, but they will also make you drowsy, or dizzy, or a plethora of other unpleasant side effects that all leave you not in much shape for writing either.
The pain is the result of shingles. Not the roofing kind, although sometimes it feels as if roofing nails are being pounded into my armpit, but rather the herpes zoster kind. It's a viral infection of the nerves that anyone can get as an adult if you ever had chicken pox as a child. (Talk to your doctor about the shingles vaccine, particularly if you're over fifty. This has been an unsolicited, wish-I-had-known-about-it-and-done-it, endorsement.) And now that my rash has faded, it's quite possibly the postherpetic neuralgia kind, which is the technical way of saying that there can be long-term nerve damage from shingles that lasts long after the infection has run its course.
How long? "The natural history of postherpetic neuralgia involves slow resolution of the pain syndrome." That's a polite way of saying, we don't know how long it will last for you. Days, weeks, months... Years. Nobody knows, because it's different for everybody.
Bottom line: it still hurts. Hurts every day, all day, to some degree. But I'm not going to whine about that any more – really, I'm not. I've done that for eight weeks now, it doesn't make me feel better, and it's certainly no fun for you to listen to.
Instead, starting yesterday with a half-hour of exercise (also something that I hadn't done for the previous eight weeks), and starting today with the writing of this blog, I'm going to take back my life. I'm going to write, to run, to have fun, and do many if not all of the things that I haven't been doing because of the pain. Oh, I may not do them as well as I've done before. It may take longer to accomplish certain things. But I'm going to do them anyway. I'm going to enjoy the game of life, even if I'm playing through the pain.
If Kafka could write with turberculosis (not to mention the Brontës, and George Orwell with not only tuberculosis plus a bullet in his neck, etcetera, etcetera), I can write with shingles pain. I'll continue to hope it ends soon, and continue to work with my doctors for long-term and short-term pain management, but regardless of all that, as of this weekend I'm going to continue to be me. To live life, to write, and to have fun.
I'm playing through the pain.
Thanks for reading,
Stephen
That's nothing new. I haven't written anything of substance outside of the day job for the past eight weeks or so. It's not that I haven't had the time to write, or been blocked, or any of the other reasons I usually use to not write. (If you're a regular reader of this irregular blog, you've heard them all before.) No, the reason I haven't been writing, or doing much of anything outside of the aforementioned day job, is because I've been sick. Sick and tired.
More specifically, I've been in pain, and constant pain wears you down. And the medicines they give you for constant pain may help, a little, with the pain itself, but they will also make you drowsy, or dizzy, or a plethora of other unpleasant side effects that all leave you not in much shape for writing either.
The pain is the result of shingles. Not the roofing kind, although sometimes it feels as if roofing nails are being pounded into my armpit, but rather the herpes zoster kind. It's a viral infection of the nerves that anyone can get as an adult if you ever had chicken pox as a child. (Talk to your doctor about the shingles vaccine, particularly if you're over fifty. This has been an unsolicited, wish-I-had-known-about-it-and-done-it, endorsement.) And now that my rash has faded, it's quite possibly the postherpetic neuralgia kind, which is the technical way of saying that there can be long-term nerve damage from shingles that lasts long after the infection has run its course.
How long? "The natural history of postherpetic neuralgia involves slow resolution of the pain syndrome." That's a polite way of saying, we don't know how long it will last for you. Days, weeks, months... Years. Nobody knows, because it's different for everybody.
Bottom line: it still hurts. Hurts every day, all day, to some degree. But I'm not going to whine about that any more – really, I'm not. I've done that for eight weeks now, it doesn't make me feel better, and it's certainly no fun for you to listen to.
Instead, starting yesterday with a half-hour of exercise (also something that I hadn't done for the previous eight weeks), and starting today with the writing of this blog, I'm going to take back my life. I'm going to write, to run, to have fun, and do many if not all of the things that I haven't been doing because of the pain. Oh, I may not do them as well as I've done before. It may take longer to accomplish certain things. But I'm going to do them anyway. I'm going to enjoy the game of life, even if I'm playing through the pain.
If Kafka could write with turberculosis (not to mention the Brontës, and George Orwell with not only tuberculosis plus a bullet in his neck, etcetera, etcetera), I can write with shingles pain. I'll continue to hope it ends soon, and continue to work with my doctors for long-term and short-term pain management, but regardless of all that, as of this weekend I'm going to continue to be me. To live life, to write, and to have fun.
I'm playing through the pain.
Thanks for reading,
Stephen
Saturday, December 28, 2013
Reading and Writing in 2013
What did I do in 2013? On the Reading and Writing front, that is.
Well, I read some books. Sixty-nine of them, according to my Goodreads stats (that's 21,112 pages, an average 306 pages per book), a big increase over the forty books that Goodreads thinks I read in 2012. (I'm currently reading Tom Wolfe's doorstop THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES, and still have about four hundred of its 659 pages left to go, so at best I'll barely make it to seventy books by the 31st.)
To eleven of those books I gave a five-star rating, the highest available on Goodreads. Here's the list (alpha by author):
THOSE WHO SAVE US, Jenna Blum
ANOTHER DAY IN THE FRONTAL LOBE, Katrina Firlik
THE APPRENTICE, Tess Gerritsen
THE SINNER, Tess Gerritsen
SOON I WILL BE INVINCIBLE, Austin Grossman
THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2012, Tom Perrotta, ed.
THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS, Jon Ronson
THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS, Rebecca Skloot
HEADS IN BEDS, Jacob Tomsky
THE WORLD WITHOUT US, Alan Weisman
THE LAST POLICEMAN, Ben Winters
Of the above, I'd have to say my favorite work of fiction was THE LAST POLICEMAN, a pre-apocalyptic police procedural, while my favorite non-fiction book of the year was THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS, about medicine, racism, cell culture and, well, cell culture in popular culture.
Eyeballing the remainder of 2013's books, I estimate at least two-thirds of them are fiction. Based on the above ratings, I suspect I'm judging the fiction harder than I am the non-fiction, a possible bias I'm going to keep an eye out for in 2014. I only gave a one star rating out to a single book (Thomas Pynchon's THE CRYING OF LOT 49, and I would gladly have given it a zero), and only a couple of two star ratings, all to works of fiction.
As far as my own fiction writing and writing support went for the year, one of my writing groups more-or-less dissolved itself, but the other is still going strong, as is the Grub Street writing community and various spin-offs from it, such as the unofficial Facebook support group organized by Cathy Elcik for November's novel writing efforts. And although I only ended up with a woefully incomplete seventy-seven page beginning of a lit-noir novel set in Las Vegas, November was an interesting experience for me, a month of writing every day, for at least a few hundred words, on the same large work. To be continued, I hope. (Although I have to confess the daily writing thing that I thought was getting to be a habit has already gone on the skids as holiday activities have ramped up.)
Short story writing is, however, still closer to my wheelhouse, as they say, and probably will continue to occupy most of my writing efforts. This year, I had various short fiction publications including a bit of Las Vegas flash in Prime Number magazine, a one-sentence piece of literary erotica collected in the Go Deeper Press anthology, Dirty Little Numbers, and a spoken word piece recorded at the Boston Book Festival and then published in The Drum.
It should go pretty much without mentioning that I also had a large number of rejections in the year, including a least one for all of the pieces that were eventually published this year (writers, take heart) as well as rejections for those yet to find a home. Which only means I need to finish writing more pieces, and send more out, in 2014.
Thanks for Reading, and Happy New Year!
Stephen
Well, I read some books. Sixty-nine of them, according to my Goodreads stats (that's 21,112 pages, an average 306 pages per book), a big increase over the forty books that Goodreads thinks I read in 2012. (I'm currently reading Tom Wolfe's doorstop THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES, and still have about four hundred of its 659 pages left to go, so at best I'll barely make it to seventy books by the 31st.)
To eleven of those books I gave a five-star rating, the highest available on Goodreads. Here's the list (alpha by author):
THOSE WHO SAVE US, Jenna Blum
ANOTHER DAY IN THE FRONTAL LOBE, Katrina Firlik
THE APPRENTICE, Tess Gerritsen
THE SINNER, Tess Gerritsen
SOON I WILL BE INVINCIBLE, Austin Grossman
THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2012, Tom Perrotta, ed.
THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS, Jon Ronson
THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS, Rebecca Skloot
HEADS IN BEDS, Jacob Tomsky
THE WORLD WITHOUT US, Alan Weisman
THE LAST POLICEMAN, Ben Winters
Of the above, I'd have to say my favorite work of fiction was THE LAST POLICEMAN, a pre-apocalyptic police procedural, while my favorite non-fiction book of the year was THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS, about medicine, racism, cell culture and, well, cell culture in popular culture.
Eyeballing the remainder of 2013's books, I estimate at least two-thirds of them are fiction. Based on the above ratings, I suspect I'm judging the fiction harder than I am the non-fiction, a possible bias I'm going to keep an eye out for in 2014. I only gave a one star rating out to a single book (Thomas Pynchon's THE CRYING OF LOT 49, and I would gladly have given it a zero), and only a couple of two star ratings, all to works of fiction.
As far as my own fiction writing and writing support went for the year, one of my writing groups more-or-less dissolved itself, but the other is still going strong, as is the Grub Street writing community and various spin-offs from it, such as the unofficial Facebook support group organized by Cathy Elcik for November's novel writing efforts. And although I only ended up with a woefully incomplete seventy-seven page beginning of a lit-noir novel set in Las Vegas, November was an interesting experience for me, a month of writing every day, for at least a few hundred words, on the same large work. To be continued, I hope. (Although I have to confess the daily writing thing that I thought was getting to be a habit has already gone on the skids as holiday activities have ramped up.)
Short story writing is, however, still closer to my wheelhouse, as they say, and probably will continue to occupy most of my writing efforts. This year, I had various short fiction publications including a bit of Las Vegas flash in Prime Number magazine, a one-sentence piece of literary erotica collected in the Go Deeper Press anthology, Dirty Little Numbers, and a spoken word piece recorded at the Boston Book Festival and then published in The Drum.
It should go pretty much without mentioning that I also had a large number of rejections in the year, including a least one for all of the pieces that were eventually published this year (writers, take heart) as well as rejections for those yet to find a home. Which only means I need to finish writing more pieces, and send more out, in 2014.
Thanks for Reading, and Happy New Year!
Stephen
Saturday, August 31, 2013
Back to School Questions
Bit of a blogging drought this summer for me, eh?
Well, at least you can enjoy my flash fiction piece, "Bee Noir" now up at Prime Number magazine. Go ahead, read it. I'll wait.
So, that's pretty much it for today. What about tomorrow, you ask?
Actually, tomorrow is the first day of September, and between late summer warm days with a hit of fall at night, the general back to school vibe and stationary sales, and the (not-at-all-coincidental) re-opening of all the university-sponsored lit mags to submissions, September just might be my favorite, and most-productive, month.
We'll see.
Thanks for reading,
Stephen
Well, at least you can enjoy my flash fiction piece, "Bee Noir" now up at Prime Number magazine. Go ahead, read it. I'll wait.
So, that's pretty much it for today. What about tomorrow, you ask?
Actually, tomorrow is the first day of September, and between late summer warm days with a hit of fall at night, the general back to school vibe and stationary sales, and the (not-at-all-coincidental) re-opening of all the university-sponsored lit mags to submissions, September just might be my favorite, and most-productive, month.
We'll see.
Thanks for reading,
Stephen
Sunday, June 30, 2013
The Usual Stuff.
Obviously I haven't been blogging lately, so you might ask, what have I been doing? Oh, you know. The usual stuff.
Writing.
The writing's actually been going well. New, and some newly revised, stories are out on the rejection circuit, and there's a longer piece starting to bake, inspired by Mark Fogarty's one-day Grub Street seminar about using Joseph Campbell's "Monomyth" theory of the universal story for inspiration. And I'm proud and happy to say that Go Deeper Press will be including a little one-sentence (one loooong sentence) flash piece of mine, "Inappropriate Footwear," in their forthcoming flash erotica anthology, Dirty Little Numbers. You may have heard me read an earlier version of "Inappropriate Footwear" a couple of years ago during Grub Street's Muse and the Marketplace conference, at the Beyond the Margins cocktail party open mic.
Reading.
Penny's been traveling back and forth to Pennsylvania this year to help care for her mother (who's doing well now after a serious stroke), and while I'm home alone I tend to spend more time reading. Twenty-two books since March 1st, well above my usual average of three to four per month. Too many good ones to list them all here (and if you're a friend of mine on Goodreads you've already seen them), but Tim Powers continues to impress me with his alternate world historical urban fantasies (go read Expiration Date, if you're at all interested in the genre), I finally read Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (fascinating), and Steve Martin's memoir about his stand-up career, Born Standing Up, shows what it takes to succeed at not only stand-up, but pretty much anything (spoiler alert: it's practicing, learning from people who are better than you, and sticking with it). And I'm working through The Complete Idiot's Guide to Taoism (laugh while you can, monkey boy), at one chapter per night.
That's pretty much it.
Oh, and working, running, eating, drinking (have you tried Deep Eddy vodka yet?), playing games, walking the dog, and the other usual suspects, too. But I'm assuming that's not why you're reading this.
Hey, why are you reading this?
Well, whatever it is, thanks.
Stephen
Writing.
The writing's actually been going well. New, and some newly revised, stories are out on the rejection circuit, and there's a longer piece starting to bake, inspired by Mark Fogarty's one-day Grub Street seminar about using Joseph Campbell's "Monomyth" theory of the universal story for inspiration. And I'm proud and happy to say that Go Deeper Press will be including a little one-sentence (one loooong sentence) flash piece of mine, "Inappropriate Footwear," in their forthcoming flash erotica anthology, Dirty Little Numbers. You may have heard me read an earlier version of "Inappropriate Footwear" a couple of years ago during Grub Street's Muse and the Marketplace conference, at the Beyond the Margins cocktail party open mic.
Reading.
Penny's been traveling back and forth to Pennsylvania this year to help care for her mother (who's doing well now after a serious stroke), and while I'm home alone I tend to spend more time reading. Twenty-two books since March 1st, well above my usual average of three to four per month. Too many good ones to list them all here (and if you're a friend of mine on Goodreads you've already seen them), but Tim Powers continues to impress me with his alternate world historical urban fantasies (go read Expiration Date, if you're at all interested in the genre), I finally read Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (fascinating), and Steve Martin's memoir about his stand-up career, Born Standing Up, shows what it takes to succeed at not only stand-up, but pretty much anything (spoiler alert: it's practicing, learning from people who are better than you, and sticking with it). And I'm working through The Complete Idiot's Guide to Taoism (laugh while you can, monkey boy), at one chapter per night.
That's pretty much it.
Oh, and working, running, eating, drinking (have you tried Deep Eddy vodka yet?), playing games, walking the dog, and the other usual suspects, too. But I'm assuming that's not why you're reading this.
Hey, why are you reading this?
Well, whatever it is, thanks.
Stephen
Sunday, March 10, 2013
My AWP: Lessons Learned
I was in the middle of writing up a rather longish convention report for AWP, covering the panels I attended, who I heard reading (and what they read), tucking in my lessons learned for the benefit of future attendees, when I realized that most of you really don't want to hear about any of that. Really. You're just saying you do to be nice.
So instead, I've broken the story. Edited it down to a few snippets of text, key lessons learned, photos found and photos taken, random beverages consumed. I present it to you here in a mosaic or chiaroscuro structure, if you would like a label for it. (Writers like labels.)
It might not give you a true picture of what AWP is all about, but it does bring you a little closer to my rather blurry state of mind during and after that recent event. And maybe that's something.
Wednesday, March 6th.
Lesson Learned: Pre-register, and show up on the first day of registration if you can. (Bonus lesson. The fee for a replacement badge is $50. Do not lose your badge.)
Sonsie Boston in their Wine Room. Because, you know, wine and cocktails.
I look up and see another introverted male standing not far from my corner, glancing up from his own smartphone. We quickly look away after that terrifying moment of recognition.
He is wearing a porkpie hat.
Lessons Learned: Don't go to parties where you don't know anybody if you're not willing to make the effort to get to know people. Don't wear porkpie hats.
Beverages Consumed: One glass cabernet sauvignon.
Thursday, March 7th.
Lessons Learned: Use the Coat Check. Have Second and Third Choices on Your Schedule.
Looks like 80% of all AWP attendees are female. Why does the VIDA report continue to be so bad?
Lesson Learned: Take Better Notes. Go to Lunch with Sally Bunch. Don't Grow a Beard.
Seventeen pounds. Here's most of it.
Lesson Learned: Don't Go Crazy in the Bookfair. At Least, Not on the First Day.
Thursday Night, Grub Street's Get Lit party at Storyville in Boston.
Lesson Learned: People You Know Will Introduce You to People They Know That You Don't. Cathy Elcik is a Trusting Soul.
Beverages Consumed: Two Dunkin' Donuts regular coffees, one medium, one large. Two vodka collins's, two vodka gimlets.
Friday, March 8.
Another eight pounds.
Craft panels in small rooms with large audiences.
I win a Sundog Lit mug.
Back to Storyville, readings sponsored by The Drum.
Was Chris Castellani wearing orange pants?
Ask a roomful of fiction writers to tell you their greatest transgression. What are the odds they're making it up?
Beverages Consumed: Two Dunkin' Donuts regular coffees, one medium, one large. Three bottles of random German white beer.
Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right, Stuck in the Middle of the Story.
Handouts! Much sage advice.
Sex writers like reading their own work.
Sex scenes structure themselves. Desire, rising action, climax, afterglow.
Book Purchases On-Site and in my Amazon Cart:
DEVANGELICAL, Erika Rae
WHERE THE GOD OF LOVE HANGS OUT, Amy Bloom
DELICATE EDIBLE BIRDS: AND OTHER STORIES, Lauren Groff
NEWS FROM HEAVEN: THE BAKERTON STORIES, Jennifer Haigh
PRACTICAL MAGIC, Alice Hoffman
HOLY GHOST GIRL: A MEMOIR, Donna Johnson
CHARITY GIRL, Michael Lowenthal
THIS IS NOT YOUR CITY, Caitlin Horrocks
ANGELS: A NOVEL, Denis Johnson
NARRATIVE DESIGN, Madison Smartt Bell
THE ABSTINENCE TEACHER, Tom Perrotta
Final Beverage Consumed: Mudslide in a Red Solo Cup.
The End.
Thanks for Reading,
Stephen
So instead, I've broken the story. Edited it down to a few snippets of text, key lessons learned, photos found and photos taken, random beverages consumed. I present it to you here in a mosaic or chiaroscuro structure, if you would like a label for it. (Writers like labels.)
It might not give you a true picture of what AWP is all about, but it does bring you a little closer to my rather blurry state of mind during and after that recent event. And maybe that's something.
Wednesday, March 6th.
Lesson Learned: Pre-register, and show up on the first day of registration if you can. (Bonus lesson. The fee for a replacement badge is $50. Do not lose your badge.)
Sonsie Boston in their Wine Room. Because, you know, wine and cocktails.
I look up and see another introverted male standing not far from my corner, glancing up from his own smartphone. We quickly look away after that terrifying moment of recognition.
He is wearing a porkpie hat.
Lessons Learned: Don't go to parties where you don't know anybody if you're not willing to make the effort to get to know people. Don't wear porkpie hats.
Beverages Consumed: One glass cabernet sauvignon.
Thursday, March 7th.
Lessons Learned: Use the Coat Check. Have Second and Third Choices on Your Schedule.
Looks like 80% of all AWP attendees are female. Why does the VIDA report continue to be so bad?
Lesson Learned: Take Better Notes. Go to Lunch with Sally Bunch. Don't Grow a Beard.
Seventeen pounds. Here's most of it.
Lesson Learned: Don't Go Crazy in the Bookfair. At Least, Not on the First Day.
Thursday Night, Grub Street's Get Lit party at Storyville in Boston.
Lesson Learned: People You Know Will Introduce You to People They Know That You Don't. Cathy Elcik is a Trusting Soul.
Beverages Consumed: Two Dunkin' Donuts regular coffees, one medium, one large. Two vodka collins's, two vodka gimlets.
Friday, March 8.
Another eight pounds.
Craft panels in small rooms with large audiences.
I win a Sundog Lit mug.
Back to Storyville, readings sponsored by The Drum.
Was Chris Castellani wearing orange pants?
Ask a roomful of fiction writers to tell you their greatest transgression. What are the odds they're making it up?
Beverages Consumed: Two Dunkin' Donuts regular coffees, one medium, one large. Three bottles of random German white beer.
Always stay awake for Richard Russo. Buy Amy Bloom's book.
Is this Saturday? Rise and shine, Sunshine.
Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right, Stuck in the Middle of the Story.
Handouts! Much sage advice.
Sex writers like reading their own work.
Sex scenes structure themselves. Desire, rising action, climax, afterglow.
Book Purchases On-Site and in my Amazon Cart:
DEVANGELICAL, Erika Rae
WHERE THE GOD OF LOVE HANGS OUT, Amy Bloom
DELICATE EDIBLE BIRDS: AND OTHER STORIES, Lauren Groff
NEWS FROM HEAVEN: THE BAKERTON STORIES, Jennifer Haigh
PRACTICAL MAGIC, Alice Hoffman
HOLY GHOST GIRL: A MEMOIR, Donna Johnson
CHARITY GIRL, Michael Lowenthal
THIS IS NOT YOUR CITY, Caitlin Horrocks
ANGELS: A NOVEL, Denis Johnson
NARRATIVE DESIGN, Madison Smartt Bell
THE ABSTINENCE TEACHER, Tom Perrotta
Final Beverage Consumed: Mudslide in a Red Solo Cup.
The End.
Thanks for Reading,
Stephen
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