Step #1: Find manuscript.

So I probably got a little ahead of myself with my Down with wallowing! Time to find an agent! post. I have a tendency to get into the researching/planning aspect of things while avoiding the all-important “doing” phase. And there’s definitely some doing to be done.
Rather pathetically, step #1 in my finding an agent and [...]

The Hello Kitty Undead

This is completely random, but I had to share. I found this video by way of the always-something-fun-for-everyone Watashi to Tokyo blog… It’s cute, and yet it’s dark.
Like the Hello Kitty Undead or something.

What happens to MFAs

I stumbled on this depressing — though not entirely surprising — article about what happens to MFA graduates, from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The post-MFA wallowing is hereby over.

It’s time. That’s right. It’s time to stop wallowing in my post-MFA blahs and get to work. I’m talking about an agent. It’s time to dig that fat manuscript out of the pile it’s in in my closet. If I’m ever going to publish the book I wrote — or any future books — I [...]

The Inheritance of Loss

I’m reading The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai. It’s a book I might have picked up at some point, but I wasn’t in any hurry, until Friday, when I did something highly uncharacteristic and joined a book club by answering an ad on Craigslist. (The uncharacteristic part being the answering of the ad, not [...]

Is this a problem?

So this thought occurred to me the other day: I maintain a blog about writing, and …wait for it… I’m not writing anything. In fact, other than this blog, I have written nothing since getting my MFA in mid-December. Absolutely nothing. And since I spent much of my last two months in my program revising [...]

You know you’ve been spending too much time online when

You dream in Flickr. Ick.
I slept poorly last night, the result of an extra coffee beverage consumed at a cafe yesterday afternoon. I was way too wired. So I stayed up and read the rest of Guy Delisle’s Pyongyang — an excellent graphic novel…a very interesting look inside North Korea from very observant artist. I [...]

Northern California authors not too shabby

There was a mini article in the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday about how many of the finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Awards are from the Bay Area. Among those NorCal writers getting the nod, Michael Pollan, for The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, and Jason Roberts, for A Sense of [...]

New York, interrupted.

I’ve been obsessively clicking around on Flickr since my return from New York. I guess it’s some kind of visual inspiration carryover from all the art I saw on my trip.  It’s been a while since I went to any art museums and so this trip provided much-needed fulfillment to a part of my brain [...]

New York, New York

I’m headed to New York for a few days….so excited! I haven’t really spent any time there since I was in high school –far too long ago. And it seems like everyone I know goes there all the time. They are always talking about it, like I know exactly what they mean about certain neighborhoods [...]