Opposite day.

Yesterday sucked. It was one of those days:
1. I slept very little the night before (insomnia!) and woke up cranky.
2. It was pouring rain and hail. All. Day. Long.
3. No one called me back for the six stories I’m trying to write by the end of the week. In fact, one guy even emailed me [...]

Max, the bad talking parrot

It’s raining, I have a TON of work to do, and I am procrastinating. It’s surprisingly hard to stay focused when you work at home and there’s no one around to distract you.
Today’s distraction is a look at what people searched for on Google or whatever that landed them here. These are my favorites:
-max the [...]

Neverending stories

My book group is reading The Neverending Story this month. Not that I need to explain this, but it came to be this month’s book because at last month’s meeting somehow we got to discussing it and some of us remembered it so fondly that we decided to read it. I suppose I feel like [...]

Bap! Pow! Thwak!

For all of my ranting and defending of nonfiction recently, I have been, ahem, playing around with other genres. For some reason, I am filled with ideas for illustrated fictional children’s books these days, which is funny, because a) I don’t have children, b) I interact with kids maybe once a quarter, if that, and [...]

I’m a manly writer, I guess.

A post over at Nonfiction Readers Anonymous reminded me of something that came up in one of my workshops: gendered writing, and the Gender Genie.
Basically, there’s some kind of algorithm that predicts author gender based on their use of certain words. So I tried the Gender Genie three times, once with a two-page chunk of [...]

Lost

I’ve been thinking about writing something new, and some ideas have been percolating on the topic of disappearance… They are still rough, and I’m unsure of what form they belong in — essays? full-length book? fiction?
In any case, thinking about disappearance and loss reminded me of a magazine I bookmarked a few months ago and [...]

Labels: They’re not just for high school anymore

My MFA was in nonfiction writing, not fiction or poetry, which always surprises some people. Oddly, it’s writers who seem to be most thrown by this admission.
For example, a conversation I had upon being introduced to an author (of fiction) last year at a party:
Mutual acquaintance, before disappearing to get a drink: This is Elizabeth, [...]

A boycott, spring weather, and sex scenes with ex-presidents, oh my

The whole blogging exercise can be funny sometimes; for me it’s a series of up and downs. Some weeks, I can’t stop writing blog posts, both on my computer and in my head, there’s so much I’d like to say. And other weeks and other days, well, let’s just say I feel suddenly shy. I [...]

Reading to travel, traveling to read

I had trouble waking up this morning, and even after my usual mug of Peet’s French Roast, I’m still not quite awake. I’ve been web surfing before I buckle down on my freelance projects, hoping that procrastination will lead to perkiness…. one of my cyber-stops? Slate.
A series on Slate that I’ve been reading all week [...]

I heart nonfiction

Being that it’s Valentine’s Day and all, I thought I’d post about some nonfiction books that I love. I’m not talking about essays here, because that’s another romance entirely and as such it requires an entirely separate list. I’m talking about some full-length works of nonfiction that I have loved:
In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote. [...]