See, there.

I’ve gone and done it and written the beginning again in first person. And now it’s a different story and the main character became all hard-boiled and involved in intrigue that I don’t even want to be writing about.
Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, I’m going back to draft number two.

Still wrestling with these people

Not too long ago, I wrote about some characters I couldn’t get out of my head. Well.
These characters have apparently decided to camp out for a while. I can’t let them go. I guess that means this is a story I need to tell. I have never been this focused on a short story. Often [...]

One time, when I was in Japan…

… I committed the dumbest travel-related mistake. Dumber, in fact, than not sleeping for 40 hours and trying to navigate a bus system in a language I couldn’t read. (There are other runners-up in this contest, including an overnight trip alone on the wrong train through Austria and Italy, and a 15-hour car ride across [...]

work-writing balance

It’s not just me; other writers are thinking about/worried about/frustrated by trying to balance working full-time and writing. A former co-worker and writer’s group member wrote to say that she wants to fall out of full-time and into freelance, because she’s frustrated by how little time she can spend on her writing.
And here I am, [...]

a different kind of commute

Recent discussions with friends about commuting reminded me of an essay I wrote in grad school, about living in San Francisco. The essay as a whole did not go over very well with my classmates or my professor, and when I reread it I understand better some of the reasons why. But whatever its flaws [...]

Clearly, I have cursed myself.

I’ve cursed myself by writing this, for which some people have called me insane. I think I agree.
Not even a day passes from when I wrote my ode to commuting to work, and my to/from work experience sinks swamp-low.
First I sprayed myself in the face with a hose this morning. That has no relevance to [...]

Stocking up

Yesterday after work I stopped at a great independent bookstore that I haven’t been to in a long time. It’s near my office, and I used to visit there frequently when I was working there before. But it’s been a while.
In this case there was an urgent reason for the visit. My bookclub is meeting [...]

Somebody remind me of this in about a month

I like going to work. I mean, I don’t like getting up every single day at a certain time, or the time that work takes from the things I like to do, but I like the action of going to work.
In the morning I like the personal time, listening to my ipod while walking down [...]

Fair enough.

I thought this was an interesting take on Nell Freudenberger’s novel, “The Dissident,” which I wrote about not too long ago.
I’ve since read her story that was in the Granta collection, and wasn’t a huge fan. It didn’t grab me. Or maybe it took too long to grab me. It felt like a long short [...]

It’s a job, OK?

People have been acting very strangely toward me when they hear that I’ve gone back to work full-time in an office. Which is funny, because the reactions I got for freelancing and writing, i.e. doing my own thing, were also strange.
When I told people I was a writer and I did freelance work to help [...]