telepathic paranoia

Forgiveness Divine He was jittery on their honeymoon, spilled a glass of red wine on her dress.  “I’m sorry,” he told her, but she smiled placidly back.  “I forgive you,” she said. The next day when she was swimming, he stole her book to read, then misplaced it somewhere.  “I’m sorry,” he told her.  “I [...]

Why yes, that is an eyeball balanced on my wedding ring, sitting on my laptop. And in the background, you can see my attempt at creating a color-coded spreadsheet representing my characters’ motivations throughout the course of the novel. In the past few years, I’ve seen any number of writers — both professional and aspiring [...]

so this is a bit of a microfiction failure — more a fragment then a fully-formed story. I did have a story in mind, with characters and dialogue and conflict and everything, but I got caught up describing the setting and wound up edging the girl out of the story. She might show up next [...]

The Elegant Variation has an interesting guest post by Marisa Silver on the short story, and its merits relative to the longer fiction narrative. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, as I’m finishing up one class on reading the short story and another on writing them. I once counted myself among the people [...]

Okay, I don’t have quite that many. Yet. I’ll admit, I have a bit of a problem with names. I’ve had a few — given names, middle names, nicknames, and the like — over the course of a lifetime, but nothing has ever quite felt like me. And so, pretty much as soon as I [...]

I’m a little late, but I’ve been meaning to make a few comments about the Guardian’s compilation of Ten Rules of Writing from a host of different authors. Sure, it’s cute to see what advice various famous authors have, and it never hurts to get a few tips on how to make this lifestyle work. [...]

So lately I’ve been hearing from a lot of frustrated writers (though most recently from literary enfant terrible Steve Almond) about how the current publishing model needs to change, and we should all look to the music industry for a system that allows non-mainstream talent to find its niche and gain success. It seems like [...]

Happy New Year!  I still have more Japan for sharing. Much as Americans have a fetish for Japanese video games, anime, and manga, the Japanese also flirt with American culture…  sometimes in unpredictable ways. This department store had a really vast t-shirt collection on display.  Some of my favorites: Hawkeye: The Outdoor The Mushroom Is [...]