Of Left and Write

Yesterday I began a reply to Bloglily on how I plan my writing projects — to the extent what happens is actually planned. Here’s the rest of my answer.
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Planning? What planning?

My deficiencies in planning are revealed. My coworker Bloglily, she of the bright wit, well-turned phrase and sharp mind, had asked a number of us how we plan our writing projects.
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Back in a Northern Town

Sunday afternoon, December twoth: It’s good to be in a northern city again. Driving down streets with leaf litter, there’s a ragged, unkempt edge to Portland I don’t find so often in California, with its edged lawns, poodle-cut bushes, and palm trees. Portland has a stolid feel to it, even in its architecture, with [...]

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A New Deal

It’s so easy to take it all for granted, until you realize the debt that’s due, and how, if the heroes of a prior era hadn’t worked so hard, all too often for so little pay, the very building you stand in or the bridge you traverse would be gone.
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All watched over by elephants of love and grace

My little back-of-the-garage computer cockpit here has an adjoining “den” with an old couch, carpeting, a dogbed (chewed by Edie as a puppy), shelves full of books, and the new flat-screen visible from both cockpit and den. Our furnace is in the far corner, but the heat is piped elsewhere, so in winter I sometimes [...]

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Kingsolver - and more porcine flights of fancy

While up in Inverness, I read Barbara Kingsolver’s Pigs in Heaven to see how she had put it together. First I read through about a third of the book, then I went back and put boxes around the names of recurring characters, underlined good metaphors, drew a vertical line next to key passages that moved [...]

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V: Parsing the Good from the Not So

F. Scott Fitzgerald called it “the separator.” Ernest Hemingway, characteristically, called it “the bullshit detector.”
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IV: Beyond Enchantment

I like the name Wittgenstein; the first syllable: Witt, the last, a vessel for hefting a cool, frothy beverage. It sounds so precise yet airy and amused. But couple it with the first name Ludwig and mention him as one of the 20th century’s foremost philosophers, and you can almost see people’s eyes glaze.
Which [...]

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II: What Deep Roots the Lies of Words Have

Deception is everywhere. Even the simplest animals employ camouflage to deceive. Vladimir Nabokov writes of a butterfly whose wings portrayed a leaf so completely that it included the appearance of raindrops, with the lines on its wings curved to simulate the refraction of light through water. (That still amazes me.)
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I: What Liars Words Are

My very good friend Gary and I had an understanding that, if we ever agreed on anything, we each needed to automatically re-examine his own position.
There was a Zen element mixed into this, mostly by Gary, who had taught in Japan, although I held my own. And his half of our agreement was premised [...]

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