Emma

 Have you ever felt like you were headed down the road in one direction only to see a number of signs luring you a different way?

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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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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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Chandler & Gardner or: Getting the hint

Sometimes life has to pitch a notion to you several times for it to sink in. I don’t remember the first time someone recommended that I read Earle Stanley Gardner; the second time, I think, was while home brewing with my friend Dave. Recently, Marianne commented on him, and then I picked up Raymond Chandler [...]

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Matuszak Meets Marlowe

I like it when similar notions collide from separate places, when life supplies a serendipitous two-fer, as if a mystery writer might tackle a football player across the decades, a sort of cross-disciplinary meeting of minds and muscles.

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Raising High the Roofbeams

What has depth and worth any more? Can we even talk in terms of heavy, or is the notion as trite as a mass media portrayal of hippies?

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Amusing French Anecdotes

I bought Stanley Karnow’s Paris in the Fifties almost on a whim, and I’ve been glad ever since. I’ve enjoyed the book immensely, even as my interest in the topics varies. For instance, though I didn’t dawdle in the fashion essay, it still startled me to read of a macabre fashion after the Reign of [...]

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