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. (more…

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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? (more…

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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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9/11 Neocon blinders and award ceremonies

In her February 21 rant in the SF Chronicle complaining of the ubiquity and purported liberalism of awards shows, Cinnamon Stillwell epitomizes much of the blindered myopia afflicting conservatism of late.
It isn’t just that she chooses not to see events in real perspective. It’s that she sees the awards through their own red-tinted, thin-slitted [...]

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