Career advice

Though I spent the summer traveling, I have no reports of nearly falling off cliffs because I got too close to the edge nor of staying out all night in the rain because I failed to book a hotel room in the height of the season, and this disappoints me a little, not because these…

“Never trust a storyteller,” Jonathan Gottschall says in The Story Paradox. There are a number of reasons he says this but primary among them is that we’re always manipulating the story for maximum effect. We think about what details to emphasize and which to downplay. We spend a lot of time deciding which rock will…

I started this morning trying to remember the phrase for “quotation marks.” I came up with “word hole.” Which, in fact, is a perfect description of how I feel about my current work-in-progress, an apparently neverending story that just isn’t quite there yet. All the words go in and nothing comes out. Well, not yet….

People sometimes wonder how someone as feral as I am came to be a writer, which is all about connecting and communicating with other people. For me, the connecting and communicating with others is more of a bug in the process than a feature. I mean I want people to read my books because otherwise…

Every Tuesday, we go to the farmers market and I give Jessica four dollars to buy a chocolate-pecan cookie from the French baker (literally a baker who is French). And every Tuesday there just happens to be a second cookie that is broken or otherwise not quite good enough to sell to customers that makes…