fiction | fiction
Nov.12.2008
This is a very short list -- it could easily be twice as long -- just a few of the books that my students and friends and I have found useful and illuminating. Some of the books on this list move into the territory of theory. A few of these are “career” books, though I include them with some...
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Nov.12.2008
As I worked on a book proposal for a nonfiction book that I would like to write it became obvious to me that I needed to better hone what the book is about. It is not a broad subject. Rather it is narrowly focused on the Americans who volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War of the mid 1930s...
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Nov.11.2008
Reading Like a Writer synthesizes Francine Prose's lifetime's experience in literature--as a reader, a writer, and a teacher. It's a splendid book because it is so learned, well-written, and insightful, presenting fiction (that's Prose's literary focus) in its component guises of words, sentences,...
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Nov.11.2008
This has part and parcel to do with my NaNo novel, Flame of Raven's Soul. I classified it as Young Adult Fiction because I wasn't sure if it was too juvenile for adults. After all, the main characters are in their teens and it's mostly set in a high school, dealing with the problems of teenagers...
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Oct.31.2008
For a guy who apparently draws stick figures for a living, the chap that creates the web comic xkcd (pronounced by saying the letters) has an amazing ability to make things simple:
In gearing up for NaNoWriMo, I know my notes were starting to create their own vernacular. This comic made me...
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Oct.29.2008
Remember when I posted about Charlie’s first swear word? And remember how he was holding the dust pan while saying, “Shit, shit”? Well, it turns out that what he means to be saying was, “Swish, swish,” which–according to Grandma–is the sound a broom makes. (I knew it was Grandma’s fault!)
Meanwhile...
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Oct.29.2008
I've got a busy month ahead of me, with all kinds of articles to research and write, along with some potential changes in where my writing is going to regularly appear, and how much blogging I'm going to do each day (namely, it might increase). Even without that possibility, I can predict that my...
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Oct.28.2008
Just from now until the beginning of Nanowrimo, I'm taking orders for my new collection, Ennui & Other States of Madness - at a discounted price. The trade paperback edition normally costs $19.95 and the signed, numbered limited edition (only 100 copies) is $50. If you buy it now through me...
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Oct.27.2008
Jessica Anya Blau’s first novel, The Summer of Naked Swim Parties, was a fixture on summer reading lists. Part memoir, part fiction, it tells of a 14-year-old California girl with free-wheeling parents. Read Street asked Blau, a Baltimorean who teaches in the Johns Hopkins University’s writing...
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Oct.25.2008
The Window
by David Niall Wilson
The window looked out over mean streets and dirty dreams. Smudges of soot, wind-blown grit, and splatters of the last things to go through the minds of bugs and birds alike coated the multi-colored panes, creating subtle shifts in the original artist’s...
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