voice | voice
Jul.29.2010
The Gihon River Review – Spring 2010/Volume 14
I used to find literary magazines in my mailbox regularly, and I don’t anymore. That’s a shame. For the world's struggling writers, litmags are bread and butter. Or, more properly put, they’re our likeliest outlet. While they don’t often pay,...
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Jul.25.2010
Settle Into Your Plainness
1. Ask yourself why doing the obvious is so difficult. The question is profound in its simplicity. If it were easy, we'd all be doing it.
2. Doing the obvious-fundamentals-is to care enough to find true purpose in the mundane. If you can't do this, you're not plain...
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Jun.25.2010
Editing this chapter of a previously published novel I hope to have re-published has been difficult. One of the first editing responsibilities is always to ask of a manuscript: How can I improve this without significant structural changes? It could be that a few tweaks to improve word use and to...
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Jun.18.2010
The MORE cover bragged, the most revealing interview yet--Sharon Stone. In the highlight, Sharon says something like, you never really know an actor, it's always just a persona. Then she went onto cartoon herself in the interview as a tramp with brains, but was wise enough to mention divorce,...
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Jun.13.2010
For the past three days I've become obsessed with finding the right cover for my book. This is not my job, nor my expertise, but a voice in me told me: go and find it. I scanned the internet in search for royalty free images, that were also free. I found this site http://sx.hu and spent so much...
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Mar.09.2010
How does one sustain the life of an artist? And how is that different (if at all) from simply sustaining a life?
I'll be talking about this with a choreographer, a director, and a dancer at CIIS this coming Saturday (the 13th)
at the California Institute of Integral Studies (7-9). (See directions...
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Feb.22.2010
Parent/teacher meeting looms on Wednesday afternoon. Middle son reminds me of this as I ladle up a thick lamb stew guaranteed to ward off the cold weather that clings to our bones. He warns me that I should avoid his English teacher;
- Mom, he says, I don't want you to lose it with him.
- Why is...
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Jan.04.2010
Rewriting comes in many guises and brings with it both pain and pleasure. For me it all depends on when I am rewriting. If I have to rewrite on the editor's request then it is a pain, because by then I am already well into the next novel. If it is during the revision stages of a novel (before it...
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Dec.18.2009
As my publish date draws near and the structure of the book is coming to life, I feel reflective, calm, at peace almost. Aaah, who I am kidding, I feel giddy and so excited. Can you believe it? I wrote a book. I am publishing a book and it is so exciting. I finally get to share with others in my...
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Dec.17.2009
Anytime any writer (well, not all writers, but some) goes away from who he or she is in terms of creating a character, people start having issues. On these blogs pages in times past, we've talked about the ability to write about anyone or anything--that I could suddenly conjure forth a a gay Asian...
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