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I'm a writer and creative director. I make things, collect books, write fiction and don't understand Zen. I'm Vegan.

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Vonnegut’s Creative Writing 101

A great set of a writing rules from one of our finest writers.

  1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
  2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
  3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
  4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
  5. Start as close to the end as possible.
  6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
  7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
  8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

From Bagombo Snuff Box

What Zen Is

“Vast sky transparent throughout;
a bird flies like a bird. ”
- Dogen

Oddly, I’ve never read anything by Kurt Vonnegut.

I’ve always suspected I’d like his writing.

So, I’ve finally picked up a copy of Slaughterhouse Five.

So it goes.

I enjoyed Zone One quite a bit, but for literary horror, The Last Werewolf had more bite.

Stop by the very cool literary zine Metazen and give my story Oliver Pratt a read.

zone_one

Reading: Zone One

A literary zombie thriller from Colson Whitehead?

I can’t think of better Halloween reading. Another fantastic choice would have been the thrilling and completely entertaining The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan, but I’ve already read it.

Who wants to be that the zombie theme is really commentary on the modern self-absorbed, aimless masses? I wonder of Whitehead’s read any Gurdjieff?

James Hillman, visionary, iconoclast, father of Archetypal Psychology and intellectual successor to Jung has died. Hillman’s writings on Soul and Psyche have been influential to how I approach writing.

He’ll be missed.

thesenseofanending

The Sense of an Ending

After just winning the Booker Prize, I had push a few other reads aside (Sorry Hermann Hesse and Philip K. Dick but you guys are up next. Promise.) and jump this one to the front of the literature que. More on this book after the brief, but expectedly dazzling read.

It’s to fiction that we regularly and gratefully turn for the truest picture of life.

– Julian Barnes, from The Art of Fiction #165, an interview in the Paris Review.

nanowrimo2

Yes, it’s that time again

National Novel Writing Month is almost here and that means 30 days of writing madness if you take up the challenge to participate in the always fun NaNoWriMo.

The idea is simple: write a novel in a month.

No plot, no editing, no worries, just write. Because you can’t edit and refine the novel you haven’t yet written.