A Book of Uncommon Prayer
Reading Log favorite Matthew Vollmer edited this particular anthology, an artifact that began as a personal writing project and expanded to include the work of many writers. Everything in here…
NonBinary Review 8: Sun Tzu’s The Art of War
All of the stories, poems and other literary works in Issue 8 of NonBinary Review are connected in some way to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. The first section…
Literary Privilege, MFAs, and that Marxist chip on my Shoulder
Writing is less and less a thing that people can do as a job, and the price of admission is getting higher. With their spreading proliferation, MFAs in Creative Writing…
On Editing
Throughout my undergrad writing experience, “editing” simply meant speed-reading my paper out loud to catch any glaring errors (full disclosure -this is also about all the editing I do for…
Revising Prose, Carlin, Euphemism and the Official Style
Richard Lanham’s book Revising Prose -now in its fourth edition- has the worst cover of any book I’ve read this year. Something about living in academia goes hand-in-hands with horrible…
Writing, Word Counts, NaNoWriMo and Productivity
First off, I’m not doing NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. I have no problems with it, but it’s not for me, or in line with what I’m trying to…
Music for Writing
I usually listen to some kind of background music while I’m writing. Since I play music myself I have to be somewhat particular about what I listen to or I’ll…
John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist
I’m generally extremely shy about craft-based books on writing. I have yet to read Stephen King’s On Writing, and ever Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer was picked up rather…
Reading Like a Writer
I bought this book a few years ago for a creative writing class at CSUB; most of the non-fiction on my shelves seems to be there for similar reasons.…