The smallest literary magazine ever? Matchbook Story is a lit mag published inside, you guessed it, a book of matches, with only enough room for a 300-character story.
At seven am every morning, I pop out of bed and drink a freshly squeezed orange juice and eat a zucchini frittata. Before I do any errands or school work, I spend three hours working on the latest chapter of my book. I eat lunch outside while reading volume two of Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago.” In the afternoons, I revise what I wrote the week prior. I have a light dinner and then get back to reading Solzhenitsyn. Before bed, I write in my journal for an hour and keep the pen and notebook on my bedside table in case I have interesting dreams or book ideas in the middle of the night.
Or not.
I’m a graduate student. I have two jobs. I have a forty-five minute commute through New York City almost every morning. I’m usually rushing. I’m not really a morning person. Sometimes I get headaches from staring at my computer all day and I would rather cook a fun dinner when I get home than write anything. I do a lot of writing for school and for my jobs, but I’m not always good at prioritizing my own writing projects.
Scottish comedian and writer Al Kennedy had a piece up at The Guardian earlier this month about a day in the life of a writer:
…I usually compare my life to those of so many other novelists who are (perhaps inaccurately) quoted as saying they “always complete the final draft in my suite at the Carlyle” or “my writing room faces the smaller of our lakes and has a delightfully inspiring view across the Chilterns/Dartmoor/the Swiss Alps/Dollis Hill” or “I always get up at 4am, sip my organic mint tea – dew-kissed leaves fresh from the sunken garden – and then five or six thousand words tumble forth before Freddie and Timmy and the dogs wake up and I have to oversee Marta while she makes them breakfast – she’s from the Philippines and simply doesn’t understand toast” and so forth.
It’s mostly a spoof piece but she manages to be refreshingly realistic. We’re not all going to be able to wake up to the sunrise at our lakeside writers retreat. We’re going to have gigs and side jobs. We’re going to be grumpy in the mornings. We’re going to not want to write all the time, but we’ll force ourselves to because that’s our calling.
What would my own ideal daily schedule look like? Here’s a non-ironic fantasy: Read more »
Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner DWW for getting a free copies of the chapbooks Typewriter by Jimmy Chen and Less Shiny by Mary Miller.
This week, we are giving away TWO books: The Drunk Sonnets by Daniel Bailey and We Were Eternal and Gigantic by Evelyn Hampton. The Drunk Sonnets full-length book of poems by Daniel Bailey. From forgiveness in a beehive to tiny banquets for retired janitors, Bailey’s celebrated sonnet sequence arrives in a perfectbound volume that you can carry and eat and hold against your heart when your heart catches a shake. Bailey’s work has appeared in No Colony, Abraham Lincoln, NOÖ Journal, elimae, Opium Magazine and more. We Were Eternal and Giganticis a collection of prose and poetry from Evelyn Hampton, the editor of Dewclaw. We Were Eternal and Gigantic asks: What do you do when there’s a shape in you the size of your body? When some haircuts are wolverine kits and some cling to bulwarks? When you want to be more sincere but the economy says NO / EAT MORE? Doesn’t husband sound like has-been? Maybe you are in love with the one who took a sun fish from your mom’s aquarium. Maybe in America, the male lead has lost his really great mustard-colored slacks. Remember: when the world is too much with you, the world can can still look white from the air.
I clearly remember the time I read through my first literary sex scene.
I was probably around 10, or 11 years old, and I was probably reading some adult book I had pilfered from my mom’s bedside table or that someone else had pilfered from their own mom’s bedside table. Where the book came from, or even it’s title, isn’t important, what is important is that Anne Rice was behind it — and spared no details.
Obviously, I wasn’t old enough to understand what was going on in the pages I skimmed through during one long summer afternoon, but even as a very young writer, one who had just barely begun to record life with big, loopy letters, I was concerned with how Rice actually got the courage to write such lurid details. And they were lurid. At least to a 10-year-old.
These days, I have that same concern.
Yes, I’m older. Yes, I understand sex and see it as a natural part of life (I somehow missed the whole Shame and Guilt dance Roman Catholicism can often force its young followers to do…and left the church before they could tell me it was even worse to do It before marriage), but I’m still much preoccupied with putting it into my own writing.
I mean, we all like to watch sex scenes. And we all like to read them, too. They’re fun. They break up the monotony. They give us ideas. Etc. But. How does one create a sex scene that doesn’t (ahem…) suck? Read more »
What happened to patient 67? An abstract plot twist, that's what.
I don’t know if anyone really noticed, but the advertising campaign for Scorsese’s latest joint, the misty Shutter Island, was built around the film’s “shocking twist ending.” This was interesting to me — instead of advertising the cast or the director, or flashing a bunch of positive reviews, most of the ads for this flick I saw seemed to hint at some genius plot twist, something so mind-bending that I had to go experience it for my self. So I did. And although I thought the ending was actually kind of obvious, it did get me thinking about other famous plot twists that screenwriters have employed over the years.
First though, what separates a good twist ending from a gimmicky or contrived deus ex machina? Not much really. I think a good twist ending should illuminate everything that we’ve seen so far not only in a new way, but also in a way that resonates with the theme of what we’re watching. We should want to mentally race through what we’ve just seen, ascribing new significance to everything. We should be Totally. Freaked. Out. But the ending should also never, ever feel forced or non-sensical; then, the emotion the viewer is left with is not surprise or amazement but anger, anger that they’ve just wasted two hours of their life. (The Wikipedia entry on plot twists is actually really interesting, in that it classifies the different official names for each iteration.) Anyways, here are some of my favorite plot twists: Read more »
Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Meagan for getting a free copy of Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler.
This week, we are giving away TWO chapbooks: Typewriter by Jimmy Chen and Less Shiny by Mary Miller. Chen’s Typewriter is a collection of thirteen flash fictions by Jimmy Chen concerning the fluctuating technologies of writing, searching, and finding unlikely things in an all too likely world. Chen’s fiction has appeared in Best of the Web 2009, McSweeney’s, Fourteen Hills, No Colony and many other publications. He is a regular contributor to HTMLGIANT. Less Shiny is a collection of short short stories from the author of Big World (short flight/long drive books 2009). Mary Miller’s stories have appeared in the Oxford American, New Stories from the South 2008, Mississippi Review, Black Clock, Quick Fiction, Barrelhouse, Hobart, and elsewhere.
Learning how to edit your own work is crucial for a writer.
When it comes to my own writing, I crush easy. I fall in love with sentences, placing them on pedestals like God himself penned them rather than little ol’ me. I feel like they’re etched in stone, like I can’t hit backspace a few times and make them disappear. It’s a problem a lot of beginning writers have. In a perfect world, we’d have editors to send our stuff to and kick back while they go nuts with red ink and spit it back spick and span. But this ain’t a perfect world, and we’re not nearly successful enough to afford those dudes, so the next best option is ourselves. Being a good self-editor is important for a young writer. It allows us to screen our writing and weed out a good chunk of the faultiness in it. I’m no expert, but in the last year I’ve improved my editing abilities a lot with a few steps I’ve learned through experimentation and experience. Read more »
How much would you pay for this adorably bedraggled kangamouse? A dollar? Less? What if it was a gift from a soldier in Vietnam to his two young sons back home, a gift that they worshipped alternately as “The Great Faa,” and as “Mr. Peepers” — and a gift that ultimately divided the family and lead to an exorcism via toilet? That seems worth a little more than a dollar, right? That’s because there is a certain value to stories, to histories; this is why people pay thousands for certain baseballs or comic books, this is why experts on Antiques Roadshow can tell people with a straight face that their ancient button collection from the civil war, with letters to prove its authenticity, is worth more than my car.
I clearly remember the time I read through my first literary sex scene.
