Cocktail Hour
Bad Advice Wednesday: 15 Great Writers’ Writing Advice Revisited
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Baby’s last snapshot.
1. Ernest Hemingway: “Kill your babies. Then kill your grown children, too.” Continue reading →
My Wife the Superhero–Part II
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Disguised as the mild-mannered Christine Woodward, my wife, Nina de Gramont, has written a page-turner of a love story starring the X-Men heroine, Rogue. This is Rogue, pre-X-Men, as a teenager, and I’ve got to tell you that books about teenage girls are not usually high on my reading list. But I loved this book–gobbled it up and even cried at the end.
But don’t listen to me….the reviews are pouring in for Rogue Touch and they are great:
Kirkus:
After the MFA? Another Great Writing Day
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 6 comments
Kerry Headley
My ceremonial hood and gown were still draped over a chair in the living room when I posted this on Facebook: Oh my God. Reading for pleasure. Post-MFA bliss. And I was in a state of bliss. After three years of reading, writing, and rereading and rewriting, I earned my MFA in creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. If I wasn’t reading, writing, revising, or thinking about my own work or the work of my classmates, I was doing all of the above in regard to the students I taught. Grad school flew by faster than I can believe. And now I have time to read all the books I bought and never opened. I also have time to sleep in and free-fall into the Internet rabbit hole to pursue weird true crime links and watch every cute cat video. (Don’t judge me. I just told you I worked my butt off for three years.) Continue reading →
Serial Sunday: Crash Barry’s “Tough Island”: Episode Seven
categories: Cocktail Hour
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“Truthfully, I hadn’t noticed her before.”
Episode Seven
SHE MAY HAVE been tall or short. Zaftig or junkie-rail-thin. A blonde, a brunette, a redhead or raven-haired. Doesn’t matter. I’m not gonna describe her, other than to tell you her skin was soft. And she was another man’s wife. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Wet
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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The path’s a brook
Baseball, Joe Dimaggio, and Pacifism: Colbert, How Can You Resist?
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Really? Joe DiMaggio? Another WWII novel?
I know. Like everything I write, this new novel, The Powers, just followed me around and insisted on being written till it wore down my resistance. It started during a conversation my then-draft-age sons were having about the Iraq War and whether they could in good conscience claim C.O. status. That topic led us to WWII, the one war we collectively tend to think of as the “good war,” which led me to think about 1941. Continue reading →
Meet the Keatles!
categories: Cocktail Hour
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I’m proud to say that my essay on John Lennon and John Keats (and how they became who they are) is out in The Oxford American, which just hit the newstands.
Here’s the first page and the illustration by my new favorite artist, Derrick Dent.
Bad Advice Wednesday: How to Work with an Editor
categories: Cocktail Hour
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A while ago a former student of mine had a book accepted for publication. This was great news of course, the best. Happy times followed. Happy moments at least.
Then the student got the edited version back from his editor. He called me, he wrote me, he cried. He didn’t know what to make of all the marked-up pages and the long letter full of suggestions and re-workings.
What I told him was that this meant he had a good editor, one who thought a lot about the books he took on and one who cared.
Which was true except that I remembered when I got my first edited manuscript back. The howls of rage. “It’s like they cut off my arm,” I yelled to my wife about one deleted passage. (I wish I was exaggerating for comic effect; I am not.)
You’re Never Alone When You’re with a Drone
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Not too worried about drones? Maybe you should be.
Here’s my cartoon:
And for more on the danger of drones in the woods, here’s my latest blog post at OnEarth… Continue reading →
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” by Ben Fountain
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 1 comment
Ben Fountain
War is a petri dish for the creation of great literature. Setting aside the absence from the “forgotten war” in Korea, the United States‘ recent military engagements have inspired The Naked and the Dead and Catch 22 from World War II and The Things They Carried and Dispatches from the Vietnam War. Yet until recently there has been a glaring absence of a defining work from the War on Terror. Until now. Continue reading →
