Cocktail Hour
Bad Advice Wednesday: Be Your Own Willy! Give Yourself a Minimum Word Count
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 10 comments
The self-discipline required for writing has always been at odds with my nature, which is fundamentally lazy. Right now, for example, I’m switching back and forth between this blank screen and Facebook Scrabble, and I’m also contemplating the guilty pleasure book that arrived from Amazon yesterday, A Year and Six Seconds by Isabel Gillies. It’s just warm enough that with a sweater I could read in the hammock.
But in addition to this Bad Advice Wednesday that David asked me to do, I’ve got a novel to write, and it’s not going to write itself. Not unless I do some typing. You might say that the novel won’t write itself no matter what. But I’ve found that’s not entirely true. When writing in the long form, it seems to me that my subconscious ends up doing most of the heavy lifting – as long as I give it a little kickstart, which I can manage no matter how unmotivated or uninspired I feel.
Furthur in Portland, Maine
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 15 comments
Friday night, Juliet and I and a lot of other people from Farmington (we saw friends and familiar faces on the highway, we saw them in line, we saw them at the concert, we saw them in the parking garage after) drove down to Portland (our Portland, the one in Maine) to see the remnants of the Grateful Dead perform in their latest incarnation. Juliet’s been following Furthur for a few years now. She collects tour posters, downloads concert recordings, buys t-shirts and tie-dyed trousers, travels all over the country making the “shows,” as they’re universally called, the focal point and excuse, really, for visits with friends and family.
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I’d never been. My worry was that I’d miss Jerry too much. I’ve been told (by Juliet) to get over it. This is a new band. But they play the old songs! Is my argument. I was never quite a deadhead, though I liked them a lot. I was, though, and remain, a Jerry head. He was a true genius in several guises, and whatever he touched turned to genius, too, including the Dead. He was also very funny and lighthearted and a drug addict who died young of exhaustion and diabetes. Continue reading →
Random Doodle Day: Sketches From My Journal
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 3 comments
After some consultation with my blog-mate, I have decided to upgrade the drawing of Super Bill, aka Captain Memoir. I don’t feel the earlier drawings captured his true super-ness.
Bad Advice Wednesday: The Annotated Table of Contents
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 9 comments
Table of Contents for "100 Famous Views of Edo"
Let’s say you have an idea for a nonfiction book, whether it’s a memoir, an extended personal essay, journalism, or something else. It’s hard to get started, isn’t it? Or if easy enough to get started, hard to keep going. Part of the problem is knowing where to start, and after that, where to go.
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Or you’ve finished a draft of a book and the chaptering came willy-nilly as you composed. There are holes in the narrative or in the stream of argument. The sections are of all sizes and methods and shapes. There’s no sense of progression, or if there is, the progression seems to stutter.
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Or say you’ve written four essays on a related theme. Growing up in Nigeria, for example. Or your life as a teacher and coach. Or in my case, more than 20 years ago, on my adventures in nature with my then girlfriend (now wife) Juliet.
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Or take it a little further–you’ve thought quite a bit on your subject and have some preliminary chapters put together and you want to go ahead and pitch your book idea to editors or agents. Continue reading →
Our Big Year
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 2 comments
ABOVE: JACK BLACK, OWEN WILSON, AND STEVE MARTIN IN THE BIG YEAR
I think the reason that I watch birds instead of birdwatch is that I’m reluctant to turn the woods into an arena. I’m already competitive enough in too many areas of my life. I don’t really mind if I’m a bad birder. Just as long as I get to see birds.
This was the problem I had with the book, The Big Year, though as you’ll see below from the review I wrote for the Christian Science Monitor, I liked it well enough.
The photo at the right is obviously a joke, reused from our Jonathan Franzen and the Great Swamp Warbler post. You will note that both Jack Black and Owen Wilson have aged considerably, while Steve Martin looks a lot younger.
What Bloody Man is That? (a review of “Sleep no More”)
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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We were a little late, leapt out of the cab on 10th Avenue, nothing to see on West 27th street toward the river but a couple of closed galleries north and a wall of blank warehouse faces south, pair of huge men hanging out a little ominously under a bare bulb down there. But that doorway—there was a ten-foot star above it, nothing flashy, flat-black as the building in fact, was clearly a clue, the first in an evening of clues and little resolution. We asked the men where the MacBeth performance was, if they knew where it might be. They looked at one another long. The huger one brightened very slightly. “You mean the Hotel?” he intoned. “The Hotel McKittrick?” Behind him the doors opened. A nattily dressed and fake-ish hotelman eyed us, said, “You’re not Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wed: Accept Your Small Self; Strive to be Larger
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 14 comments
I had every reason to be happy when I heard that Edith Pearlman had been nominated for the National Book Award. When my wife called to tell me the news she certainly expected to be happy. I am happy for Edith now, very happy, and I should have been happy for her then. After all, I had been lucky enough to be in the room when Emily Smith and Ben George, the founders of Lookout Books, had called to read Edith the glowing cover review of her book in The New York Times. That had been a thrilling moment, and we were on lifted up in its excitement, and news that she had now been nominated for the NBR should have provided me with a similar lift. Continue reading →
Are You a Megalomaniac? A Quiz For Writers
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 5 comments
1. You think your work will be remembered…
A. fondly
B. by your Mom
C. until next week
D. For All Time
Harbinger Hall
categories: Cocktail Hour / Our Best American Short Stories
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Here’s a story for our new category, “Our Best American Short Stories.” “Harbinger Hall” appeared in The Atlantic in December, 2004. Readers seemed evenly divided on the question of whether it represents a little boy’s fantasy or something real. I mean, real in a fictional sense, if that’s not too confusing. My answer is that I completely believe in the story we are told. By me. Or more accurately, by my narrator, who is not so much a version of me as he is an extension into adult consciousness of the protagonist, Bobby. And maybe then again an extension of Mr. D’Arcy. In an earlier post, I told the story of the Atlantic’s fact-checking of this story. And now, as we build our new feature, here’s the story itself. Continue reading →
