Month: March 2003

  • Two Questions

    I heard the President’s speech. So did most of everyone else, I imagine. I remain frustrated. I am willing to support unilateral action on our part; I’m willing to go along with this. But I’m still waiting for the answer to two simple questions, and I haven’t gotten the answer to either one yet. The…

  • Bumps in the road

    Found myself offline for almost a week right after switching the community over to new software but before completing the debugging, and during the time that our server changed software and ate our chat suite. I got a lot of writing done, all offline of course. And came back and started running like wild just…

  • My high school English teacher just called

    Sometimes wonderful things happen so out of the blue it nearly knocks you off your feet. Jim Rose, who taught me English my junior and senior years of high school, and whose teaching shaped both me and my writing, phoned today just as the five-year-old and I were putting two loaves of banana bread in…

  • Is reading the classics a waste of time?

    (This essay written in response to the Is reading the classics a waste of time? thread in the Forward Motion Community, also appears there.) For writers, reading the classics — the stories that have lasted for centuries because they were good, powerful, and in many ways timeless stories — is essential. What’s important is to…

  • Tossed a chapter, wrote a chapter …

    I threw out one chapter in its entirety this morning, and wrote a new one. These were villain chapters, and because my image of the villain (not who he is but what he is) has changed so drastically over the past ten years, the first appearances of the villain are all going to have to…

  • “In my opinion, …”

    It’s one of those little linguistic tics, both in speech and in writing, that is so pervasive it’s almost invisible. In my opinion … Three words, sometimes modified by various adjectives, that pretend to be something they are not, and attempt to do something that they should not succeed in doing. I don’t like the…

  • Two more chapters down

    I had a lot of revision to type in on Midnight Rain this morning, and a fair amount of new material to add. (New material being the stuff that I came up with this morning, as opposed to last month.) Because of conflicting family schedules, I did not have a lot of time to do…

  • My Older Son Turns Eighteen Today

    I now have two adult children. Two. I’m dazed. Download as PDFPrint Page