“Balloon face.” Mask on red balloon in decorative reeds. Abu Dhabi, UAE, 31 October 2010. I’m a few days into NaNoWriMo by now, and I’m working on characters. So far, my favorite is probably the seductive but cold (and ultimately evil) Portia Lynn, whose stone-white face and emotional distance this mask makes me think of. Continue reading “Photo blog 28”
Category Archives: fiction
Some tips for new WriMos
I was browsing my Middle East Regional forum over at the NaNoWriMo website today and found a post thread that I imagine is showing up on everyone’s discussion forums: tips for first-time WriMos (a “WriMo” is someone participating in NaNoWriMo, though to be honest, I’m not a fan of the term). The first question, unsurprisingly,Continue reading “Some tips for new WriMos”
A Writer’s Notebook: Photo story
My wife turned our laptop around the other day and showed me this photo and said, “You should write about this.” So, first, the photo, and then the writing. And then, the exercise. People think I do this for money. I put out a box and I don’t object when people drop money in it. Continue reading “A Writer’s Notebook: Photo story”
A new story
As promised in the last Writer’s Notebook entry, I wrote a story for Ryan Werner’s Our Band Could Be Your Lit blog. I’ve been a fan of this project since before it began, back when it was still an exercise on my blog, but I’m awfully damn impressed with where Ryan is taking it. AndContinue reading “A new story”
A Writer’s Notebook: Our Band Could Be Your Lit
This week the writer’s notebook will get delayed. That’s not because I’m not working, but because I’m working toward something. I’ve agreed to write a guest-blog story for Our Band Could Be Your Lit, so I’m using this week’s Notebook to work on that. But the story won’t get posted until Sunday (and probably won’tContinue reading “A Writer’s Notebook: Our Band Could Be Your Lit”
A Writer’s Notebook: “Uninvited Guests”
Like my early Writer’s Notebook entry “1,000 words,” this exercise requires I post a picture. This picture, though, comes with a title and a caption, which I’ve included with the pic at the right (for the full citation, see the end of the story). Children’s lit fans might recognize the title of this post and/orContinue reading “A Writer’s Notebook: “Uninvited Guests””
Last lines
We writers pay a lot of attention to first lines. They’re supremely important — for the reader, they are the opening impression, the first glimpse not only at the story but also at the style of the story and even (dare I say it in this age of modern criticism) at the author. For theContinue reading “Last lines”
10 tips on writing from the Chronicle of Higher Ed
One of my professors from graduate school posted on her Facebook a link to an article, “10 Tips on How to Write Less Badly,” in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It’s a strange title, partly because the URL truncates the title to read “10-Tips-on-How-to-Write-Less,” which is precisely the opposite of this article’s purpose: The tipsContinue reading “10 tips on writing from the Chronicle of Higher Ed”
New fiction by David Maizenberg
A long time ago, I accidentally found an amazing little collection of short stories that felt unlike anything I’d read before–and in the best possible way. The book was Invitations to a Bridge Burning, by David Maizenberg, and they profoundly changed the way I think about fiction. I had by that time been through enoughContinue reading “New fiction by David Maizenberg”
A Writer’s Notebook: Prose haiku
Technically, this is just a very short short-short, the flashiest of flashes (to borrow a phrase from Rowan Atkinson in Love Actually), but I’ll explain below why I call it a “prose haiku.” She sat on a thick window sill outside the store and tucked into tiny chicken wings, so small they looked like friedContinue reading “A Writer’s Notebook: Prose haiku”
Samuel Snoek-Brown 