I began my 2016 NaNoWriMo on fire: thanks to a midnight start, I cranked out more than 9,000 words on the first day. By Day 4, I’d launched up to 15,000 words. As of Monday, November 7, I had written 17,643 words — I was WAY ahead of schedule, so I decided to take November 8, ElectionContinue reading “NaNoWriMo 2016: getting back to work”
Category Archives: writing
Kelly Luce and a literary communion
Last night I went to Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma to see my friend Kelly Luce read from her new novel, Pull Me Under. Kelly was in my workshop group at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in summer 2015; another fellow Sewanee alum, Jason Skipper, teaches at PLU and had organized Kelly’s visit to the campus. IContinue reading “Kelly Luce and a literary communion”
Lit Crawl & Wordstock 2016: the recap
It’s been a week now since Lit Crawl and Wordstock. And what a week it’s been. I haven’t written much at all since Tuesday night, but this post has been brewing since last weekend, and it’s been a welcome change to take some time and look back on last Saturday with so much love and friendship.Continue reading “Lit Crawl & Wordstock 2016: the recap”
Lit Crawl Portland and Wordstock 2016
I’m taking a short break from NaNoWriMo this weekend to catch a train to Portland, OR and attend Lit Crawl and Wordstock, two of the year’s biggest literary events in one of my favorite literary cities! I wrote about Wordstock last year, but this year I’ll be volunteering (I’ll be a door monitor), so in addition toContinue reading “Lit Crawl Portland and Wordstock 2016”
NaNoWriMo 2016: starting over
People have been asking me on social media if I’m participating in NaNoWriMo this year. Friends, former students, readers who liked my first NaNoWriMo attempt (Hagridden) — I even got a Facebook event invitation from NaNoWriMo executive director Grant Faulkner. I’ve told them all the same thing: of course I’m participating! Except, as I’ve done aContinue reading “NaNoWriMo 2016: starting over”
Tacoma’s Creative Colloquy doesn’t crawl, it PARTIES
Last Wednesday, I ventured into the heart of Tacoma’s Stadium District to experience as much of my new hometown’s creative and literary scenes as I could in a single night. The event was the second annual Creative Colloquy Crawl, a kind of literary and creative “pub crawl” through businesses in one of Tacoma’s coolest and most creative neighborhoods.Continue reading “Tacoma’s Creative Colloquy doesn’t crawl, it PARTIES”
Celebrating 40 with my literary family
Last Friday, my first novel, Hagridden, turned two years old. And I turned 40. About six weeks before that, I moved away from Portland, that beautiful city full of beautiful writers and publishers that I have called home and family, respectively, for the past five years. So for my 40th birthday, I decided to drive the two hoursContinue reading “Celebrating 40 with my literary family”
What’s past is prologue
In my series of blog posts (and, this past spring, my series of writing workshops) on researching for historical fiction, I’ve discussed “going to the source,” by which I usually mean interviewing live people, getting expert opinions or local insights or eyewitness accounts. But as I explained in my workshop a few months back, sometimes theContinue reading “What’s past is prologue”
Dream-plotting
Last night I dreamed that I was having coffee at a window bar in a coffee shop when a person approached me hesitatingly and asked if I was a writer. I was wearing my Plot tshirt (an orange triangle representing Freytag’s Pyramid and the word “Plot”), and the person (who was genderless in my dream)Continue reading “Dream-plotting”
My writing space
From time to time, I assign my students an essay about their writing spaces. I share other essays about other spaces, some fairly spot-on (like an older one by my friend Alexis M. Smith) and some a little more out there (like this one on silence and sacred spaces by Pico Iyer). And then I haveContinue reading “My writing space”
Samuel Snoek-Brown 