My mother is retiring from 36 years of teaching, and to honor her, my sister, my brother, and I threw her a surprise party while I was down visiting during my PCA/ACA conference. My sister and my mom’s good friend Debbie, also a teacher, also organized a scrapbook for people to leave memories of myContinue reading “A Writer’s Notebook: an essay about Mom”
Tag Archives: Writer's Notebook
A Writer’s Notebook: News stories
Believe it or not, this is a true story. Sort of. I remember studying H. P. Lovecraft in college, though at the time we studied him as literature, not gospel. I was enchanted by his name, Lovecraft, as though it was a commandment: here is the craft of writing fiction, and you shall adore it.Continue reading “A Writer’s Notebook: News stories”
A Writer’s Notebook: a reading
I had thought to sneak in a little writing this week during the PCA/ACA conference I’m attending, and believe me, I’ve written PLENTY, but very, very little of it has been creative in the strictest sense. It’s mostly conference notes. So I don’t have a Writer’s Notebook today. I did, however, read a piece ofContinue reading “A Writer’s Notebook: a reading”
A Writer’s Notebook: life study / character notes
This is a true story. For now. The taxi driver’s name was Muhammad. He is from Pakistan. He has warm, kind eyes, something between hazel and blue in the dim passing light of the street lamps on the highway. A faint downturn at the outer edges, where his dark olive skin creases in fans fromContinue reading “A Writer’s Notebook: life study / character notes”
A Writer’s Notebook: Mapping a story
This past Tuesday, I visited Zayed University to speak to an education class studying youth literature and preparing to write young adult stories of their own. (I’ll write a fuller post on this experience later this weekend.) We talked about books they were reading and how they might begin to write their own stories. TheContinue reading “A Writer’s Notebook: Mapping a story”
A Writer’s Notebook: “Bridge the Gap”
I’ve done photo stories before (here, here, and here), but this one is a little different: this one involves two photos. I’ll explain more below, but just so you know up front why I’m using two pictures, the idea here is to get from the picture on the left to the picture on the rightContinue reading “A Writer’s Notebook: “Bridge the Gap””
A Writer’s Notebook: “mentor texts”
I think I might accidentally have started a new novel. It doesn’t look like much in this exercise, I admit, but believe me, it’s frighteningly large inside my brain. I don’t have time for this right now, frankly, and I’m going to have to put this on hold for a while (I might save itContinue reading “A Writer’s Notebook: “mentor texts””
A Writer’s Notebook: dream journal
I can’t explain why, but I woke up with this in my head: Like everyone else, the caricaturist had good days and bad days. On good days, the people would laugh and clap their hands, touch his shoulder, would point to their hairdos or their cocked grins and say, “Oh, that’s me exactly! That’s meContinue reading “A Writer’s Notebook: dream journal”
New publication(s)
Some publications news: I have two new stories in the March issue of Red Fez, “Still Alive” and “Dream with Enough Conviction.” You might recognize “Dream with Enough Conviction”: an earlier draft of it appeared here about ten months ago, as a Writer’s Notebook entry on music and fiction. And you might recognize Red Fez,Continue reading “New publication(s)”
A Writer’s Notebook: Description (from high school!)
This is a bit embarrassing, but what the hell — the essence of exercises is to attempt to write, and sometimes the results can be ugly. Besides, I have the defense that I wrote this almost twenty years ago, when I was just some high school kid who didn’t know anything about anything. I awokeContinue reading “A Writer’s Notebook: Description (from high school!)”
Samuel Snoek-Brown 