Day 3 Thursday, April 8, 2010 There were too many highlights today, and it’s hard to single out the second-best moment. Was it the train ride south to the Hague, the countryside rolling by as we wrote postcards in the flashing sunlight? The splendid Maritshuis museum, with its brilliant focus on the best of theContinue reading “The Netherlands: Days 3 & 4”
Tag Archives: writing
The Netherlands: Intro and Days 1 & 2
As I did with my travel journal from Vienna last fall, I am going to start posting my journal from my recent trip to The Netherlands. And, like the Vienna posts, I’m going to break them up by days, partly to keep the posts (relatively) short but also to try and replicate the journal-writing experience.Continue reading “The Netherlands: Intro and Days 1 & 2”
The good times are killing me
We writers and academics love to ask each other what books we’d want with us if ever we’re stranded on a desert island, and we love offering clever, literary answers: Jane Austen, Cormac McCarthy, the Oxford English Dictionary, the Dhammapada. But we’re lying to ourselves.
A Writer’s Notebook: Capt. Snoek, the elder: Adventures at sea with Ted Snoek’s father (Pt. 2)
Today, we’re we should have been on our way home from the Netherlands (see the note at the bottom), so I’ll conclude the story of my great-grandfather and return to other writing exercises next week. As with last week’s entry, I’m still working from the basic interview-storytelling exercise I mentioned in the first “Capt. Snoek”Continue reading “A Writer’s Notebook: Capt. Snoek, the elder: Adventures at sea with Ted Snoek’s father (Pt. 2)”
A Writer’s Notebook: Capt. Snoek, the elder: Adventures at sea with Ted Snoek’s father (Pt. 1)
Because we’re in the Netherlands, land of my ancestors, I thought I’d continue the story of my great-grandfather William Karel Snoek, Sr., who left his home in Hoorn, Holland at the age of 12 and took to a life at sea. There is no new exercise this week, though–I’m still working from the basic interview-storytellingContinue reading “A Writer’s Notebook: Capt. Snoek, the elder: Adventures at sea with Ted Snoek’s father (Pt. 1)”
A Writer’s Notebook: Three perspectives
I have several friends who are visual artists, some of whom also write. In comments on previous blog posts and via several e-mails, I’ve been chatting about the relationship between art and writing with my friends Lori Ann Bloomfield and Crystal Elerson, and I thought it might be fun to try a sketching exercise asContinue reading “A Writer’s Notebook: Three perspectives”
Script Frenzy
I don’t expect anything like the success I had with NaNoWriMo, partly because I’ll be on vacation for 10 out of April’s 30 days, but I plan to participate in Script Frenzy this year. I’ve long wanted to adapt my dissertation novel as a graphic novel, and I’ve taken a few tentative stabs at itContinue reading “Script Frenzy”
After life
Look upon the world as a bubble, regard it as a mirage; who thus perceives the world, him Mara, the king of death, does not see. ~ Dhammapada, Canto XIII, verse 170 I’ve become a student of many aspects of many religions, but one of the areas I pay most attention to is death andContinue reading “After life”
The Road
It’s been a long time coming. When I first heard Cormac McCarthy‘s brilliant novel The Road was being developed as a film, I noted the release date on my mental calendar and held my breath. That was back in early 2008. When the movie finally did get released more than a year and a halfContinue reading “The Road”
The hardest thing about writing
I’m preparing one of my novels for submission, and I’m writing a synopsis. I hate synopses. Like all prejudice, it’s an irrational loathing–I always feel like I’m crushing the story, stripping away the beauty and leaving just a skeleton, and I can’t help but think that if people want to know what a book isContinue reading “The hardest thing about writing”
Samuel Snoek-Brown 