I’ve been thinking, this week, about the politics of communication and about an older radical that I used to do activist stuff with. The starting point for this reflection is an article that I read. The topic of the article doesn’t matter, but it was smart and I mostly agreed with it. But I was …
One very obvious component of the writing practice that I’ve taken up in these “Creating Through the Crisis” posts is the need to come up with something to write about each week. My basic approach to doing that is to think about what has been on my mind lately, and then choose one of those …
I don’t generally pay a lot of attention to transitions dictated by the calendar. I don’t do much to mark my birthday, for instance, and I’ve never been given to making resolutions just because the count of years clicks up by one. I’m not claiming that this is any better than any other way of …
I like fanfiction. That’s perhaps something that someone who wants to be taken seriously as a reader, as a writer, and as a sayer-of-things about the state of the world shouldn’t admit, but it’s true. I’m not going to say what fandoms I enjoy, but I read a fair bit of it, and I’ve (pseudonymously) …
It’s pretty clear that a lot of people don’t understand the way that more extreme elements on the right try to build support for their agenda of harm and violence and a base to pursue it by organizing things like the anti-queer/anti-trans actions across the country last week and the convoy occupation last year. Not …
I alluded in a few places last week to the fact that a substantial piece of writing was rather rapidly coming together, and today I officially set Chapter 7 of my current book project aside as “done enough” for the time being – so, more polished than a raw first draft, but probably pretty different …
Working on a book in 2020 has been quite a ride. I mean, I can’t complain too much – the horrors of the world have at points made it hard to generate the focus that writing requires, but I’ve managed. And I have, long after I had hoped, a draft of what is provisionally Chapter …
I really wanted to like this book more than I did. I like the author – I’ve enjoyed her acting and her range of online projects, as well as her memoir a few years back. I also read a lot of books about process – this one frames it as process related to “creativity” rather …
Three weeks before the deadline that I set at the beginning of the year, and five weeks after my most optimistic interim guess at when I might actually be able to finish it, I have a complete done-enough-for-now draft of Chapter 4 of my main current book project. Yay! Won’t be able to start Chapter …
A book of essays – genre-bending ones – by someone who is “sometimes called a poet, sometimes an essayist, sometimes a lyric essayist, sometimes a prose poet” (101). Some are about writing, many are about life, and most feel like they follow closely the fluid movement of the author’s mind. Some cleverness and some lovely …