[Lake District, England, Summer 2002: Wrote some really bad poetry in that journal on top of the Loughrigg Fell watching the sun go down.]The last class of every semester in English 101 I always give this quick little talk about how writing is time travel.Let me explain: Future generations will get the opportunity to read… Continue reading Writing is Time Travel
What does it mean to be diseased with an infection of the page? The Writer’s Disease can be defined as the deep need to dismantle a piece of art to figure out how it works. Mechanics and musicians do it. Think about the last song you listened to: “Maps” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs reminds me of… Continue reading The Writer’s Disease
People often ask writers where their ideas come from and usually the answer comes in many ways that you never expected. Everyone’s mileage might vary, but when I’m looking for ideas, they never show up. Usually, it happens when I’m bored out of my mind. Take, for example, Catholic School in Connecticut in ninth grade. My… Continue reading Where do ideas come from?
Good morning! Happy Friday.This Sunday I’m one of the featured writers for the Sunday Prose Series hosted by the Writers Guild of Bloomington at the Monroe County Public Library. I’ll be reading some new short stories for about twenty minutes and it starts at 3pm in room 1c.Hope to see you there!
In my year-end newsletter, I talked about how much I loved Benjamin Percy’s Thrill Me– his collection of essays on writing fiction. Percy is the author of Red Moon and the recent Dark Net as well as the writer behind Green Arrow and Teen Titans and a recent run on James Bond. I finally managed… Continue reading Five Things I Learned from Benjamin Percy’s Thrill Me
I’m looking for a full-time job, hopefully still in education because that’s where the bulk of my career capital is.I’m challenging myself to submit short stories four times a month for the duration of 2018 to reach the goal of getting one short story published in a lit magazine. As a result, I’m writing a… Continue reading Right Now
Good morning everyone! I’m going to send weekly newsletters on Fridays with a couple of things from the previous week that fueled my work. Sometimes they’ll be articles, other times they’ll be music, comics, just a roundabout of 3 to 5 things that I found interesting from the previous week. If you’d like to get it,… Continue reading Not Depressed
What are you looking to achieve? That seems to plague us more and more every day with so many productivity gurus getting us down to inbox zero.How about inbox none? Most things on the Internet are shallow. Like email. I never check it more than twice a day. I don’t even post anything on my… Continue reading Ken Follett and Life’s 3 Acts.
Today’s message from Noah Hawley (author of Before The Fall and creator and showrunner of Fargo and Legion): “I try to build the work around my life as opposed to my life around the work.” I have it taped inside the first volume of 2018′s daybooks, because that’s what I’m shooting for this year.davidpress.net:I gave up… Continue reading Previously on…
You may have noticed that I’ve deleted my Twitter and Facebook accounts and I’m no longer updating my blog or Instagram. Recently, I read Cal Newport’s Deep Work and So Good They Can’t Ignore You, and I realized that social media and my blog does not really help me work on anything that I value. If anything, they take me… Continue reading What I’m Doing Now: Why I’m off Social Media.
