Congratulations!

I just heard the absolutely thrilling news that Heidi Durrow’s novel Light-skinned-ed Girl just won the Bellwether Prize for Literature of Social Change and will be published by Algonquin Books in Fall 2009!
Heidi and I were NYFA fellows together and organized a reading at the Housing Works Bookstore some years ago. I remember when she [...]

Writers Helping Writers, Assumed Rejections, and Cake!

Good things first: e got me a “Happy Book Deal” cake this weekend and even as I type this I want another slice. (No, really, where is it? I want another slice.) I asked him if I would get a cake for every book deal and he said yes. Isn’t he wonderful? I hope this [...]

For Yojo*

Today is Yojo’s birthday. She hasn’t been feeling well, so I hope this finds her feeling better. I hope her voice returned. I hope she enjoys her day.
I think I first met Yojo my second year at college. I don’t remember exactly if it was that year or the one before, but I do remember [...]

How Books Save Me

I love books, always have. And by that I mean the physical object of a book itself: thick pages, crisp black type you can feel beneath your finger, that hard binding, that tough spine, how when you flip through the pages they fall in a cascading arc, blindingly quick, and the air fills with that [...]

A Day of Books, Stories, More Books, More Stories, and Long Lines (AWP Day 1)

I’ve been at the AWP conference all day. So many writers. So many choices. Such narrow escalators. Book-fair tables for miles. Only three stalls in each women’s bathroom, talk about lines! Let’s just say it’s been a jam-packed day.
The first panel I attended was “Shaping a Short Story Collection”—first thing in the morning, in a [...]

Write Away

Famous Writer I Admire So Very Much smiled at me as I came in today.
Does this matter? Can’t I write on a day when Famous Writer doesn’t smile at me? Well, of course I can. But sometimes it’s nice to think that I’m here writing, and she’s here writing, and we’re both just, I don’t [...]

Supporting the WGA Strike

As I blearily wake up to continue my pursuit of the NaNoWriMo high I’ve had for the past five days, this is the second day the film and TV writers in the WGA are on strike. If you haven’t seen it already, a great post on the screenwriter John August’s site explains reasons here, and [...]

Collecting Short Stories

I have two pitches to complete in order to answer two separate, and exciting, invitations. I have other projects awaiting my attention. A novel brewing. An old novel wondering after its fate. Yet… I keep getting pulled back to my short story collection. I tell myself it’s so totally impractical and can’t I do something [...]

Keep At It (The Yearly Smack on the Head)

This past year has been a long, slow stall for me. I like to brush off the rejections—I tell myself I’m brushing them off—but I wonder if instead I’m hanging on so I can mull over them later when no one’s looking. Truth is, for a year I’ve written things of no real consequence. Ghostwriting [...]

Proximity

It is a strange feeling to sit not three feet from a writer you admire while she marks up her printed pages with a blue pen. You wonder: is that a new novel? a story? something I will soon someday read? But you cannot look. She is here to write, not to be ogled, just [...]

Living Dolls!

I just have to take a moment to plug the new photobook by Courtney Summers: Living Dolls (Book One). Some of you may already know this talented photographer and writer, but if not, the photos in her “Living Dolls” series will be an exhilarating introduction. I first saw the images in this series on Courtney’s [...]

How I Came to Be

Seeing Lit Kitten’s mention of Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye jolted me. It’s been a long time since I read that book, so long I couldn’t recall a word of it. Still, I can’t say I’d be the person I am today (or the writer, which for me has become the same thing) if I [...]

Helper

Writers help other writers—well, sometimes they do. A long time ago, when I had the opportunity to volunteer at literary magazines and read slush, that’s what I loved the most: the chance at finding a good story by an unknown and being the one to bring it to the board for consideration.
It’s been a while [...]

Kick Me

I am in need of a good kick in the pants. I thought, for some moments, that this weekend might be it: I ran into a fellow graduate of my MFA program and we talked about regrets before a row of sinks in the bathrooms. She had some, though she didn’t like to use the [...]

The Best First Line of a Short Story… Ever?

Responding to my post about how much I love first lines, Adam told me that his high school English teacher used to say that the best opening line for a short story, ever, was this:
“None of them knew the color of the sky.” —from “Open Boat” by Stephen Crane
Now, no matter what I think of [...]

On Ideas, Fragments of Ideas, and the Red Room

In my mind right now is a tiny little thing. It started smaller than a pea, just this miniature glob knocking around up in there, sometimes I’d notice it, but most times I’d just let it be. It’s this idea I have. For the past few days I had a headache, so I couldn’t think [...]

distraction no. 99: 2006 in Review

I started posting sporadically in this blog in 2006. I started by carrying some older posts from another anonymous blog over here as a tease. Then I deleted that anonymous blog and stayed here for good. Now, apparently, I can’t stop. So here’s to a new addiction, or, I should say distraction… I tell you—it’s [...]

Inspired by Openings

I love the “Shelf” section on W’s Loud Solitude.
There is something so tantalizing about catching a glimmer of a book from peeking at its first line. This is how I usually decide what to read in a bookstore or a library. My first influence is, of course, the title on the spine. But once the [...]

Physical Memory

I have a physical memory when it comes to rejection. Reading a writer friend’s post on her own recent rejection sent my memory soaring back to the lobby of the Loew’s Village VII movie theater, the one with the narrow staircases between floors, and of standing in a distinct spot near the water fountain on [...]

My Writing Tics

I wrote recently about problems I had been having on a short story. Another writer commented this:
Maybe your story hasn’t revealed enough in the previous scenes. You say you want the last scene to be, “The how-did-this-happen, the full circle, the change everyone says you must come to in a story, the WHY.” Perhaps, I’m [...]