writing practices

  • When In Doubt, Kill.

    For the past year and a half I’ve been working on a novel. It started out as a short story and then I thought it was going to be a series of stories and then it turned into something else. I haven’t completed a draft yet (thanks to 2007 “Year of Hell,” then moving, new…

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  • Write Now, Write Away!

    When I talk to people about my job and about being a writer in the same conversation, one question commonly comes up. “Do you have time to write?” they ask. They ask with sincerity, because they want me to be writing, and they ask with trepidation, because they’re afraid I’m not, and sometimes I think…

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  • I’ve written about 10,000 times on this blog that I always know when it’s time to write again because I start asking questions about what a poem is and what it’s supposed to do. (It’s happening to me again.) It makes me a fussy reader, first. I’ll try to read some things, but I’ll become…

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  • So, my blog is slowly coming back. I’m not super excited about the blocks Blogger put into place when it comes to template-jacking (everything I had before was done “by hand” by altering code on the template), but at least I got the Buffy quote back…and more things are on the way, I hope. Some…

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  • When you live in Arizona, Mexico does not seem exotic. It seems…there. Nearby. Like Canada when you live in Minnesota and pay for things with Canadian change. When someone gives you Canadian change and you can’t be upset about it because you pass it off all the time anyway, except into vending machines, which are…

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  • A few months ago, I reconnected with an old practice of mine: making lists on my bathroom mirror in dry erase marker. Why? Because that’s the one room I’m guaranteed to visit every day, for one reason or another, and having to see the list keeps it fresh in my mind, making me more likely…

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