On Labor Day, 2009, I lost my camera (sorry, Mom!) and the day after Thanksgiving, 2009, it was found (thanks, N!). Here’s what you (and I) missed: Thanksgiving weekend roundup to come.

1 comment  ::  Read on

Today the Times‘s book review asks Stephen King to review the new biography of utter wretch/mad alcoholic Raymond Carver, who, after taking Carver to task for being such an utter wretch of a mad alcoholic (at a party, he reportedly smashed a wine bottle over the head of his first wife—who seems to have supported [...]

 ::  Read on

C.B.’s own bad example of superimposing the past on the present was bad, he said, because it didn’t involve any kind of superimposition at all, merely an interjection. A “flash back” if you will: Ramona was bored by Baxter’s presentation in the Little Theater. What was he talking about? Lushness, or something. Outside, the grass [...]

 ::  Read on

Just found out that my short pedagogy paper (see above title) was accepted for the pedagogy panels at the 2010 AWP conference. It’s in Denver in April. It’s not a terribly huge thing (dozens upon dozens of people get accepted), but still nice to hear. Here are the basics of the thing I’ll be presenting: [...]

2 comments  ::  Read on

Earlier this week, C. Baxter came to the UNL English department to talk about style in fiction writing—specifically lushness. Those of you who read this blog who were at Bread Loaf this past summer (tally = 0?) heard this same lecture (and I believe the pretty stunning short story, “Mr. Scary”, he read later in [...]

1 comment  ::  Read on

Herndon, Virginia, the town I’m from, has been popping up in the oddest places lately. First on Patton Oswalt’s DVD Werewolves and Lollipops, and now on passiveaggressivenotes.com one of the blogs I semi-frequent. The site’s a depository for people to send in scans/photos of notes they’ve found or been left that usually form some kind [...]

 ::  Read on

Construct a story such that each verb can be read in either the present or past tense. You can start with this sentence: “I set my keys noisily on the countertop and then spread my hands out over the cold surface.” Past? Present? There are probably like 5 such verbs in the language. Read, put [...]

 ::  Read on

Tonight, after an episode of Man v. Food which sent Adam Richman to Pittsburgh to stuff his gut along the Strip, I decided it was time to introduce N to the Primanti’s sandwich. Italian bread, kielbasa, provolone, homemade fries, and homemade cole slaw. It wasn’t 2:30am after a night at the bar, but we ate [...]

3 comments  ::  Read on

Has anyone seen the new Miller High Life ad campaign? Well: “new”. The one where some distributor/deliveryman wiseacre crashes upper-crust fetes at the horse track and I think a yacht? and kidnaps their untouched cases of Miller High Life to then redistribute / -deliver said cases to “common sense” folk? Putting aside the whole general [...]

2 comments  ::  Read on

(With apologies to A. Peterson’s On Editing a Novel series.) “The home stretch” is a baseball metaphor, right? Far be it from me to be familiar with baseball metaphors, but I think this is where I am. In, on, or at least facing the home stretch here. Two-to-three thousand more words and I’m finished. Carl [...]

3 comments  ::  Read on