The Middle of the Dark

Ben told me to update and so here goes: Not a lot to say, except the Cubs won the division (yay) and my friend Amitabh had a short film uniquely titled The Art of Stalking win the award for Best Short at the Boston Film Festival. Congrats to him. I'm sick and working lots of overtime right now (the perfect combination) but I did FINALLY get new glasses after a years of questing. The stars are now tiny round dots again and not fuzzy halfway hairy things of blue and silver. I'm reading Francine Prose's Reading Like A Writer which is a very good 'How To' book without being a 'How To' book. Her central point in the book is that there is no how-to when it comes to writing. There are ways of seeing, and it's simply (well...) a matter of choice. That's my problem. I cannot choose. I feel like I can deploy a certain style or tactic of writing to one degree of success or another, but I never know what is right for me or the story I'm working on....

Madeleine L'Engle, the author of probably my favorite book as a kid, A Wrinkle In Time, has died at 88. Following the many links and tributes around the web I found on her website her acceptance speech for the 1963 Newberry Medal Award: So how do we do it? We can’t just sit down at our typewriters and turn out explosive material. I took a course in college on Chaucer, one of the most explosive, imaginative, and far-reaching in influence of all writers. And I’ll never forget going to the final exam and being asked why Chaucer used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote in a white heat of fury, “I don’t think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these things. That isn’t the way people write.” I believe this as strongly now as I did then. Most of what is best in writing isn’t done deliberately. Do I mean, then, that an author should sit around like a phony Zen Buddhist in his pad, drinking endless cups of espres...