Last year, I was experiencing a short-term liquidity crunch. I have a good idea what the big stuff (mortgage, health insurance, auto insurance) goes. To get a better handle on where money was flowing, we saved all of our receipts from everything we bought that month. When I tabulated up everything at the end of […]
Maybe it’s time to simplify life… Read More »
I ended up with four good non-fiction essay drafts, four blog topics, two bonafide novel ideas for next year’s NaNoWriMo, and a caffeine-monkey that I need to get off off my back. My experience closely paralleled Chris Baty’s book. 11/1 – 3 – enthusiasm. I was sitting in the corner of Cafe Allegro and just
Post NaNo Debriefing Read More »
In the NaNoWriMo excerpt I wrote this weekend, my characters were avoiding doing anything by debating why “tricky questions” are so prevalent during interviews. By “tricky question,” I mean something that has nothing to do with practicality, but might win you a bar bet or provide suitable blogging material (for me). For example, I was
This one is borrowed from Kristin. The rules: Open up the music player on your computer (if you have one — the music player, I mean. Clearly you have a computer, because otherwise you couldn’t read this). Set it to play your entire music collection. Hit the “shuffle” command. Tell us the title of the
I hit the halfway point Saturday evening, abandoning any pretext of plot. Although this thing is so disjoint and heavily weighted in dialogue, it’s long… and that’s what counts! For the love of all things good in the universe, please do not read the excerpt below while sober.
Excerpt from this lengthy diatribe Read More »
My Dell Latitude is nearly four years old, which is about 85 in Laptop-years. Sure, the glide pad has an unnatural sheen in the middle, buffeted by hundreds of hours of hackery; the bumps on the “F” and “J” keys wore off a long time ago; and the cooling fan groans whenever I do serious
A friend is working on her Ph.D. in psychology and needed a victimvolunteer to take an I.Q. test. It would be filmed, so her professor could review her testing technique. Most potential volunteers backed down when they found out she’s not allowed to reveal the results of the test (she’s not certified). Without revealing actual