Category Archives: Writing

Raw Thirst

From J Nathan Matias I had forgotten what it’s like to be around people who read, write, and think about ideas out of raw thirst.

Welcome Mary Ellen

Mary Ellen finally has a weblog. It’s titled Tribelet of Hoodlums. Now we can follow the Trinity experience. Cool.

CommentPress at GTA

This will be interesting to follow, a selective code application of CommentPress for use on Expressive Processing at Grand Text Auto, a subject that has recently come up in the development of Brimmer and Death here at this weblog. Expressive Processing is Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s latest.

Sally Terrell Travels

Congratulations to Sally Terrell, our wonderful talent, for her inclusion in For Keeps, a collection of memoir edited by Victoria Zackheim. Over the course of the next few days, Sally will be reading from her work. She’ll be at Community Book Store in Brooklyn tonight at 7:30 PM, December 8th at Bluestockings in Manhattan at [...]

Crazy for Beverly Cleary Clearly

Maybe you remember Beverly Cleary books from the ’60s. I don’t. I read comics, Hardy Boys, and other things I can’t remember in the early ’70s. My son has gone positively ape over Ralph S. Mouse and Henry and Ribsy, partially due to the quality of the storytelling and to the way Cleary writes for [...]

Politics and Journalism

This article by Peter Wallsten from the Los Angeles Times and printed in The Hartford Courant is typical of what I would call “political or horse-race reporting.” It’s also reflective of news programming that concentrates of political strategy and campaign instruction, which may be a new idiom of the art. Here are some features that [...]

The Cite is Right

A wonderful colleague sends this along on issues of citation, which gives writers all kinds of headaches for some reason. How many guacamoles can you win?

Shadow and Neil Daiman

At the moment I’m reading Neil Daiman’s novel American God’s. I also clicked to The Reading Experience and found this by Dan Green on the subject of character. He writes In my opinion, asking for a “vivid, memorable character” amounts to requesting that a work of fiction provide us with a friend, a “person” with [...]

On Tragedy

Well placed and well put by Susan Gibb.

American Shaolin

Matthew Polly’s American Shaolin is thus far filled with wonderful conversation. Polly has spoken with a Beijing cabdriver and a Zheng Zhou key girl named Moon. The talk is very similar which, in many ways, diversifies and develops the narrative. The dialogue is planted with irony. “What country are you from?” “America.” “America is a [...]

Writing and Science

Chris Mooney on the potential of English majors.

Storytron

I’ve been watching the Storytron development for some time now. But Susan Gibb is actually doing brainwork in the building environment, SWAT. She’s developing some fine ideas for approaching the Crawford vision of interactive storytelling. Following her into this and playing with Storytron, I imagine, will be an electric process. I can’t wait to see [...]

Otto and Passion

Susan Gibb has a passion for Otto Lord knows I stand in my shop at the worktable for long periods of time so it shouldn’t have bothered me, but this afternoon working at a paper cutter for two hours I was near crying with the pain.  I even tried to stand (as I do while [...]

Hypertext and Space

Here’s an issue. In trying to understand a perceived weakness in a sectional story arc in Sandoval, as he’s working the hypertext to generate story and illustration of certain pet ideas of his, I keep wondering when certain dramatic issues should declair themselves. The answer should come from the creative drive of the writing, but [...]

Hypertext and Time

The context is time for Sandoval in The Life. And environment. In session today, which was hard to get out of, Sandoval was trying to fix a POV problem, a POV problem that had to do with verbs. I’m still trying to fix a pulse problem with the plot of the novel in a certain [...]