Plowing Through the Pandemic The bus stops at the cement island, a group of masked people get off. As I walk near, I recognize the face of a man who used to work in the boutique hotel flying the Tricolor in the neighborhood where I live. In ten years, we’d never spoken a word to […]
Read MoreJennifer was a piece of work, but no way did she deserve what happened to her. She was my connection’s girlfriend. Jim was the guy that got the ergotamine tartrate from Czechoslovakia, found the chemist in Ann Arbor, and had the tabbing machine in Woodland Hills. Best damn LSD in the ’70s. I would buy […]
Read MoreWe expect fictional characters to be conscious—meaning to have some level of self-awareness—in order that we can understand, believe in, and perhaps identify with their motives. It’s fair to say that the quality of being conscious is the essential human quality, even though we don’t have a very clear idea what it is. We can […]
Read MoreI’ve been swapping books with writers I dig up online—I’ll bug the shit out of ten, but then I’ll hook one and occasionally get a surprise. Greg Levin’s In Wolves’ Clothing hits all the spots I want in a good novel: It’s got a terrific (first-person) voice, it’s original, it moves, it has sympathetic characters, and […]
Read MoreSo what do you do if you have a story to tell and you realize that the best way to tell it will require introducing an element that’s not quite, shall we say, of this world? Should you worry about narrowing your market or having your work be pigeonholed as fantasy, supernatural, science fiction, or some […]
Read MoreHere’s a Handy Tool for Writers Besides writing, I work as an editor and proofreader. When I get back a copyedited work, I am then tasked with—assuming it’s a Word doc with Tracking turned on—Accepting or Rejecting edits, which I can see in a Reviewing Pane and address one at a time, either right-clicking or […]
Read MoreI remember, from back in the day, how much you could tell about an auditioning musician, even before he started playing: the way he touched his instrument, the way he played a chord or a lick after tuning—not to show off but to establish that the tone was right—and I would say to myself, “OK, […]
Read MoreAfter more than forty years, he found me on Facebook. The images are complex and fascinating, with a weird, alien beauty. I asked him how he created them and he got irritated and said, “That’s sort of like if you wrote a book and everyone became obsessed with your word processing software.” I started calling […]
Read MoreOr rather: How well can a writer edit and proof his or her own work? As a writer as well as a working editor/proofreader, I was shocked to see that (at least) two glitches in my second novel (TRUST ME) got past me, my editor, the copy editor, and the proofreader. They’re the kind of […]
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Earl
November 16, 2020
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