I’m Querying My New Novel! (Here’s How That Works)

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Quick Note: If you’re a literary agent who’s stumbled across my blog, this might be a good place to start reading ;-)

I’ve had this one in the works for a LONG time—MFA Thesis Novel is my satirical novel inspired by my experiences in grad school at the University of Nebraska.  It’s about a twentysomething writer from the Northeast named Flip (who’s totally not based on me at all, btw) who leaves his mind-numbing office job to start an MFA in creative writing program in an unnamed midwestern state.  The problem, though, is that Flip’s a literature nerd who’s stuck in the past—his heroes are Joseph Heller, John Updike, and Kingsley Amis, and he hasn’t read much of anything from the past twenty years—which means his fellow grad students are more than happy to tear his novel to pieces on the first day of workshop.

While Flip’s main goal is to create great writing, the other grad students…think differently.  Everyone around him is obsessed with getting published, beefing up their CVs, Continue reading »

Productivity, Burnout, and Trying to Do It All

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I’ll start this (short) entry by doing something I don’t normally do: pointing you toward something I didn’t write.

That something is this BuzzFeed News article by Anne Helen Peterson entitled How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, and it covers a social phenomenon I’ve talked about elsewhere but haven’t seen explored in this kind of depth.  The gist is that by trying to do it all—and by trying to harness every ounce of our productivity and working efficiency—we’re not only burning ourselves out, we’re overlooking simple errands like registering to vote or taking knives to get sharpened (something I’ve never done, btw.), which in turn is having adverse effects on our sense of fulfillment.

In addition, the article reads like a laundry list of issues that I’ve dealt with myself and/or have had friends deal with, including putting off low-reward errands, maximizing time by cutting meal prep, excessive multitasking, learning to overwork while in grad school (!), Continue reading »

Good Art Breaks Us Out of the Monotony

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A bunch of years ago I read a book of letters and short pieces by the writer Franz Kafka, and one of his reflections struck me hard at the time, in reference to how really great books affect us:

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.

(bold emphasis mine)

I thought about this axe for the frozen sea idea a lot, so much so that I talked about it on my old blog over a decade ago.  I didn’t go into much detail about it the time, but I feel like it deserves my attention more than ever now. Continue reading »

Thoughts on Hyping Your Shit

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I think a lot about promotion, and how a lot of creative people don’t like doing it.  I hear from a lot of creative people that they want to be in a position where they can handle the actual making-stuff part and leave the selling and the hyping and the getting-the-word-out-about-the-stuff-they-made parts to someone else who’s doing it as a separate job.

For whatever reason, this attitude seems especially prevalent among other writers I meet, who find the idea of promotion distasteful.  Maybe I notice this because I also used to feel awkward about promoting my work, especially after having jobs where I had to sell shit I didn’t care about.  The selling at these jobs sucked so bad that I began to hate the entire idea of selling anything, especially if I was doing it to make money for some super-impersonal corporation somewhere.

Selling things for other people made me feel unclean because I was usually repeating a script someone else had written Continue reading »

I Edited a Writing Anthology!!!

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So this one’s pretty cool.

Last spring I put together and edited Concord Writers Night Out 2018: An Anthology of Writers and Writing in association with the New Hampshire Writers’ Project.  It’s a collection of short stories, novel excerpts, poems, and essays from writers around the area with an introduction and a short story by yours truly. (My piece is called “Rejection,” a fictional rejection letter to a REALLY bad writer).  I handled the editing and the bulk of the organizing while fellow writers Gary Devore and Kevin Barrett formatted the e-pub and distribution ends.

It was a pretty rad project to work on, and I’m happy to say that it’s finally out.  After much discussion we decided to make the electronic versions available FREE to literally anyone who wants one, so if you want to check it out you can download the PDF from the NHWP website or get the e-pub for Kindles and tablets directly from the publisher or the iTunes store. Continue reading »

I Spent a Bunch of Money on Pens and I Don’t Regret It At All

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Many of you reading this know that I’ve carried the same blue medium-sized style Bic pen in my pocket since high school.  It’s hands-down my preferred writing implement for both creative work and all those little notes and lists I tend to write in my daily life (though not for Day Job-related tasks, as I talked about last summer).

I keep a handful of fancier pens I use for special notes or formal occasions, though for regular writing, I just plain feel better using something familiar.  I love the weight of these pens, their simple style, the way their blue ink stands out against printed black type when marking drafts, and even the way I can cleanly slide their caps off with one hand. Continue reading »

Why Sacrifices Are Necessary (and Hard….)

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Warning: Stream of consciousness ramble ahead.

I think a lot about how I spend my time, and how much of that time I should be spending on creative work or other things that move me closer to my goals. I used to think of this as a simple equation: the more time I devoted to creative work, the more I’d get done…though this led to more than a few cases of terrible burnout that weren’t productive at all (which sucks, btw).

That led me to alter my thinking: maybe taking plenty of breaks was the way to go, because if I stayed as rested and stress-free as possible then my mind would be clearer to focus on my writing and other tasks that required focus. I went through a period when I set aside every Saturday as a No Exceptions Day of Rest, and another Continue reading »

I Signed a Book Contract!!! (Here’s How it Happened)

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AWESOME UPDATE: Eikaiwa Bums is out!  This post is about how I queried the press and signed the contract, but you can also read about what happened when it actually came out, or cut to the chase and order a copy from my webstore.

So a little while ago I got some REALLY amazing news: in August, Blue Cubicle Press will be publishing my short story, Eikaiwa Bums, as a chapbook in its Overtime series of fiction about work.  And just like that, I’ll have a book out.

Though this is hardly my first time getting my writing published, the Eikaiwa Bums chapbook feels like a BIG step because it’s an actual printed book that people can hold in their hand and read, as opposed to reading online or as part of a bigger magazine. (Don’t despair, virtual readers: there’ll Continue reading »

Run Your Own Art Swap

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It’s that time of year again.

For the past five years I’ve done a yearly Art Swap where I round up a group of creative folks (almost all of whom have Day Jobs of their own) and everyone makes a project of some kind, in any medium, big or small.  They make enough for everyone in the swap, mail them to me, and I collect the shipping money and mail the projects out to everyone else.

Organizing the whole thing is surprisingly simple—I keep in touch via plain ol’ email, set some deadlines early on to keep people on track, then send out group reminders as those deadlines get closer.  Most everyone involved finds the deadlines helpful, since as I wrote about a few weeks ago, we tend to take tasks Continue reading »

October Novel Progress Update!

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It’s been a busy month, but not for novel-writing.

When I last posted about my progress on my new novel I was getting back into the game after a 3 month hiatus brought on mostly by my new job and recent move.  Taking a break from writing helped me get a lot of stuff taken care of, but after so many weeks away I realized I had to get back to the novel or else I risked becoming even more disconnected from it than I already was—and that wasn’t a good thing. Continue reading »

Make Your Creative Work Sound Like You

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When I was in first grade I played tee-ball, and because I sucked at running and every other kind of physical activity I always had to play outfield—the worst possible position for a first-grader with a limited attention span.  The experience directly contributed to my lifelong aversion to organized sports, but that’s not the point of this story.

I’ll never forget one practice where I had to make a really long outfield throw.  For whatever reason, this throw felt a lot more important than other throws Continue reading »