Posted in Culture, Writing, tagged creative writing, currency, family, nostalgia, one hundred dollar bill on 07 Nov 2017| Leave a Comment »
I’d heard of them long before I saw one in the wild. Rare, elusive, they were things of power and legend. Sure, I saw them in movies, but I knew those were fakes; we all did.
The C-note. The Benjamin. One hundred smackeroos.
I was nine years old when I saw my first one.
We were at Tiburon Tommie’s, the Chinese restaurant of my youth, a place where the drinks menu was long and fixed, and the food menu was short and subject to change. (more…)
Posted in Writing, tagged boosting posts, creative writing, Facebook, indie authors, marketing, self-publishing on 30 Oct 2017| Leave a Comment »
Two weeks ago, I tried an experiment.
As some of you know, in addition to this blog I have a Facebook page for my writing, which feeds through to my Twitter account. (I don’t like Twitter, but I’m not convinced it’s useless.) Posts here also go to my LinkedIn profile, to Google+, and to Tumblr.
I don’t have too many readers here—hundreds, but not thousands—and membership on my Facebook page is . . . modest, if you catch my drift . . . but I figured that this situation was the perfect foundation for a small experiment.
In short, I ran an ad. (more…)
Posted in Writing, tagged building believable characters, creative writing, indie authors, novel writing on 12 Oct 2017| 2 Comments »
Going back over early notes for this novel, I realized that this project has been rattling around in my head for over a decade.
The first outline I wrote up has a note on the top: Tabled Jan 2004.
Initially, this was very depressing. (more…)
Posted in Seattle, Writing, tagged creative writing, novel writing, Seattle history, writing research on 28 Sep 2017| 4 Comments »
Fish or cut bait. Poop or get off the pot. Split wood or lend someone the axe.
During the run-up to a novel project, there comes a time when I must put down the books and pick up the pen. My problem, though, has usually been knowing when I’ve reached that point, that moment of sufficiency when, though I certainly don’t know everything about the pertinent subjects, I know enough to get started.
Now is that time. (more…)
Posted in Writing, tagged creative writing, Poetry, vignettes, Writing on 21 Jul 2017| Leave a Comment »
summer’s iron hand
beats me with light
with heat
my mind winces
whipped dog shying
hiding in darkened corners
then, for a few hours
clouds bring respite
moisture’s brief touch
salves my skin
saves my soul
Posted in Writing, tagged creative writing, novel writing, procrastinating, Writing on 13 Jul 2017| 2 Comments »
Just because I wasn’t writing, that doesn’t mean I wasn’t writing.
I know to some it seems like I’ve been procrastinating, putting off actually breaking through my years-long writer’s block, but it hasn’t been all “Mañana, baby.”
In fact, in the past month, I did a lot of writing. No words written, but a lot of writing, nonetheless.
It began with re-reading one of my older books, and culminated (well, so far) over this past weekend when I had a revelation about my difficulty getting to Page One. (more…)
Posted in Creativity, Writing, tagged creative writing, novel writing, why do i write, writers block on 22 Jun 2017| 3 Comments »
Typing. Deleting. More typing. More deleting. MOAR typing. Delete delete delete. Delete it all. Every last word, comma, and period.
That was yesterday.
I was working on an essay for this blog and … it wasn’t going well. I was working on a topic that had been rolling around in my head for a month. All my arguments and counterarguments were lined up. I even had a catchy title … well, I thought it was a catchy title, until I googled it and found a hundred thousand other uses of it (including one by Garrison Keillor, which I discovered in a moment that was both uplifting and depressing).
Anyway, for hours I wrote and deleted in precisely equal measure, and in the end I was left with the same blank page I’d started with.
At which point I stopped and wondered: why was I having so much trouble?
The answer was obvious: I had no passion for the topic.
Not anymore, anyway.
Oh, when the idea first struck me, I was all fired up and ready to unleash my staggering intellect upon the world. See my reasoning and despair! But now, a month later, things have changed. Not externally. The premise still stands, the argument still works, and I can find no flaw in my logic, but internally … I just don’t care about it anymore.
This is not a bad thing. (more…)
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 