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Posts Tagged ‘creative writing’

Unexpected Interest

Posted in Books, Writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 04 Aug 2014| Leave a Comment »

Bath Abbey Fan VaultingSometimes, the word “interesting” isn’t enough.

This weekend past, as well as being sad, stressful, productive, lazy, and maddening, was also interesting.

It was the 31st anniversary of my wedding. It was the yahrzeit of the death of my wife’s mother. It was a weekend of plans, and of disrupted plans. It was a weekend with three reservations to the same restaurant, each one made and canceled in daily succession. It was a weekend of editing, rereading and rewriting my latest short story (“The Book of Solomon”), proofing it, polishing it, and then sending it off to a paying market.

It was also the weekend when I got an email from the Senior Librarian in Sumner, WA, asking if I’d be interested in participating in a panel, this October.

Yeah, “interesting” doesn’t really cover it.

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Tango with the Tiger

Posted in Books, Hi Tech, tagged , , , , on 24 Jul 2014| Leave a Comment »

NikeLast weekend, the Seattle Times ran two opposing op-eds on the Amazon/Hachette contretemps. Frank Schaeffer wrote in favor of Amazon, while Nina Laden countered in favor of Hachette, creating a “debate” of sorts. I put “debate” in quotes because, from a purely debating standpoint, it was no contest.

Unfortunately, both pieces missed the main point.

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What Once Was Lost

Posted in Writing, tagged , , , , on 17 Jul 2014| Leave a Comment »

Lupine Hi-RiseI’ve never really been one who lost things. (Except for gloves. I used to lose gloves all the time.) And I’m especially good about computer files. After once losing the first three chapters of a novel, I got really strict about my file management methods.

So, back in the mid-Naughties, when I “lost” a handful of poems, I was pretty mad at myself. Granted, I had a couple of “vascular events” during that time, brought on by workload and stress, but still, I was disappointed. I mean, how can you “lose” a computer file? Luckily, I was able to recreate most of them from offsite storage, but a few were lost and gone forever.

Then, two days ago, while editing my latest short story, I noticed a folder in my “Writing” directory. The folder was labeled: Poetry.

Guess what I found in there.

Here’s one of them: Non-Euclidean Geometry

k

Chamomile

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Keeping Track

Posted in Writing, tagged , , , , , on 10 Jul 2014| 4 Comments »

Kurt R.A. GiambastianiOkay, so I don’t always think things through.

Ages ago, when I was writing nothing but short fiction and sending out MSS to the far corners of the publishing world, I had an idea for a computer application for writers. It was a struggle to keep track of where my dozens of MSS were; where they out with a publisher? For how long? Too long?

So I thought: What if you could enter the names of all your MSS into an app, note when you sent it out, and keep track of where everything was and how long it had been there?

It seemed like a good idea, and so I cracked my knuckles and began to write the code for my MSTracker app.

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Old Dog Meets New Trick

Posted in Writing, tagged , , , , , on 08 Jul 2014| 2 Comments »

Stack of Books

After successfully avoiding pen and paper during my recent vacation (Thank you, World Cup!) on Sunday I finally grabbed myself by the collar, sat myself down at the deck table, put a pen in my hand and paper before me, and started the short story that has been nipping at my heels like a poorly trained corgi for nearly a month.

I started writing at about 7AM Sunday and finished it at around 11PM. It clocked in at about 3000 words.

For me, that is fast writing. But that wasn’t the interesting bit.

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Resurfacing

Posted in Culture, Hi Tech, Low Tech, tagged , , , , , , , , , on 03 Jul 2014| 3 Comments »

 

Simple Living

One evening, when I was courting my wife-to-be, we were at my place when the phone rang. Since we were talking, I ignored the phone. “Aren’t you going to answer that?” Nope. If it was important, they’d call back (I didn’t have an answering machine). This was my relationship with technology in those days. Technology was my servant, not the reverse.

Well, sometime during the last three decades, that has changed, so I’m just now coming off a full week of an “internet fast.”

Overall, I am surprised at how easy it was. I stuck to my “going dark” guidelines so successfully that when I tried to go back online, I found that all my little electronic connectimoids needed to be charged up. The computer, the tablet, even the smartphone had gone almost entirely unused for a whole week.

What did I miss? What didn’t I miss?

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Writing Process Blog Tour – Station Four

Posted in Writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , on 24 Jun 2014| 6 Comments »

Writing with Pen and PaperWelcome one, welcome all, to the fourth stop on the Writing Process Blog Tour, one of those writerly process-ish bloggy tour-like things that we use as an excuse to talk about our passion: writing.

My name is Kurt, and I’ll be your host for as long as you keep reading.

Thanks to my predecessor, J.Z. Murdock, author of darkness, for the invitation to join the tour.

The premise is simple. At each stop along the tour, the author talks about his/her writing processes, and then hands you off to the next writer in line. (Todd…you ready?)

It’s just four simple questions:

  • What am I working on?
  • How does my work differ from others in its genre?
  • Why do I write what I do?
  • How does my writing process work?

Still here? Good.

Here we go…

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