importantly, not writing my novel, yet
In one sense, I started my novel in November of 2017, eight and a half years ago. Since then it has gone through six drafts, more than 200,000 words, and now...
Muck Time
I am perfectly fine, as I always am; I simply wish to be alone. I always find people deeply challenging, am only comfortable by myself. The choice is thus...
Sirāt: On seeing a better movie than it actually was
Sirāt (2025) debuted at Cannes and has since manifested some polar interest. Summarizing it crudely reveals its flaws: it follows a bunch of Europeans gone...
Gone bloggin'
I define myself by my fiction, but I often forget that I blogged almost daily between 2004 and 2011. We all left LiveJournal, but I flounced properly after...
Daydream Manifesto
This month, I had designs to participate in a bastardized version of NaNoWriMo. My four goals were: to engage with my own work in some form every day; to...
On Creative Want
I have been ruminating even more than usual on alienation. I find myself often thinking that people are the great difficulty of my life. I don’t wish them to...
What of the Storyteller in an AI Economy?
I have frequently returned to Ted Chiang’s 2024 New Yorker column, “Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art,” even as my own impressions of AI (which I use here as...
Longing, or: Struggling to Become a Part-Time Writer
For months and years and weeks and days I have been grappling with the fact that I do not write. This is no longer itself interesting. I understand why I do...
On "The Writer," the artist
Some beast in me feels to be waking up, or has perhaps awoken and is still groggy. In February I began looking for jobs, then jobs and work consumed me. Now...
Interpreting Le Guin on Voice, Sound, and "Serious Writing"
Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story (New York: Mariner, 2015). Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft is...
The 13 Books I Read in January
I did not set out to read 13 books this month, and never before have I read 13 books in one month! I've organized them loosely into categories, but beyond...
My Favourite Books Read in 2023
Depending on whether I clean up two more in the next 48 hours, I will have read between 58 and 60 books in 2023. That's a pretty good number given that I...
Writing Goals for 2024: Develop a Practice
This time of year—at least, my experience of it—operates in a liminal space between future and past: a space that, bizarrely, wants little to do with the...
Welcome to Footnotes: On Craft, Writing, and the Language Arts
I always have a great deal of thoughts about what I’ve been reading, media, writing generally; but I also have a stubbornly enduring sense of alienation that...