In his 90-Day Novel book Alan Watt advises not to revise anything, just write and write and write and worry about the editing later. But that's not something I've ever done. I'm used to turning on the computer, looking at what I've written, and fiddling with the...
This past week marked the first week in which I started writing the new novel proper. (I'd been writing only notes during the first four weeks.) One of the advantages of writing a novel this fast, under deadline, is that the so-called scary blank screen doesn't seem...
“On a cold blowy February day a woman is boarding the ten a.m. flight to London, followed by an invisible dog.” So begins a wonderful Valentine’s Day book and one of my favorite romances, Alison Lurie’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Foreign Affairs. I remember when I first...
As if I needed any more reason not to see my book-wager money to fall into the hands of the anti-gay marriage crowd, I now learn that the forces of evil have vowed to undo the work of the Washington State legislators who bravely voted this week to extend full marriage...
So about this challenge I'm in: The StickK website has my credit card information. On April 25 they'll e-mail me a certificate asking me if I've honored the resolution I launched a couple weeks ago, i.e., whether I wrote the first draft of a new novel in 100 days. ...
I'm now two weeks into writing my new novel from scratch. I still haven't come up with names for the characters -- they're still just letters of the alphabet. This is probably a good thing because writing their names out longhand would probably consume too much...
I’m now a week into the challenge of writing the first draft of a new novel. If I don't have it written by April 25, I've pledged to fork over $100 to an institution devoted to denying gays and lesbians the right to marry. Needless to say, putting money on the line...
As many of you know, I'm looking forward to publishing my second novel, "You Are Here," by this summer. I now find myself itching to tackle a new project. But what to write? What characters, what plot to create? And can I really afford to devote another gigantic chunk...
If my new novel gets off the ground, I'll owe part of the success to the generosity of so many Bay Area writers who have provided me with an open forum in which I can read drafts of my work aloud and edit out what doesn't work. One of these writers is one of my...
Since I've started adding posts to this blog I'm now getting inundated with spam -- over 200 just yesterday. It feels like such a waste to throw it all out. Luckily, my friend Dan Cohen, a.k.a. The Sixty-Second Gourmet, has published a helpful, 90-second video on...
