Donec rutrum congue leo eget malesuada.
Vivamus suscipit tortor eget felis porttitor volutpat.The Most Luxurious Mammoth
When I was small, my parents would sing a certain lullaby to me. I don't think I've heard it since. Like any writer, I took that tender memory and perverted for the sake of a story. I made a rough, funny character write and sing "The Whore Song," set to the lullaby's...
I Missed an Off Ramp on the Hero’s Journey
There’s this thing called the Hero’s Journey, which is not the same as driving to El Paso with three kids in the back seat. It’s a type of story that is found in many different cultures at different times in history. In recent years Joseph Campbell explained it...
The Problem With Explaining Grief
I've been looking for a way to explain how I feel about my father dying. It's as if I were born on a continent, and I played there, and I grew up falling, and getting back up, and figuring out how I fell. I went back there when I was proud. I went back there when I...
Don’t Let Housework Ruin Your Marriage – Leave That to Booze and Gambling
My wife never came right out and said she was distressed by our house and the fact that I live in it. I only became aware of her distress after years of examining various signs and back-trails. It was like tracking a bear that occasionally walks into your kitchen...
All I Want for Christmas is a Chainsaw to Cut My Novel in Half
Guilt is for children with sticky fingers and mysterious stains. I declare this to be true in defiance of all religious and sociological thought, because I don’t want to mess with guilt today. I haven’t posted for a month, and I don’t even need a reason, never mind a...
I Will Take My Beating in Cowed Embarrassment
Writing brings out the mental illness in me. My wife can testify to this. I’m in control of my behavior almost all the time. As Mark Twain said, “For business reasons, I must preserve the outward signs of sanity.” If I wake up to find my brain mired like a mammoth in...
If I Start Looking Too Happy, Shoot My Cows
I’m thinking about murdering some flying cows. It wouldn’t be hard, at least on the technical side. They’re cows, so they’d just stand there and take it, or maybe they’d chew their cuds and hover a little. But I’d struggle on the emotional side, because they have huge...
I Couldn’t Tell He Was Real Until He Stopped Making Sense
When my grandfather went out to eat he always put sugar in his coffee, even though he didn’t like sugar in his coffee. He did it because the sugar was free. I’ve heard that little story dozens of times since I was a boy. It comes up all the time when my family talks...
Five Good Reasons Not to Write
I gouged out part of my soul and hurled it into a wood chipper the other day. It was no fun, although I did get to eat pie while I did it. It happened because I’m trying to write something longer than the instructions for assembling an armoire made in Korea, and...
I Should Never Be a Cyborg
I'm writing this with a tequila bottle in one hand and a five dollar cigar in the other. That's not totally true, I guess, or even true at all in the technical sense. But I could be writing with booze and smokes in my hands if I wanted, and every writer in literary...
I Live in Terror of the Creepy Elves – Emotion in Writing
Do they smoke dope at an elvish solstice festival? I know it sounds like a frivolous question, but I grappled with it for several hours yesterday. You see, I’m writing a story about Santa Claus, and he’s an elf, and the next thing that happens in the story requires a...
Planning for My Literary Beat Down
I will infiltrate the DFW Writers Conference this weekend. I hope to make important contacts, find people who tell me how great my work is, learn writing and publishing secrets, and meet a an agent who thinks my novel is so marketable they’ll run over orphans while...