Perfect Whole
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Essays
- And then some history happened, and here we are.
- The Bulldozer
- Be A Happy Warrior
- The Perils of Prophecy
- Vindication
- “The Question Is”
- Survivalism
- “The Schools”
- “How Kind of You to Come”
- Creating a Character Template
- Rejecting the Gratitude Challenge
- “Mom, What’s the Right Age to Start Having Sex?”
- Don’t Pray for Peace
- Alligators and Flash Fiction
- What Are We Preparing Our Students For?
- “Unconvincing”
- The People’s MFA
- “The Goldfinch”
- Hungry
- Querying is Like Hell, Except Your Friends Aren’t There, Part I
- A Terminal Curable Disease
- Bigger
- Expanding the Universe
- Today’s Reason to Love the Humans
- “A Hologram for the King”
- What Would Dashiell Hammett Do?
- “Popping the Hood”
- Max Perkins: Editor of Genius
- The End.
- “Following”
- A New Year Every Day
- We Don’t Need Books to Free. We Need Them to be Brilliant.
- An Angel Packs a Suitcase
- The Other Julie Goldberg
- Lobbing Nerf Rocks
- Improvised Emergency Oil Candles
- “The Circus of Dreams”
- Perfect Whole, Superstorm Sandy Edition
- “One Lovely Blog”
- Unfriended
A few things I was thinking about…
Obsessions
Obsessions of Others
Recurring dreams
- 5_Part_Series
- advice
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- A Room of One's Own
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- brain
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- editing
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- employment
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- feminism
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- Marc Prensky
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Twitter Updates
- RT @AntheaButler: I dislike feeling like this, but I'm really really tired of "mistakes" like I thought my taser was my gun excuse. I just… 6 minutes ago
What I’m reading
Tag Archives: advice
Be A Happy Warrior
After an hour, I gave up trying to call Senator Chuck Schumer. His D.C. number played its monotonous busy signal to my wide-eyed young Android, who had never heard such quaint music, and the voicemail boxes at three of his … Continue reading
Creating a Character Template
Dr. Johnson called remarriage “the triumph of hope over experience.” The same might be said of writing a second novel before selling the first. Yet here I stand at the altar again, veiled, clutching a bouquet, arrayed in the sleek second-wedding ivory suit, tuning … Continue reading
What Are We Preparing Our Students For?
Today on Perfect Whole we have a guest post by my colleague, Richard Smith. A longer version of this essay was published in our school newspaper. Rich and I work in an extremely high-achieving school district in which nearly all … Continue reading
Posted in Education
Tagged advice, brain, children, economy, education, employment, materialism, perfectionism, teaching, Waldorf education, wisdom
1 Comment
Querying is Like Hell, Except Your Friends Aren’t There, Part I
In February of 2013, I rejoiced to type “The End” on the manuscript I’d been writing on and off for over twenty years. I spent the next two months editing, proofreading, and preparing the manuscript for the querying ordeal. Querying, … Continue reading
A Terminal Curable Disease
I’ve been brewing an essay on the illness that is perfectionism for a long time now. It’s not quite cooked yet. But this morning, after a terrible loss in our community, the thought came out like this: Be a beautiful … Continue reading
What Would Dashiell Hammett Do?
In its 2013 summer fiction issue, The New Yorker magazine ran a Dashiell Hammett story called “An Inch and a Half of Glory” written in the 1920s, but previously unpublished. Parked at the station, waiting for my daughter’s train, I … Continue reading
Posted in Criticism, Writing
Tagged advice, Dashiell Hammett, editing, expletive construction, revision, show don't tell, style, syntax, The People's MFA, to be verbs, writing
13 Comments
A New Year Every Day
I paid more attention than usual this year to people’s New Year’s resolutions and to the obligatory articles in the media about the most common resolutions and how long people keep them. Unsurprisingly, people want to improve their health, financial … Continue reading
Posted in Criticism, Writing
Tagged advice, New Year, resolutions, survival, wisdom, writing
15 Comments
Lobbing Nerf Rocks
At a workshop I attended recently, Emmy Laybourne, author of the Monument 14 series, shared a rule, well-known among screenwriters, that I had never heard before: “Chase your character up a tree and throw rocks at him.” It’s smart advice: … Continue reading
Posted in Books & Libraries, Motherhood, Volta, Writing
Tagged advice, books, Bothmind, motherhood, wisdom, writing
3 Comments