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
- anti-bullying law
- A Room of One's Own
- attachment parenting
- authors
- baking
- blessing
- blogging
- books
- Bothmind
- brain
- bullying
- buttercream
- children
- cocoon therapy
- commercials
- concussion
- conflict resolution
- consciousness
- consumerism
- diane ravitch
- digital immigrants
- digital natives
- DNTO
- economy
- editing
- education
- education reform
- employment
- entrepreneurship
- feminism
- flash fiction
- freaks
- freedom
- freewriting
- geeks
- internet
- letterboxing
- libraries
- love
- magnificent nose
- Marc Prensky
- materialism
- midlife crisis
- motherhood
- news
- NJ Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights
- Obama
- PACC
- perfectionism
- poetry
- politics
- popularity
- post-traumatic stress disorder
- power
- publishing
- reading
- relationships
- religion
- romance
- soul
- suicide
- survival
- teaching
- technology
- television
- The People's MFA
- turret
- unknown unknowns
- Virginia Woolf
- Waldorf education
- weeding
- wisdom
- writing
Twitter Updates
- RT @NewsLitProject: On a big-event day like today, it's easy to share misinformation — especially falsehoods pushed by bad actors with bad… 1 hour ago
What I’m reading
Tag Archives: writing
“The Schools”
Lately, I’ve been writing essays in my head instead of on paper, which has made Perfect Whole far too quiet, and my head far too noisy. But I’m popping in to share some news. The inaugural issue of River, River, a … Continue reading
“How Kind of You to Come”
In what may be the first and last sort-of ghost story of my career, I present “How Kind of You to Come,” a short story I wrote for Neil Fein’s Magnificent Nose, a tale of Halloween, art, grief, obsessive love, … 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
Alligators and Flash Fiction
Flash fiction is a strange beast, isn’t it? It’s compressed like a poem or a joke. It tries to do many things in a tight space: create a tiny narrative arc, suggest fully-formed characters in a gesture or two, allude … Continue reading
Posted in Books & Libraries, Criticism, Writing
Tagged flash fiction, magnificent nose, The People's MFA, writing
2 Comments
The People’s MFA
I have a new essay on Neil Fein’s Magnificent Nose today about the People’s MFA, and about a particular session taught by Professor Michael Chabon. I’ve been thinking for some time about the process by which writers consciously and unconsciously model, … Continue reading
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
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
“Popping the Hood”
Over on Neil Fein’s Magnificent Nose, I have a post up about reading like a writer, including the tragic tale of how I lost my magical reading powers and what I got in exchange. Read the essay here. Thanks! … Continue reading
Posted in Books & Libraries, Writing
Tagged books, MFA, reading, The People's MFA, writing
4 Comments
Max Perkins: Editor of Genius
Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, by A. Scott Berg, arrived in my mailbox from a friend I know only from the Internet, because life is strange these days, with the intersections of the real and the virtual constantly confusing those of … Continue reading
Posted in Books & Libraries, Criticism, Writing
Tagged A. Scott Berg, authors, biography, book reviews, books, editing, Fitzgerald, Maxwell Perkins, novelists, novels, Thomas Wolfe, writing
1 Comment
The End.
Saturday evening, a little before 9 pm I typed two words I have longed to write for many years. The words were “The End,” and in typing them, I crossed an item off the list of my life goals. I have … Continue reading