I am still struggling with the default font reset that WordPress has offered me for the last few weeks. In order to have the font I prefer I have taken to writing a bit of nonsense at the end of each paragraph. Then I set my cursor at the beginning of the trash, hit return, [...]
Learning how to write — sigh
The heroine of one of my Works-in-Progress has been stuck in a hayloft, in the middle of the night, for years. The reasons she is stuck there are legion, as I have slowly realized over those same years. A fiction book written today has to have a story arc. I'm betting that books always did, [...]
Reading on many levels
When I was originally struggling with reading The Divine Comedy, I tried some of Dante’s other writings. Dante wrote up a whole system about how to read on more than one level and this, oddly, was a good entry point for me, because my mother had shared this system with a whole bunch of teenage [...]
Analemmas and a personal Stonehenge
Driving on Route 7 in Northern Virginia in late November poses a special challenge. There are a few days when the sun rises directly in line-of-sight down the road. Because it is so early in the morning the sun is low in the sky and blinds drivers. Traffic slows down as you come over certain [...]
Ridiculous comparisons, slightly useful thoughts
Sometime in the past year I read several books from a modern author. The author is an immigrant, the books are award winning, the prose is exceptional, and the books are unrelentingly depressing. This person is supposedly writing about a particular immigrant experience, but the whole canon was utterly alien to me. I spent some [...]