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BACKING UP AND ADDING ON

Backing up into a parking space is normal? It’s getting that way, but there’re still holdouts.   – People who always back into to parking spaces think they better than us. – I back into my parking space in the garage and the garage is inclined up…I also do it with a manual transmission car, […]

YOU WANT ME TO WANT TO?

In Patrick DeWitt’s novel French Exit, the mom asks her thirty-two year old son to get something for her. “Please bring me my cup.” “I will if you want me to.” “I want you to want to.” And he obeys. So I ask . . .

SISTERS BROTHERS BOOK, MOVIE, AND MORE

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt spooked me from the moment it showed up. What kind of tricky title was that. Would it be about brothers and sisters, sisters who wanted to be brothers? I had to find out, and so I did. I picked it up and read it. Then what?

YOUR STORY: WHERE TO START

Your story is like every story: waiting to be told. You: But, Blogger Dave I sound dumb when I write it down. Me: What’s dumb sound like. You: It makes me sound like a blogger. Me:

LOST HIGHWAY? GET A MAP, BOOMER

The Lost Highway by Hank Williams is every road ever traveled. Some longer, some shorter, but it’s the same road. You can say you’re not lost. Go ahead. But we’re all old enough to know better.

BLUE SKIES IN THE BOOK REVIEW MIRROR

Blue Skies came to me via Twitter. T.C. Boyle mentioned a new novel and he delivered. What he delivered felt a little too close to home for me, which kept me reading. How close?

KEEP GRINDING, WRITERS

“Keep grinding’ is the message all writers tell themselves, but not out loud. Instead, what they say is their word count for the day. Maybe it’s a thousand, maybe more. The message they send is keep grinding.

ESSENTIAL READING TO IGNORE . . . AT YOUR OWN RISK

One blogger’s essential reading is another’s fire-starter; that’s just how it is. Except the book in Ken Kesey’s hand won’t start any fires today, not the way it started fires in his younger days.

WHAT’S SO GREAT ABOUT JAY GATSBY?

The Great Gatsby patrols the modern world with Jay Gatsby walking point. (Just finished Hemingway’s Movable Feast. Scott Fitzgerald came in at the end. He and Papa were buddies in Paris before Zelda slipped a gear. In 2011 Paula McLaine wrote a novel called The Paris Wife about the same time. Read both books for […]

WRITING THE BOOK I WAS DESTINED TO WRITE

    An English major joke goes like this: I like to write poetry, but I suck at writing poetry. So I wrote a short story that was worse than my poem. To fix the problem I wrote a novel and it’s the worst yet, and this explains the deluge of bad writing.