So much better! How I do love Salman Rushdie. There's something about reading a collection of short stories and enjoying every one of them.

OOH! And I get to read Neil Gaiman now!

Finished Reading: Salman Rushdie, East, West
Date Finished: 12 March

Currently Reading: Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things
Date Started: 12 March

Why Charles de Lint isn't writing in the Magic Realism genre: It's hard to articulate, but there's something irrelevant about his kind of magic. Magic Realism features extraordinary coincidences and impossibilities, but they're more meaningfully integrated into the larger social context. In Magic Realism, magic emerges as an extension of cultural ( Read more... )

Read some of Stephen King's On Writing today, and really found I agreed with a lot of it. In particular, found one passage absolutely enlightening, and now know why I was dissatisfied with the ending of my short story. Must rectify this soon. Have also found a new way of approaching paragraphs: viewing them as "beats". Will see how this works ( Read more... )

Half-finished typing the handwritten draft of my short story into the computer for further editing. Have been playing playing with new prose styles and adjectives since reading Borges. Still have problems with pacing; I really need to work on this skill more than any other. Waiting for my Charles de Lint book to arrive, and will then begin ( Read more... )

Finished the first draft of my first short story. Have started another one. Also need to type the handwritten version of the first into the computer for further editing.

I've just finished reading Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses for the third time, and I think I can say without excessive hesitancy that it is, in at least one sense, the best ( Read more... )

2007 is the year I've decided that I want to become a writer. Following the advice of Stephen King, this means I have to work up to writing for 4 hours every day, and reading for 4 hours every day. So I've started keeping a time sheet of sorts in my writing notebook, clock in, clock out, that kind of thing. I may have to start another one for ( Read more... )

Let's have a little talk about tweetle beetles ( Read more... )

I'm not active enough on LJ anymore to actually spread memes, but Lauren tagged me with this one and I suppose I ought to comply. Ten odd facts, etc ( Read more... )

Werner Heisenberg is driving to a lecture appointment at the Institute For Advanced Studies, and gets pulled over by a cop for speeding. The cop walks up to the driver's side window and says, "Sir, do you know how fast you were going?" To which Heisenberg says, "No, but I know exactly where I am ( Read more... )

(Classroom setting)

Me: Political groups pay big money to advertisers for exactly this reason. For example, the UCLA ran an advert that
Student 1: ACLU
Me: What?
Student 1: I think you mean the ACLU. UCLA is our sister campus in Los Angeles.
Me: Oh, right. So anyway, the advertisement featured the president of the UCLA, saying
Student 2: ACLU
Me: ( Read more... )