I know it's been a million years since I posted here, but I'm officially moving this blog over to wordpress. It's too much hassle to deal with both and I'm going to start posting more regularly over there. So, if you haven't already, please check out my wordpress blog/website! It has much more info on my various creative projects and I hope to be ( Read more... )

This is just to say that I’ve been working away on my novel and my lecture and cooking a ton of food from scratch so I don’t have as much time right now to blog about anything particularly interesting. My advisor really loves the new third person I’m playing with, which I’m very pleased about, and she wants me to keep moving forward in the story ( Read more... )

Whew! Packet 2 is in and I'm taking a much needed break to do things like clean off my desk, lol :) But I have an exciting announcement to make. My dad's new short story collection "The Conjurer and Other Tales" is coming out this fall from Tagus Press. If you enjoyed his first novel, "The Undiscovered Island", are interested in Portugal and the ( Read more... )

Okay, so I know I’ve been very bad and skipped another week of posting, but I’ve been swamped with rewriting everything (again) after getting some awesome feedback from my advisor (and a few other people). I haven’t even had a chance to work on my lecture yet and my next packet is due a week from today so there has been a lot of panicking. But I ( Read more... )

So the graduating class at VCFA have to give a lecture in their final residency. Sometimes people use their critical thesis as a basis for their lecture, but I’m choosing to do something completely different. I’m going to be doing a lecture on characterization, more specifically, on using free-writing to get to know one’s characters.

What do I mean ( Read more... )

If you write at all, sooner or later you’ll come across the concept of “killing your darlings.” It’s inevitable that as an artist you will also eventually create something that you love dearly but that doesn’t work in the grand scheme of your story or is at best self indulgent. And then you will have to kill it. Dead. But like most things it’s a ( Read more... )

Okay, okay! So I was supposed to post something once a week. But I had this crazy idea to scrap most of what I had written of my novel and start over again so I’m currently in panic-and-chain-myself-to-the-computer mode. Therefore a real post will have to wait. I will try to actually write something useful when I’m done killing my darlings. I will ( Read more... )

I spent most of last semester alternating every other chapter of my novel between the past (backstory) and the present (the actual story, I guess) and in the process lost any semblance of logic. Characters would do things for no particular reason I could think of other than that I didn’t know what else to have them do. Or they would become my plot ( Read more... )

I have returned at last from the frozen wasteland that is Vermont and its below freezing weather ready to launch into my fourth (and final!) semester at VCFA. *Weeps* I’m feeling a little overwhelmed. Fourth semester is when things get serious. We have to complete a publication worthy manuscript of at least 75 pages and prepare the lecture that we ( Read more... )

Tomorrow I fly off to Vermont for my fourth residency at Vermont College of Fine Arts! I can't believe it! This will be my last semester and then I graduate in July. And it has gone by so fast! Just a year and a half ago I thought: two years? That's going to take forever! Apparently time flies when you're working your butt off and having fun.

I'm ( Read more... )