Entries from January 2010

January 31, 2010

100 Things About A Novel, Pt. 2

[Note: Part 1 is here.] 25. Novels are hard, not like diamonds but like fate, the choice you make that reveals it was never a choice at all. 26. Then it is the novel as jailer. You in a small dark room with no answers to any of your questions and no one seems to [...]

January 22, 2010

100 Things About A Novel, Pt. 1

Sometimes music is needed. Sometimes silence. This is probably because a novel is a piece of music, like all written things, the language demanding you make a sound as you read it. Sometimes I have written them on subways, missing stops, like people do when reading. It begins for me usually with the implications of [...]

January 8, 2010

January 8th, 2010

1. In a thread on Darcy Cosper’s facebook page, I learn that the New York Times forbids writing in the present tense, as it is technically a fiction, even when used in the presentation of nonfiction. 2. My old friend Gerard Koskovich, the historian and archivist, was shopping the yard sale of a young woman [...]