Sometimes I feel like a housewife. Take today, when I’m at home at 10:00 a.m., chatting it up with the dishwasher repairman, who moved here from the Ukraine twenty years ago and, God love him, keeps dropping the kind of hints for which dishwasher repairmen are so justifiably famous, as in, “Does your husband treat you good? I can treat you very good. You need anything, you call me. For you, I give a very good price.” I ask if I can pay with a credit card. “My dear, you can pay with anything.”

After he leaves, it’s over to the couch with notebook and pen and, of course, coffee, to try to get a handle on the novel-in-progress. And this feels very much like playing hooky. No matter that the book is sold, my editor is waiting, the publisher has a calendar on which it is quite firmly penciled in; no matter that writing this book is technically my job, I cannot help but feel that the very act of staying home to write is akin, somehow, to spending my day eating bon-bons. Shouldn’t I be out in the world, providing a service, replacing a lung, building a bridge, repairing someone’s dishwasher?

Writers have said some pretty self-important things about writing over the years. Take Frederick Busch’s A Dangerous Profession: A Book About the Writing Life. A dangerous profession? Really? (more…)

I’ve been thinking over the past couple of days about the evolving nature of the internet and how that relates to writers and writing. Here are a few guidelines I think make a lot of sense for writers. I am sure someone somewhere has already codified all of this, but it’s important to me to state it for myself, and to remember how I want to strive to conduct my own communications.

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One of the more audacious novels of the past few years, Light by M. John Harrison contains its own comment on labeling of fiction, I think. Whether Harrison intended it or not, the following passage speaks to the craft and art of creating fiction as well as anything in a book of writing advice:

“Every race [humankind] met on their way through the Core had a star drive based on a different theory. All those theories worked, even when they ruled out one another’s basic assumptions. You could travel between the stars, it began to seem, by assuming anything. If your theory gave you a foamy space to work with–if you had to catch a wave–that didn’t preclude some other engine, running on a perfectly smooth Einsteinian surface, from surfing from the same tranche of empty space. It was even possible to build drives on the basis of super-string-style theories, which, despite their promise four hundred years ago had never really worked at all…It was affronting to discover that…”

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Jeff: How’s it going.

Evil Monkey: Fine.

Jeff: Anything new.

Evil Monkey: Just contemplating heroism.

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I get a fair amount of email asking advice about internet PR. Things like, “Should I do a video promo for my book?” Or, “is a podcast a good idea?”

My reply, first, is usually: “Who is going to host it and how are you going to guarantee an audience for it?”

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Canadian writer (and for a long time a good friend) Cliff Burns has a provocative post here on basically telling editors to f— off, with “compromise” being a dirty word.

I think I have three reactions…

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So I was sitting in the audience a couple of years ago watching my brother Francois and the Eastside Class of 2006 graduate and I was thinking about advice. Especially during the speeches given by members of the graduating class. These speeches had the ingredients one would expect: hope for great accomplishments in the future, pride at the accomplishments of the past, a gung-ho attitude. Sprinkled with advice on dealing with college and the job market. And so I started think about what I would have wanted as advice as a graduating high school senior (I can’t really remember what advice was given out back then–it was, after all, 20 years ago).

The term “permission to fail, sir,” kept running through my head.

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(Originally posted on the old blog–I’m gradually migrating over anything pertaining to writing.)

I’ve already been quoted in various interviews as saying all fiction is fantasy in a sense. As a result, all fiction is “escapist” in a sense–there are simply varying degrees of escapism. The importance of this distinction, to me, is not to buy into the untruth (”lie” is perhaps too harsh a word in this context) that any writer of fiction fails to be “escapist” in some way. For one thing, it allows us to see the worth of truly escapist fiction by allowing it to exist in the same continuum, within the same spectrum. “Escapist” should not be a pejorative, in other words. Fiction can fail in so many ways that to focus on “too much escapism” strikes me as a convenient way to overlook defects in “non-escapist” fantasy, for example.

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Evil Monkey:
You write too slow.

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Everyone talks about perspiration. Everyone talks about the long slog. Everyone talks about things like endurance and practice.

But what about inspiration?

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