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The Write Word Newsletter — September 2019
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Photo by Matt Hardy from Pexels
Checking Out, But Leaving the Lights on (and the Keyboard Warm)
Hello. I’ve been mulling this decision for a few months, and the bell has rung: I’m going to shelve this newsletter for now. I might resume it in a different form in time to come, but after good deliberation, it feels like I haven’t established a voice and message here that resonates.
It’s rare that I get any response at all from the monthly messages—and by golly, please don’t think I’m blaming my audience. I have refined the format a few times in the years I’ve been publishing (since 2012), but haven’t seemed to have fixed on what pulls people in, and then pulls more people in.
I will continue writing about writing, and invite you to subscribe to my blog, for which I’ve been writing in mere fits and starts lately, but in which I will be writing more frequently. There’s a subscription link at the top-right of my home page.
Whether you’ve read 7 or 70 of these, it’s been a pleasure writing to you, and I hope you got something out of the work, if only a smile.
Sincerely, thank you!
Links You Might Like
I'm putting my stuff on top this time, just to show my sharpened-teeth dominance. The links below those are again pieces I thought provocative and helpful in moving forward in life. Or they tasted like ice cream.
Tom's Tales
A family spent 10 years on a sailing adventure that covered 6,000 nautical miles and seven countries. And wrote a book about it. Published in September 2019 in the San Jose Mercury News.
My account of lunatic, scary, and bewildering experiences house-sitting crazed pets in many parts of the world. Published in Bluntly magazine in September 2019.
California’s coastal wetlands are threatened by polluting farming runoff. Here’s an experimental means to relieve that pollution that shows great promise. Published in the coastal science magazine Hakai in September 2019.
Other Warm Loaves of Bread
How To Simplify Your Life
What many of us long for more than anything else is a simpler life; we feel overwhelmed by our responsibilities, schedules, commitments and obligations. A six-minute film about how to create the simpler life we deserve.
The Weird Strategy Dr. Seuss Used to Create His Greatest Work
"But constraints are not the enemy. Every artist has a limited set of tools to work with. Every athlete has a limited set of skills to train with. Every entrepreneur has a limited amount of resources to build with. Once you know your constraints, you can start figuring out how to work with them."
Breaking Bad: How to Make Good Habits from Bad Ones
"Any process of change is a series of successes and failures." (with video)
Universal Laws of the World
#3. Brandolini’s law: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullsh*t is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” Great list of logical interpretations and scientific explorations of the ways we follow the herd, or unquestioningly deceive ourselves with "accepted" wisdom.
Why You Don't Need to Be Exceptional
Achievement is "a species of mental illness." Many of us walk the earth with a feeling that, in order to acceptable, we need to be something very special indeed. It could sound like ambition, but it's closer to neurosis - and a source of constant and unnecessary pain. An 8-minute film on tips to unwind the affliction.
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Swirled All the Way to the Shrub
The Roaring Twenties were bellowing along—until they weren't.
In a splintered bar in Boston, Pinky DeVroom, newspaperman, amateur cynic and would-be-novelist, clutches his sour Prohibition brandy and watches his world get sucked down into the vortex. Hope comes in the form of an astute, comely literary agent named Elfred. But hope can be its own form of hell.
Literature has never had a hero named Pinky—but despite literature's measured qualms, this is its greatest chance.
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Think Like a Writer: How to Write the Stories You See
Think Like a Writer will corral your writing ideas—and saddle up the stories you’ve always wanted to write. Do you love language, and how words work to thrill, convince, dazzle, excite?
This book will supply you with the tools to find and cultivate your writer's voice, that unique combination of attributes—sensitivity to language, storytelling and audience—by which writers see and define the world.
Download some free sample chapters of "Think Like a Writer".
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Aftershock
The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake changed—and ended—many Bay Area lives. There were heroes, there were villains, and there were many people shaken (at first, literally) to the core. A huge event like that can throw lives together in startling ways, and that's the subject of my novel, Aftershock.
Aftershock is the story of three disaster survivors who must then survive each other. One is a blithe joker who is insecure in his art, one a respected businesswoman who feels lost to her father, and one a military veteran whose alcoholism lost him to his family and himself.
Those all sound like downers (and they are) but the interplay between these characters--characters who never would have come together in these ways without the quake—is often hilarious.
Except when it's not. There's a lot of San Francisco in the book, including the city's beauties, and how the AIDS crisis affects a secondary character and thus the protagonist. Even the Bronte sisters get their moments.
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