I don’t watch a lot of television, but one show I enjoyed was Monk. If you’re unfamiliar with it, it was an old detective show based around an OCD ex-cop with an incredible power of perception. A dead body would show up, the San Francisco […]

Recently, we made a painful decision to part with a close family member: satellite television service. The good news is that we haven’t missed it. Instead, we reallocated our funds, partially, to season passes to Disneyland. There are several reasons why we chose to do […]

Charles Baxter, in Burning Down the House, Essays on Fiction, devotes an entire chapter to a principle he calls “Stillness.” To paraphrase a rather lengthy and well documented argument, he proposes that stillness, a moment in fiction where action subsides and characters/narrators focus on the […]

Some time after Flannery O’Connor’s death, her friends, Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, compiled several of Flannery’s essays and speeches on writing in a book called Mystery and Manners. If you’ve not read it, you can get it here. If you’re serious about the art of […]

You may have noticed the significant lack of updates recently. I have a very good excuse. I was magically transported into a video game. A role playing game, to be precise. If you’re wondering which one, don’t. You’re not familiar with it. You’ve never even […]

…and the small gets smaller. I resisted Twitter for the usual reasons. Honestly, I’m still a little surprised that people are so inherently narcissistic (present company included) that they’d actually believe other people would care what they ate for lunch, or some other such silly […]

Just got back from reading an interesting article about a somewhat “new” fiction fad: Hint Fiction. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, Hint Fiction refers to any story of twenty-five words or less. Of course, in the article, the debate centers on whether or not […]

My fascination with micro-fiction began as a writing assignment: Compose a story in less than sixty words. The point of the exercise, of course, was to get to the point. Beginnings are a tricky business, and this particular exercise was designed to get us to […]