Saturday, March 21, 2009

odds and ends

For you BSG fans out there, cupcakes!

I like it that there are whole blogs about bacon

Thanks to my mentor and friend, Gayle Brandeis, for mentioning my Amazon entry on her blog. She's so sweet and generous, plus she asks the best questions that lead me to improve my writing.

If you want to live vicariously in France, check out ceci n'est pas une blog

Also, Rhonda Mitchell,one of my fellow mentees at Antioch is getting much deserved recognition for writing about her experience in this recession. Check out Recession Daily

Need some musical inspiration? A friend of mine, see_thru, DJs at Blip.fm - check it out.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

reading

Looks like I won't be participating in next Friday's reading after all. The venue isn't quite right. GROWING CHOCOLATE deals with the death of child, cutting and other serious themes not suitable for family night at a Y! There will be other opportunities.

Brings up the question of when to say 'yes' to readings. Not all venues are suitable. You have to think about your target audience - who are your readers? Sometimes you have to turn things down.

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Amazon

Thanks for the great reviews! For those I've heard from who have had problems, don't forget to log in to your Amazon account first. Today's a great day and I'm off to be in the studio audience for Dancing with the Stars. Please vote for my friend, Gilles Marini. We've been so blessed by our friendship with him and his family.

Monday, March 16, 2009

Quarterfinals!

I made it to the quarterfinals of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel contest! They winnowed it down from 10,000 to 500. Please help me out by posting a positive review here. The ones with the greatest number of positive reviews move on to be reviewed by Penguin Books. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate it. Thanks for all of your support. Here's the address:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001UG3CRQ.

Thank you!

Thursday, March 12, 2009

sigh

Did not win the lottery after all. I'd probably be in the Caribbean if I had. No, I'd still be here trying to figure out where I'm going in the current novel. I entered the first 8K words in Narrative's Story contest - mostly to force me to finish the thing. Did I resolve to write 3 pages a day? How foolish. No, there's a lot of writing, deleting, writing, rewriting, adding a few words to a sentence, sometimes taking them out and general staring out the window. Right now it's sunny and there are 2 small clouds to the left. A slight breeze ruffles the trees, well, the trees that are left. There are a lot of hacked off branches since the tree trimmers showed up a couple weeks ago. I like the light though, so no complaints. Gave up complaining for Lent anyway. Finished ELEGANCE OF THE HEDGEHOG and what a disappointment at the end. Come on, do the hard work and write a decent ending. Endings have been pissing me off lately, like the end of the profile on David Foster Wallace in the New Yorker. Really, a choice? You go right ahead perpetrate media stereotypes on depression and mental illness, New Yorker. No heavy lifting required.

Here's a letter that was published in Salon about the poor use of language around suicide:

Suicide and 'choice'

Discussing causality in suicide is a tricky business, both both in psychological and existential terms. Suggesting that David Foster Wallace "chose" to kill himself presumes that his choice-making faculties were intact, that he was David Foster Wallace as those who knew him had always known him. I didn't know DFW and am only glancingly familiar with his work, but for those of us who study suicide and treat people who are tormented (and sometimes, killed) by suicidal despair, it's clear that the emotional agony sufficient to lead to the suicidal impulse is also extreme enough to have, in the same process, undone that person's ordinary problem-solving and choice-making processes. The person who engages in the suicidal act is not the person we have known in other contexts. They person who dies by suicide is, in over 90% of cases studied by retrospective 'psychological autopsy', someone suffering from a particularly virulent form of mood disorder or other suicidality-engendering mental illness. It is not "Bob (or David, or Jane) choosing to kill himself", but rather, "Bob, unraveled by the agony of illness, blindly seeking relief from pain". The act, perceived from outside that agony, seems without reason, or even, as some of the other letters have suggested, intentionally malignant; from inside the seemingly endless and intolerable subjective pain and hopelessness of the suicidal individual, it is, in the moment of unendurable suffering, the only exit visible. Those left behind to mourn in the wake of a suicide often struggle greatly to come to terms with what seems to be a heartless or sadistic 'choice'. Their suffering, which can go on and on, is made just a bit lighter if our discourse can acknowledge that what looks like a 'choice' was, in fact, a person killed being by their illness. ---

-- drjonrichard