Echoes and Mirrors » authors

Tips for writers…

Daniel — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 04:36:56 +0000

10 tips on writing fiction from some big names in writing

The biggest one I took away from this is that I need to actually do the damn thing. Which is something I’ve been overlooking for too long now, aside from this bloggy-blog thing. I love writing and used to plop down and write a story (at least one) every day, whether it was good or not. Sometimes I’d also rewrite stories that I found lacking. Lately, though, I’ve just made a lot of excuses about being too busy. I don’t even remember what it really feels like.

Tomorrow is relatively open for me – I suppose I’ll sit down and write something.

Howard Zinn dead at 87

Daniel — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 03:06:42 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

From the Boston Globe:

Howard Zinn, the Boston University historian and political activist who was an early opponent of US involvement in Vietnam and whose books, such as “A People’s History of the United States,” inspired young and old to rethink the way textbooks present the American experience, died today in Santa Monica, Calif, where he was traveling. He was 87.

I might not agree with what Zinn said, but I fully agree with his ideals of opposing the status quo, questioning authority and making sure to apply scrutiny. The world has lost a great man.

How big of a nerd am I? This big.

Daniel — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 01:50:00 +0000

I’m writing a criticism of Jane Austin for school. Nothing special, nothing new. It’s in the “New Critical” style, which makes it somewhat boring and restricts my ability to say, “they’re flirting. duh.”

That’s not the nerdy part. No, the nerdy part is that in my frustration to note something, I actually went looking for a bittorrent of the OED. God dammit. No, I don’t have a copy or access to it online, and I’ll be damned if I don’t actually need it now. This is both sad and wonderful.

For the all you romantics out there

Daniel — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 18:28:00 +0000

Lord Byron’s Great Insight: Mad, bad, and dangerous, he understood what women wanted.

It is easy to see Byron as a cad, a narcissist and, at bottom, a misogynist. But that would be unfair. Byron’s great insight, in an era where women were expected to be placid and insipid (not that they were!), was to see that women were much like men: They wanted sex and went after it eagerly, if secretly. Don Juan, his great satiric novel in verse, is a virtual catalog of passionate women who are anything but bashful, even if still virginal, and who are presented without condemnation, as human beings doing what human beings do. He understood, too, how limited was women’s scope for action. “Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,” writes Juan’s first love, the married Donna Julia, from the convent to which she is confined when their affair is discovered. ” ‘Tis woman’s whole existence.”

Byron’s electrifying effect on women readers was inspired not just by his handsomeness, his woundedness, and the exciting hope of reforming him, which was poor Annabella’s undoing. It was also due to his frankness, that sense his poetry gave that he understood his reader’s secret rebellious thoughts and longings for experience, pleasure, a life beyond tea tables. It wasn’t only the Greeks who found in him a champion of freedom.

If you stick you’re nose up at the literary greats, you are losing out on a source of both inspiration and advice. Memorizing a few lines of poetry can go a long way. Who better to learn from than one of history’s most notorious womanizers?

Hell, I learned more about women in Norman Mailer’s The Prisoner of Sex than I could have imagined, once I opened my eyes and applied a little of it. Byron offers much of the same – it is a growth process.

Try not to get any sand in your vag, I hear it itches a bit.

Daniel — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 19:32:00 +0000

The Right Not to be offended?

It’s a discredit to our national confidence that each time some impolite thought—perceived or otherwise—is uttered, sketched, or typed, a faction of professionally offended Americans engages in a collective hypersensitivity meltdown.

It has been a long-standing custom for opponents to shut down debate by tagging adversaries with some dreadful labels. No one wants to be called a racist, a Commie, or a neocon. It’s gotten to the point that the gatekeepers of the news walk so tepidly on the path of least resistance a journalist can’t even get a dirty joke in the newspaper.

Serendipitous that I should come across this after posting this the other day.

Yes, I’m probably a little crass and more than a bit vulgar, but if your skin is that thin, you might want to worry about yourself some more. But less so than Pulitzer Prize winners Norman Mailer, Henry Miller and now Junot Diaz:

Paul called it “the most profane reading that Seattle Arts and Lectures has ever put on,” which sounds right. It was as if Diaz was saying to the crowd: don’t let these frosty SAL types convince you that literature is boring. The guy said “fuck” at least 40 times, and the story he read had a bunch of instances of “nigger” and at least one “pussy” getting fingered. Before he began reading he apologized for how boring readings are, and this apology, coupled with the revelation that SAL administrators had asked him to read for a lot longer than he was willing to, made the crowd love him. In addition to making fun of SAL and making fun of himself, he made fun of Seattleites, made fun of Republicans, made fun of Dominicans—pretty much no one was spared. But you got the sense that Linda Bowers was pissed, felt slighted, and when she came back onstage to moderate the Q&A, it showed. She made a point of mentioning that there was extra time for questions, i.e., that Diaz hadn’t talked for as long as he was supposed to. When the questions were underway, she was brusque and prickly. She was icy. They seemed to be at war with one another, Bowers and Diaz, although it was all subtext and oddly enough seemed to energize the Q&A: to question after question, Diaz gave some of the most elegant answers I’ve ever heard a writer give. Seldom has a SAL lecturer triumphed over circumstances the way Diaz did last night.

Fuck yeah!

More people

Daniel — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 19:11:00 +0000

should be like this guy.

tidbits

Daniel — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 20:11:00 +0000

Roissy tackles the freaks. I sadly worked with so many of these poor people while I was in the military. Many soldiers seek out ‘anything they can get’ simply because it is easy. Given the rapid and unforseen deployments, they are quite ready to pump and dump (provided they have any game). Many are naive 18-year olds who don’t know the first thing about the real world and have women run them over -yes, they fight for their country and can outrun/outshoot/outfight most Americans, but outside of the physical realm, they have no understanding. This is what the military calls ‘retention’.
Old people like Facebook. I can confirm this: my father and many of his brothers and sisters recently discovered it. I can’t help but laugh at how serious they seem to take it, as well. “The Internet Is Serious Business.” Right.
Thomas Pynchon has a new novel coming out. I’m chewing my way through Gravity’s Rainbow during the lulls at work, and it’s damn impressive. However, for anyone who isn’t Thomas Pynchon trying to sell a book right now, your screwed: Houghton Mifflin isn’t accepting manuscripts for the time being. A common occurance for indie presses, but not for the big boys. This doesn’t apply to self-publishing douchebags: you guys can go right on trying to sell your vapid, self-edited work. (My hatred of self-publishing stems from the lack of quality control, not the writers themselves.)
Janet Napolitano is a great choice to head up Homeland Security, if you want to destroy the agency by reducing its credibility to nothing and encouraging it to implode from the weight of corruption and ineffectiveness. Which I support, as the agency is superfluous and unneccessary.
Radley Balko goes in-depth about No-Knock Warrants, Home-Invasion and why SWAT teams are overused. Great arguments if anyone you know is being an idiot about how the police seem to be dealing with this situation.

I’ve been incredibly buried in work and school lately, in addition to my healthy social life. Blogging is just not at the top of my list, and since I can’t do it from work nearly as much, has declined accordingly.

Don’t even get my started on The Dark Tower

Daniel — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 20:30:00 +0000

Stephen King talks about God and ‘The Stand’: one of those staple books from my teen years. I think I’ve probably read it three or four times. That, and Gerald’s Game. I do enjoy a good vs. evil story -I mean, shit, they’re so abstract and polarized and fascinatingly perfect -even though I don’t think either really exists. There is the Gray and there is the Nothing.

I don’t really care for much of his writing these days (my tastes have changed is all) but I do love The Stand to this day. It really made me think, “holy shit, people are so bland, even when they’re dynamic and motivated.” Not really… I just enjoyed the idea of this big global enema.

He especially struck a nerve with me about Americans being so apocalyptic, which is nothing new in itself, but funny that he brings it up. I’ve been more and more shifting towards a minimalistic, travel-light-travel-fast mentality and the empire-building types amuse me. They’re also the first ones to give into fear. My empire is in my mind, and only one act, an act that will bring me full-circle -and into perfection -that can destroy it: death.

But every now and then, a pulpy post-apocalyptic social-commentary laden story is necessary, and King is the guy that can dream it up.

The Dream People #30

Daniel — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 03:22:00 +0000

Featuring: me.

Go forth and read issue #30.

Specifically this: Esteban Canal’s Immortal Game as Applied to God.

By me. Of course.

Go read my story
-it’s not really a story-
read, motherfucker!

David Foster Wallace, RIP

Daniel — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 15:14:00 +0000

David Foster Wallace, dead:

He talked about how difficult it was to be a novelist in a world seething with advertisements and entertainment and knee-jerk knowingness and facile irony. He wrote about the maddening impossibility of scrutinizing yourself without also scrutinizing yourself scrutinizing yourself and so on, ad infinitum, a vertiginous spiral of narcissism — because not even the most merciless self-examination can ignore the probability that you are simultaneously congratulating yourself for your soul-searching, that you are posing. He tried so hard to be sincere and to attend to the world around him because he was excruciatingly aware of how often we are merely “sincere” and “attentive” and all too willing to leave it at that. He spoke of the discipline and of the abrading, daily labor such efforts require because the one imperative that runs throughout all of his work is the intimate connection between humility and wisdom.

A truly wonderful person is gone. If there was anyone who understood the horrors of the modern landscape, it was DFW. My friend Ross insisted that I read Brief Interviews with Hideous Men; he went so far as trying to give me his own copy with the caveat that I “pass it along to someone else who needs to read it.” I ended up leaving the book at his apartment but I have since read it* and am still looking forward to reading Infinite Jest (whenever I have something that resembles free-time).

*For what it’s worth (and it’s not) I have become obsessive about the hillarity of footnotes.