One of the most frequent questions writers are asked is about their “writing space,” that special place to which they retreat to spend hours upon hours with a keyboard and a stack of blank paper. The question is a tried and true staple of interviewers seeking to get inside the heads of their writer-subjects. Ernest Hemingway wrote standing up in [...]

I’m not a grammar Nazi. I don’t wander around with a copy of Strunk & White‘s Elements of Style in my satchel, waiting to pounce on the first individual to dangle a modifier or end a sentence with a preposition. (Okay, fine. I do carry a copy of Strunk & White. But I don’t lie in wait to pounce….) And I’ll almost [...]

(Or: How astrology seems to impact the pattern of literature) Let me begin with a disclaimer: I do not buy much into the belief that where the stars are when you are born plays a large role in your development as a human being. I’m enough of a hard determinist to refrain from discounting the possibility, but I would think [...]

Before I go any farther down this particularly dangerous rabbit hole, please understand that I am a huge Gleek. First among my loves on Glee is Miss Quinn Fabray, portrayed by the ever beautiful Dianna Agron. That being said, I’m a writer, acutely aware of storycraft and always on the lookout for  those times when writers either succeed tremendously or fail [...]

Here’s a question: what would it take to get you to read a five or six paragraph short story every day? The stories wouldn’t be interconnected. They would have only occasionally reoccurring characters and they would appear in your inbox each morning. Once they were distributed via email, they would be archived. I’ve been toying with the idea for some [...]

Papaw’s study is perhaps the most vivid of my childhood memories. Everything about that room — the heavy oak desk, the southeastern window, every surface piled high with papers — has a mystical pull upon the deepest recesses of my mind that walking through Office Depot will frequently turn into a trip back in time. A glimps in the corner of [...]

Or: I’m going to kill myself getting this done in time. I do this to myself every year. March is a month I should spend celebrating my birthday. (I turn thirty-four at the end of the month.) I should be recovering from the onslaught of allergies that happens every year in late February. I could be preparing for a summer [...]

(What Would Ayn Do?)   I’ve always heard people say negative things about Ayn Rand, the 20th Century writer and philosopher and, quite arguably, one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th Century America. Usually, the comments seem benign to the average listener. But to someone who grew up arguing about how to “properly parse that phrase,” and under [...]

Or: Why the hell isn’t there a Bookaholics Anonymous group? I have a secret. A dark, unspoken secret. I am an addict. My addiction is not to drugs. Cocaine will you not find in any blood panel. I enjoy a good drink, but I am not an alcoholic. I don’t even smoke very often. Yet, the truth remains. I am [...]

I’m taking th eMonth of November off for NanoWriMo. Please enjoy this as an alternative to my normal boring blogs: The Inevitable Life of Andrew Weid. Or, you can keep up with individual chapters below: Prologue Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 —and more to come— By all means, leave comments here.