Life in California went topsy-turvy on Marth 19th, 2020, when Governor Gavin Newsom issued a stay at home order to protect the health and well-being of all Californians. Quite suddenly, the world shifted on its access. The ominous sense of dread finally had a definition: Pandemic. From the ground, there was confusion. The city shut down. Those of us who had day jobs, found ourselves confined to our houses. For me, editorial meetings and teaching yoga took place on Zoom. As a writer, nothing changed. Before Covid-19, writing meant entering a fantasy world of my own making, and after Covid-19, my inner landscape remained exactly the same. To write is to step into another dimension. But the real world is something altogether different. Life got tricky. As the deaths mounted and the grim reaper laid body bags down at the steps of the capital, the highest levels of government denied reality. Toxic tribal affiliations had gripped the nation. A simmering distrust of science caused a bizarre slide into disinformation and denial of a very real virus. As a devotee of both … [Read more...] about Life during Plague Time.
Write Like You Mean it.
Writing is a calling. People write for different reasons and there is no better time in history to be a writer. Sure, the publishing world has been shaken by technology and the old system is slowly dying. Yes, the midlist is nonexistent. Of course, the gatekeepers continue to do what gatekeepers do, create exclusivity and a system where they maintain control. But the upshot is power and freedom to the writer. First of all, if you write fiction and you keep doing it, you're a special breed. As the columnist, Red Smith once said when asked whether writing a daily column was difficult, “Why no, you simply sit down at your typewriter, open a vein and bleed.” Writing has always been difficult, since the first moment a chisel was placed on a stone. Storytelling is as old as language. Stories are told, retold, and transformed into other stories; Cupid and Psyche became Beauty and the Beast became Twilight. Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John are the same story from different points of view. Socrates warned that writing stories down would lead to memory loss and a lack of wisdom. Little did … [Read more...] about Write Like You Mean it.
The Corrections: Hemingway Editor scores Nobel Prize winning author’s prose as “poor”
I am a word nerd. I love to geek out on weird and wonderful applications like Scrivener, Microsoft Word, Grammarly and the Hemingway Editor. These programs are innovative and can do some of the heavy-lifting for writers, especially in commercial writing, social media and journalism, catching spelling mistakes and proofing for small errors. But for novelists, poets and short story writers, editing programs are like talking to your drunken roommate from college; they don't always make a lot of sense. Allowing an editing program to decide how you should write is a critical mistake. Writing software has certain weaknesses, just check out the infamous spell check poem which proves conclusively that spellcheck is not the boss of you. Editing programs cannot detect rhythm or poetic metaphor or choose when the passive voice is more powerful than the active voice. Complex sentence structure baffles the algorithms of these applications. One day maybe, but not now. Editing and spelling software cannot replace education or instinct. Writers need to learn the rules in order to make … [Read more...] about The Corrections: Hemingway Editor scores Nobel Prize winning author’s prose as “poor”
