This lovely authorial vision from Flaubert is also applicable to life as lived within the nondual understanding of self and world (which is where I myself live): It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man…
Tag: writing
Writing a Novel: Slow, Underwhelming, One Sentence at a Time
A rather neat novelist origin story from science writer Sara Goudarzi, author of the soon-to-be-published The Almond in the Apricot. Her insights into the creative process and the writer’s craft that she had to learn when transitioning from writing science journalism to prose fiction ring true: While I wrote several science articles a week, a…
For Writers: Make a Place in Your Plan for the Irrational and Mysterious
Novelist Maria Mutch, writing for Literary Hub: Efficiency, rationalism, progress, all perfectly decent ideas that also call to mind the American highway-building madness of the 1950s, for instance, or the current financial paradigm of ceaseless and predictable growth, and which, left to overtake the novel-writing process, can obscure or squeeze out altogether what is mysterious…
Writing is meditation. Its value is just doing it.
The current dawning of the Coronacene reframes and underscores an always-salient truth: Real success in writing is just doing it. Just inhabiting the act itself. Just seeing new words appear on the page. “The search for meaning distilled in an act . . . an act of meditation, an act of prayer . . ….
Teeming Links – April 12, 2019
We currently live in divided and divisive times. Lately (meaning for the past two and a half years), I’ve been reading deeply in the literature about leadership for the PhD that I’m now close to finishing. And I’m here to say that it seems to me the following words from Robert Greenleaf’s classic 1970s essay…
Teeming Links – March 15, 2019
In light of yesterday’s awful mosque attacks in New Zealand, I feel led to start with this except from a 2003 PBS interview with Thich Nhat Hanh. After an extensive conversation about Buddhism, Christianity, mindfulness, and other such matters, and their relationship to gritty large-scale matters of war and violence, the interaction ends with this:…
New (and old) book projects: An encyclopedia of horror literature and a collection of horror fiction
Frontispiece to Frankenstein (1831 edition). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. On a morning when I’ve just finished up with several days of responding to publisher copy edits on Ghosts, Spirits, and Psychics, I’m happy to announce the birth of another book project: I have just signed a contract with the same publisher (ABC-CLIO) to edit…
Teeming Links – April 25, 2014
We’re entering an age of energy impoverishment. Richard Heinberg explains: “It’s hard to overstate just how serious a threat our energy crisis is to every aspect of our current way of life. But the problem is hidden from view by oil and natural gas production numbers that look and feel just fine. . . ….
Art, Mystery, and Magic: A Fireside Chat with Don Webb
“True mysteries give more energy, more questions every time you find an answer. I truly think that searching after mysteries is the source of the immortalization of the human soul. If I ever write anything that makes someone consider that maybe they don’t know everything about everything, then I have succeeded.” — Don Webb Don…
Alan Moore: “Writing is a very focused form of meditation”
From an excellent new profile of Alan Moore in The Observer, focusing mainly on his rejection of Hollywood but spinning out into various and sundry areas of deep fascinatingness (as befitting his fascinatingly deep and varied person), a statement regarding the deep intertwinement of magic, consciousness, creativity, and writing: This business of being a practising…