Original: 2010/1/15… It’s taken a couple days to get back into the groove back home. I’ve been gone four weeks and the world feels like it’s passed me by. Thus is the tempo of digital marketing. Therein it goes. I just finished working on wearing out my running shoes. And I just finished killing some […]
Fifth "First" Book
First step / trick / advice to writing a book / novel
I have 2 books scattered unevenly throughout 5 books. I’m fresh off a near-6 year tech Odyssey and back on the shores of Ithaca. I still see the writing rust speckled about the floor when I get up from the table after another session. With all that little authority, the first piece of advice I […]
A Through Line (or Spine) in a story. How I heard it.
Over the weekend I drafted out the top-level chapter names for the fifth-first book, again. I read them off to Katie and explained a little bit about each. She lit up like a Christmas tree and exclaimed: “Yeah. I really like how the through lines work.” I nodded, agreed, thanked her, and replied with an […]
[Review] “Wild” by Cheryl Strayed.
Last Sunday, Katie and I were bumming up and down Main St. in Pleasanton when she found a little book shop nestled in an old, iconic house. Town Center Books, I discovered the name when I went to pay. Pretty cool little niche place. Our Barnes & Noble membership didn’t work there and there was […]
Allergies for new Bay Area Residents within 3 years of moving here? It happened to us, too. But…
One of the things we were told to prepare for when moving from Chicago to San Francisco was that we were going to develop allergies within three years, but that we’d adjust. We had doctors tell us that, friends tell us that, blogs tell us that… But we dismissed the warnings because we thought we […]
“Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” vs “Can the Circle Be Unbroken (By and By).”
I was writing the beginning of the ending of the fifth first book when, before I realized it, I had been singing Will the Circle Be Unbroken? for over an hour. Hell, maybe a day? Week? It just crept up on me as I’ve been thinking through where I was going with this story. Well, […]
TV & Media #FOMO but we turned off the TV at 8pm tonight in order to read and write and create.
It’s 9:03 pm on a Tuesday night in mid-late January. Katie’s on the phone with her brother discussing what to read next: Thoreau, Kierkegaard, Asimov, McCarthy…Brian Sanderson’s Mistborn appears to be the winner. I’ve got a stack to read on my farmer’s table… …and a stack of what I’m currently reading next to my side […]
From BiziPorts back to the beginning
We told clients nearly two weeks ago that we’re mothballing BiziPorts. Once that happened, gravity felt weaker. I could stand taller, sleep longer, and walk farther. So, while that’s mothballed, it’s time to get to what I’ve been itching to get to since before we started BiziPorts: Books of Blues. The first book of blues […]