One of America’s literary icons died yesterday, Tuesday, Jan 27, 2009. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his work. If you haven’t read him, you might take this opportunity to try his Rabbit series. For a taste of his style, the NYTimes has posted some excerpts here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/books/28excerpts.html?ref=books

My blog was accepted by Authors’ Blogs. What a happy surprise this morning! http://www.authorsblogs.com/

Character, plot, story, setting, style, voice, point-of-view…. We can have all that, but I think there’s something else that makes a short story or a novel good. It’s the ability of an author to make the common uncommon, to make “moment” out of the seemingly mundane.

When nothing’s happening and when you, the author, are waiting for something to happen, at times one can feel utterly lost, even when surrounded by well-wishers. It’s just part of the process.

The new issue containing my short story “A Gift for Eternity” is now available for your reading pleasure. See it at The Rose and Thorn Literary Ezine on this page of the issue release January 15, 2009.

Today we had to go to “the big city” to get an LCD screen still under warranty on the road to being replaced. One word to describe the experience–exhausting. Traffic was frenetic and rude with people cutting in and out, no prior signal for warning. Is there some death wish out there? At 65 mph, it seems prudent to be a little more conservative with your own and others’ lives. Cars aren’t weapons of mass destruction, or shouldn’t be. Slow the [[expletive deleted]] down, be a bit more patient, and be considerate that the lives at stake are more than just your own!!

End Rant

I thought I’d share a bit of the kind of thing which inspires novel scenes. Here, with full permission of the original email author is an entry in what I’m going to call North Idaho Diary.

Free of the onus of having to battle the conscious will of its host person and resident body’s demands, the novelist’s brain takes sleep’s opportunity to…WRITE, PLOT, PLAN, OUTLINE, LIVE, REINVENT, MANUFACTURE, and EXPLORE the stories it insists on spawning into tangible reality whenever it can coerce and induce the person it owns and the body which owns it to sit down and type.

My favorite author events are those where the author might read a passage of the book, then stop, look up, and say something like: “You know, the morning I wrote this particular section was right after I spent a night shoveling water.”

all alone, lost in “writer’s trance,” there comes a jolt!