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If it doesn’t fit, it’s probably a blog post.

Three Quick Thoughts on Living in Tuscany

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No kidding, people are different here. Everything’s got a story and often it’s a long story. We’re glad we got out of San Francisco when we did but the real Tuscany is both much more amazing and much more about regular daily life than the brand “Tuscany”  co-opted by sellers of “Tuscan-brown sofas surrounded by Tuscan-yellow walls,” etcetera. That’s...

Why we had to get out of America

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(UPon reading “Fear of Freedom” by Carlo Levi) It was necessary to get out of America because America had become a monster, an unrecognizable foe, a fascist seedling sprouting on the fringe of consciousness. It was necessary to go someplace far away from America to sit and contemplate, to try to regain the self. I’m going to read this piece here: (Tasso Hostel open mic...

New Years Day 2018

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“I’m still alive!” is something you shout from the crevasse to the rescuers whose pick axes remind you because you are still a poet although stuck in the ice of cartoon implements from TV in Florida and this is how you hope to go one day but not yet because the medicine was good and you are still here a bit of a miracle but as they with their chisels chip and hammer at the ice that preserves you...

Linked-In proves: I know an awful lot of people not very well at all

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It is a job to get all the social media accounts up to date so I can tell everyone to buy the Finishing School book as a gift this gift-giving season and hopefully some will do as I command, I being master of the universe in my own head. But wow. So I go to Linked-In, which I hate, or at least have hated up to now, and I think, I have to get the info on this awful thing up to date just in case a...

Having left America, listening to NPR in Italy

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Having left America two years ago for Italy, having used the money from selling our house in San Francisco to buy a smaller less expensive house in Italy and live here for a while, maybe for a long while, having fled, as it were, as if the place were on fire, having felt tremors like an earthquake in the social strata, having seen our city, once a refuge, turn against us, having felt suddenly and...

I hate giving gifts. But …

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Here is the thing. Our book Finishing School: The Happy Ending to That Writing Project You Can’t Seem to Get Done makes a great gift. I propose it as the solution to all gift-giving problems. And I have somewhat reliable proof, based on real people saying real things without prompting or cash prizes. When we talked about this idea, Danelle and I, when we wrote the proposal and showed it to...

I, too, dislike “craft”

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I just read this Alif Batuman piece in n+1 from a few years back in which I found a kinship reading of “craft.” So let me get something off my chest, counterproductive and humiliating as it may be: Craft is awful. I hate craft!Instead of standing out there in the hot sun polishing and polishing your doomed anachronistic prose beauty why not instead, today! unleash the wild craftless being within...

A Post About Plot

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Here is how to make a magic book appear in someone’s hands. I write in a sometimes unstructured and intuitive way. I tend to hear the words I write. I don’t think it all out ahead of time. So I end up with events that happen in the novel but without explaining how and why they happened. For instance, I imagined a book, a fake book, a book not actually written by Mesopotamians five...

Taking it down to the sentence level

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I have rewritten a certain scene several times. As a result, I now have several overlapping texts, texts that repeat other texts or portray the same events in different colors. Luckily, using Scrivener, I can go through this 3,000-word morass of visionary … OK, that’s the other problem: This scene combined the visible world, i.e. a woman who is sleepwalking, with the interior world...

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