Veteran journalist Barbara Falconer Newhall riffs on life as she knows it.
Here you'll find author profiles as well as mini – and not-so-mini – book reviews. I’m a writer who loves to talk about writing, so if you like to write I hope you’ll stop by now and then for some writing tips and to chat about the writing life.
I want to write about tulips today. I don’t want to write about sex. The trouble is, for me, writing about tulips means writing about sex: something about their juicy curves brings erotic metaphors to my particular mind. I had thought that once my mother — and father — were no longer alive and reading over my shoulder, I’d be able to write my heart out, but . . . Read more.
You get an idea for a book. You like it a lot. You think people are going to want to read this book. You’re stoked. Then you fret for months and years over how to transform this idea you like so much into a 250-page manuscript that people will actually read. Read more.
I went away for the weekend, and when I showed up in my writing room on Monday morning my laptop had crashed. “It’s not your fault,” said the computer repair guy. “Computers are machines. Machines break.“
At 6:02 p.m. yesterday evening I hit the send button and sent the manuscript for Wrestling With God off to my publisher, Patheos Press. To tell you the truth, I’m very proud of this book. Read more.
My book contract says that I’m to deliver my book manuscript “in conformity with the provisions in ‘The Chicago Manual of Style.’” That means that, at long last, I’m finally going head-to-head with the serial comma. Read more.
Army’s assignment was to show up at the offices of the San Francisco Chronicle every weekday morning and produce seven hundred words, give or take. The challenging part was this: Unlike most newspaper journalists, Army did not sit down to his Selectric typewriter fortified with a fat notebook of stats and quotes. Army’s job was not to report the news. It was to make it up. Read more.
So many books. So little time. And a manuscript deadline — Dec. 1 — looming so near. Debbie Blue’s new book. Don Lattin’s latest. John Shelby Spong’s thoughts on the Gospel of John . . . and so many others. Read more.