Category: books & writing

I have two manuscript copies of My Husband Betty left in my files, and after this last move, I want them gone too. If anyone wants them, speak now or they go to the shredder.

I’d only ask that you pay postage and/or make a donation to some trans-relevant cause in exchange.

Some cool tips from C.S. Lewis about writing, via Abagond:

• Read all the good books you can, and avoid nearly all magazines.
• Always write (and read) with the ear, not the eye. You should hear every sentence you write as if it was being read aloud or spoken. If it does not sound nice, try again.
• When you give up a bit of work don’t (unless it is hopelessly bad) throw it away. Put it in a drawer. It may come in useful later. Much of my best work, or what I think my best, is the rewriting of things begun and abandoned years earlier.
• Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.
• Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “more people died” don’t say “mortality rose.”
• Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”: make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers “Please will you do my job for me.”

Read the rest at Abagond.

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. “Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do,” wrote Thomas Pynchon in his essay on sloth. Archimedes’ “Eureka” in the bath, Newton’s apple, Jekyll & Hyde and the benzene ring: history is full of stories of inspirations that come in idle moments and dreams. It almost makes you wonder whether loafers, goldbricks and no-accounts aren’t responsible for more of the world’s great ideas, inventions and masterpieces than the hardworking.

From this cool article by cartoonist Tim Krieder in The New York Times a week or so ago. I’ve been out drinking with him, & can report that he is the louche he says he is.

If you look at the right hand column, you can now subscribe to this blog. The really cool part is that you can edit for categories – so if you don’t like my politics but want my reports on trans stuff, you can check only “trans” & so only get relevant posts.

Cool, right? So go for it!

Neil Gaiman, writer-hero of mine, has spoken a commencement address. He’s speaking to artists, mostly, but there is so much good stuff in here.

The only two pieces of advice I’ve ever found useful come from him:

1. finish what you start
2. don’t get up except to make more tea

But he’s fleshed it out in a good way.

I had no plan either. I had a list too. In fact I write a new one every year.