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Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative by Austin Kleon My rating: 5 of 5 stars Overall, "Steal Like An Artist" is like having a pep talk at the ready for days when you need it. The general theme of the book is a sometimes gentle, sometimes blunt, reminder that there is nothing new under the sun and that's not a bad thing. We don't live in vacuums, and art (of any variety) isn't ever going to be a virgin birth. We are all products of everything we come across, and so is what we make, and THAT IS OK. And even if you know that intellectually, you can still manage to forget it on occasion. So on days, when you feel like every idea you have is unforgivably derivative - this is a great read! The book also offers valuable practical advice about things like not waiting until you think you're ready (you will never think you're ready) - just make things and see how it goes; keeping some kind of notebook/log of things as diverse as t...

You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life by Jen Sincero My rating: 4 of 5 stars Listened to the audiobook version. While some of the advice was stuff that could be found in any other self help book, some of it was wholly original and exciting. And the author fully owned that not every word she was communicating could be called earth shattering. But the best reason to read this book as opposed to others is the style of the author. Jen Sincero writes like your best friend telling you the truth. She writes without pulling any punches, in a straightforward vernacular, but with a perceived underlying concern for your well-being and self improvement. It's basically impossible not to listen. View all my reviews

Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft by Janet Burroway My rating: 4 of 5 stars I was assigned this book in my latest creative writing course. And, overall, it's a good read and a mostly helpful book. I admit some of it is redundant for anyone who has ever taken a previous course, or written anything of their own. But even when the subject being discussed was boring, the book often found a fresher take on it. We jumped around in the book, and didn't read the entire think in our 7.5 week course. I so liked what I read during the class that I went ahead and read the rest. Having done that, though, I can see why we skipped those parts. They didn't add much really. However, the parts we covered in class made up for that, I think, so I'm still giving this 4 stars. View all my reviews

In this final piece of Pineda’s puzzle she gives us the entire theatrical production, "Like Snow Melting in Water," which came from her previously described emptying and gathering processes. It was sparked by an article she ran across in the New York Times about a dying village in Japan. Apparently, she worked on it for 2 years and originally conceived of it as a novel, but she explained that it decided itself to be a work of the theatre instead. On the surface, someone outside this process might wonder how Pineda, with no particular tangible connection to Japan, could write something set there. But she does it, and she does it beautifully. And having followed her through her process as I have during this sometimes convoluted though always interesting journey, I can see clearly how her explanation makes sense. She says that she learned what it was to be a refugee first from her husband, and perhaps it was her contact with Katrina victims which reminded her of it, and that lif...

Pineda’s ‘gathering’ chapters are all about the epic destruction of Katrina. I come away from this reading feeling some sense of relief that many people are decent human beings who will help others in times of need, including Pineda herself. Pineda talks a lot about the strong sense of community in New Orleans before the hurricane and that during the hurricane the effected people were repeatedly “helping one another, sharing what they had.”  But the sense of relief at the humanity between individual people, gave way very quickly to disgust at the negligence of the organizations meant to help. Starting with the callous government officials who actually seem to have viewed Katrina as an opportunity to ‘clean up’ the “public housing” of New Orleans in favor of “urban renewal.” Rep. Richard Baker actually said as much, adding, “We couldn’t do it, but God did.” Apparently, they blew up the levees intentionally to sacrifice the poorer parts of town, in order to save the richer areas and ...

In the remainder of the “Emptying” segment of Three Tides, Chapter 2: Hip, Hip, But Not Hurrah, Chapter 3: Love and War, and Chapter 4: Summing Up; Pineda covers her battle with her HMO to receive treatment for her mystery ailment, the course of a new relationship against the backdrop of the upcoming war in Iraq, and a brief summation of her general feelings about the state of the world. Every time I read Pineda I am always struck by the poetic beauty of her word choices. She can write these amazingly constructed, evocative, insightful, impactful sentences which seem to want to stick with me forever, and I hope they do.   When she describes a glacial melt during an Alaskan cruise she says, “they yield up the air they may have held for hundreds of millennia.” And when she speaks of the return of romance in her life she describes love as, “momentary consolation for the enduring pain of living.” And even in describing people milling about while talking on their cellphones her sen...

In my creative writing class we read a selection from House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family and a Lost Middle East by Anthony Shadid. In Chapter 9 “ Mr. Chaya Appears”, we are treated to a vivid rendering of a time and place that doesn’t exist the same way anymore. Shadid says of it, “in the time of the Levant there was freedom to savor the worlds of others” and that it was “a realm where imagination, artistry, and craftsmanship were not only appreciated but given free reign.” The story told in the selection is a quest to locate antique floor tiles which are routinely being stripped from houses that are being demolished. The author goes through a long process of hunting down and haggling over the original tiles, including some more ‘back alley’ routes. Eventually though he must resort to buying some handmade reproductions to stretch his supply. I found the mixing of the original richly patterned antiques with the plainer reproductions to be a very smart and practical decision, b...

I find it difficult to sum up the first chapter of Three Tides ; Limping Through Europe. I think, to be honest, it’s mostly because of the jumping around through places and times. By the end of the chapter, the jumping makes some sense. You can see more clearly at that point the threads that run through, mentally, and tie the tales together. But during the read, I think it can seem confusing – though it didn’t help that I had a headache while trying to read the first half of the chapter. Pineda tells about a trip through Europe, planned to attend a couple conferences, with the intervening weeks needing to be filled. Pineda fills those weeks by visiting old friends and seeing sites, most of which are places she has seen before and have meaning for her. More than once she notes that she has a feeling this might be the last time she gets to visit a certain beloved locale. But there is also, interspersed, tales from her childhood, about previous times she had been in one of the locations ...

In my creative writing class we are also reading selections from various other publications. This week our selection was Chapter 1 from Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work by Edwidge Danticat. In the chapter, she talks about certain parts of her Haitian background. She describes disturbing political incidents which occurred during the dictatorship of Papa Doc Duvalier, particularly the executions of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin. She explains the significance of the event for her by saying, "All artists, writers among them, have several stories - one might call them creation myths - that haunt and obsess them. This is one of mine." She discusses, in depth, the chilling effect such times had on art, artists, and the sharing of stories. She describes a sort of cultural oppression that went hand in hand with the physical political tyranny of the regime. On oppression which vilified such accepted classics as Camus and Sophocles. She talks about how plays would be pu...

In the Creative Writing class I'm taking at the moment We've just started reading Three Tides: Writing at the Edge of Being by Cecile Pineda . I decided I'd review it, serially, as we read it. This week, we read the Introduction and Forward only. So far, Pineda has described her writing process as encompassing 3 basic parts: Emptying, Gathering, and Making Something. She apparently intends to expound on these concepts in the ensuing sections, mostly, or partly, through memoir, I believe. Certain phrases stood out enough for me to highlight them, mostly because I loved them.  Phrases like, "No one can teach anyone how to write. Someone can teach you how to spell ..." "Writing takes forgiveness ... At first, it just needs to be allowed to do what it's doing ..." and "The how of what artists do is never easily explained. Even artists themselves find the alchemy of their art inexplicable." stand out as some of my favorites.

In a bid to get some eyes on my new book, Freaky Shitty Things, and Men I decided to try a few of the paid promotional sites I've encountered online. I chose these three on the basis of liking the services they offered and the prices they were asking. Seeing as how I am just dipping my toe in with paying for promotional services I didn't want to spend an arm and a leg. Digital Book Today | Promote My New Free Book program - I'll be having a free weekend soon on Amazon. So, this seemed like a good thing to try to get some attention during that time frame. They have an option for promoting your book if it's a certain length and has a certain number of reviews on Amazon, but I didn't meet either requirement, so I did THIS VERSION . Cost: $15 - I will let you know how it goes after the promo is over. Books & the Bear | Social Media Promotion - It's a basic social media blast, designed and implemented by them, and sent to their audience of 210,000+ . Average ...

I downloaded You Are a Writer (So Start Acting Like One) by Jeff Goins on Audible the other day while battling a cold. Topics covered in the book include the motivational (picking yourself and not waiting for someone's permission to call yourself a writer) to the practical (the importance of building a platform and a brand). While I admit some of this was just common sense, some of it was genuinely new and helpful information for a self-publishing newbie like myself. And even the parts which weren't particularly revelatory, were still important on the level of reinforcement. Sometimes it helps just to be given that "just do it" pep talk one more time. I can't say that I would turn evangelist over this book, but I would definitely recommend it.