On Writing: Mischief Managed, More Planned

    I hit my Clarion Write-a-Thon goal with twelve days to spare. It wasn’t a supremely ambitious goal – a mere 20,000 new words between June 24 and Aug. 5. I’ve pulled off NaNoWriMo thrice (50,000 words in thirty days), so 20K wasn’t a huge stretch – but it did keep me writing, and, frankly, I needed the crutch offered by the artificial deadlines.

On Writing: A Graduate Reading

Rob Note: I graduated June 16 with an MFA in fiction writing from Southern New Hampshire University. The night before I did a reading from my thesis. This is that reading, as a video file and as text. The slides features photos of places and people that inspired me along the way. Special thanks to my lovely wife Brenda for her help in getting the reading down to the requisite ten minutes.

The text of the reading is after the jump.

On Writing: Two Years to the Writing Life

            I’m attending two graduations this weekend: one for 500-some high-school students and the other for me, a 40-year-old white guy who decided, a little more than two years ago, that he wanted to write fiction.

It’s been a strange little trip thus far. After an eighteen-year break from writing any fiction I took seriously, I sat down in the summer of 2010 and banged out two short stories – Leaving Home and Cloud Nine from Outer Space. I revised Leaving Home into a shorter story called It Pays to Read the Safety Cards (which was published in March) and expanded it into a 98,000-word novel, also called Leaving Home, that I used to prove my worthiness for the master’s degree in fiction writing I’ll receive Saturday.  Cloud Nine also became a shorter story, A Feeble Gleam of Stars, and has yet to find a home.