Juvenilia

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I began purchasing music when I was 16, shortly after I started earning money from my first job. I had always enjoyed listening to music, but before I turned 16, I had been content to let the music stay on the radio. The setting: the tail end of the 80s. CDs were on the store [...]

Teleread recently posted an article by Piotr Kowalczyk who suggests using Wordle as a way to generate a book cover. I’ve posted about Wordle before, and in my most recent post, I wrote about using Wordle as a revising tool. It hadn’t occurred to me to use Wordle as a book cover generator, but it [...]

Here’s how my muse works: I start with the seed of an idea for a story or a chapter. It may be just a word or a sentence, or it may not even be articulated in words yet — maybe it’s an image or an abstract concept. I start there, and of course, I don’t [...]

I’ve written about the creative process before and I know I’ll do it again in the future, so perhaps this post is a bit redundant. But creativity is at the heart of Juvenilia – both the book and blog, and it is something that continues to amaze me. Where does inspiration come from? What is [...]

Yesterday, I started work on a new chapter, but right from the start, I had the feeling that it wasn’t going to be a chapter that will make its way into the final draft of Juvenilia. Nevertheless, I’m going to write it anyway because it’s a story idea I might pursue after my current project. [...]

One big difference between Juvenilia and the other two novels in the series is that we get to see lots of characters working summer jobs. In The Spring, most of the main characters have jobs, but interestingly the narrative never accompanies them to work. In Juvenilia, the narrative does. When I was a teenager, I [...]

Putting together a novel is a bit like putting together a jigsaw puzzle: it takes a while to figure out the picture that’s being constructed and where the pieces should go. To extend that analogy a bit further, for me, it feels like I can only see half the pieces — the rest are turned [...]

What amazes me about creative inspiration is how suddenly and unexpectedly it can strike. For example, I recently had a problem with one point in my story. Rosemary has a secret and I wanted Mark to find out what that secret is. My problem was that I wasn’t sure how Mark was supposed to find [...]

“Good Times Are Gone Forever” by Two White Horses