Juvenilia

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Last weekend I read my last book of the summer. It was a novella titled Miss Lonelyhearts, written by increasingly obscure early 20th century American author Nathanael West. I actually read the book a few years ago. At the time, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. West is a peculiar writer and [...]

Another one of my books on my summer reading list was Strange Future by Joshua Smith. It’s another science fiction novel (this is my summer of sci-fi, apparently). It’s sort of a time travel story. The protagonist, Thomas, and two other characters from the early 21st century are cryogenically frozen and wake up 200 years [...]

Horatio Alger is one of those authors whose name everyone knows, but nowadays, no one reads. 125 years ago, though, he was the J.K. Rowling of his era. He wrote scores of novels for children and sold millions of copies of them. Unfortunately, all those novels were so formulaic in terms of plot and protagonist, [...]

I got clued in to a website called “I Write Like.” Here’s a link. What the site is supposed to do is analyze your writing and try to find the famous author that you supposedly resemble. I decided to try it. First, I pasted the opening chapter of Leah. I clicked “Analyze” and immediately I [...]

What’s odd about The Diary of a Young Girl is that it really isn’t that odd at all. Even though she does give updates about the war and the political situation that has forced her and her family to go into hiding, she confesses that she isn’t really interested in politics. Once she settles in [...]

I’ve been working on two chapters lately. First, I’m still working on Chapter Dinner (that chapter is more a matter of layering than drafting). I’ve also been writing a new chapter I call Chapter Father’s Day (can you guess when it’s set?). With these two chapters, I now have twelve chapters for the novel portion [...]

I’ve been posting a lot about what I’m reading this summer, but I’ve not written much about the work I’m doing on the novel. Currently, I’m working on a new chapter that I’m calling “Chapter Dinner.” It’s a Mark-centric chapter, although the entire family is present in the scene. The chapter gives us a look [...]

I have, literally, a stack of novels that I plan to read this summer. Right now, I’m reading Foundation and Earth, the last book of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series — a series that I actually started reading back in March. To tell the truth, I don’t read a lot of science fiction, so plowing through [...]

Today was the last day of the school year for me. My students are gone and I’ve locked up my classroom. I won’t see it again until August. Summer, and a well deserved break, lies stretched out before me. I have a lot of reading that I want to do this summer, but even more [...]

It may be trite to say that information technology has changed the way writers write, but it’s also a truth that I don’t think any of us have completely grasped yet. As an “independent author” (read: self-published author), computers and the Internet have helped to level the playing field just a bit as I compete [...]