Book Reviews in 200 Words or Less: Haruki Murakami’s IQ84

If you think I’d give a thumbs-down to Murakami, you’re crazier than 1Q84’s two moons hanging in the sky (which, by the way, no one notices save our two protagonists).  There’s always the intensely weird and uneasily sinister lurking at the edges of (or blasted in your face by) a Murakami novel, and we have …

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Book Reviews in 200 Words or Less: Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot

Girl meets Alpha Boy, eschews cozy friendship with Beta Boy.  Alpha Boy, we find, is manic depressive; Beta Boy goes to India to find religion and justify his theology degree.  Girl marries Alpha, Alpha divorces Girl, Girl screws Beta (home again but smelly from his travels) for a tidy rebound.   (Oh, sorry: SPOILER!): Book ends.  …

Donate a Story to the Struggling Writers Association this Season

Let’s face it: it’s going to be a crapper of a holiday season any way you slice it, but when the economic climate is stormy for the general population, it’s a goddamn tornado for fiction writers. A tornado that will never blow itself out, I guess—or maybe it should be a hurricane. A really big hurricane, or maybe …

iWrite!

With all the hubbub surrounding Apple’s recent game changers—OSX Lion, OS5 with its futuristic Siri, and iCloud—iWrite! hasn’t received any of the attention it deserves, but let me tell you, this app rocks!  Like all Apple innovations, iWrite! allows the user to focus on creativity and form, and leaves the humdrum nitty gritty (in this …

Short Story Challenge: The Happy Story

Is it that unhappy people are drawn to writing that we never get a happy story?  Or that most people aren’t really happy?  How often do you read a story populated by even one happy person?  Maybe the question should be, do you know any happy people at all?  For most fictional characters, if they …

The Art of Hype

Working on my own novel, it’s a selfish curiosity that compels me to buy and read (and be jealous of) emerging authors’ first novels.  I read these books differently, I know, than I do other books, and perhaps not in the right spirit to engage literature, trying to suss out what these authors have that …

Seventh Garden

I’ve put up a garden for the last several years, let’s say seven, since it’s a number of portent. My seventh garden. The first six, it’d be nice to claim, were training gardens, but that would mean I’ve learned something. I’m not sure I have.