http://www.themillions.com Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:10:25 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 0. PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR, Per G.G., Chief of Ordnance. (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain) 1. The best ... http://www.themillions.com/2010/03/on-epigraphs.html 1. My mother has me on a Canadian literature program. Twice a year, birthdays and Christmases, a package arrives from British Columbia with one or two Canadian books in it. I have strong opinions about selecting books for nationalism, but these gifts are wonderful, among the highlights of the year. She ... http://www.themillions.com/2010/03/through-the-looking-glass-notes-on-disappearance.html Genre, genre, genre, whole days go by when I am asked of nothing else, especially those moronic questions about horror that should have been swept out of civilized discourse at least thirty years ago: Tell us now, if you can, for we are really terribly curious ... http://www.themillions.com/2010/03/what-about-genre-what-about-horror.html 1. The literary world, and I speak here primarily of its online incarnation, does some things really well. We chew on abstract issues like why literature matters, what counts as art, and how to navigate the writing life. What we don't do as well is consider "average" or "real" readers, the ... http://www.themillions.com/2010/03/dispatch-from-the-borders-land.html 1. I’m always seeking places to write.  Never at home—laundry piles, dishes in the sink, MOM emblazoned on my forehead.  Although problematic, coffeehouses and libraries are a mainstay.  Inevitably, I’ll be thick into my work when someone I know will come up behind me, “Hey, hi!  What’cha doin’?”  Depending on a ... http://www.themillions.com/2010/03/that-woman-who-writes.html 1. If you wandered into my kitchen and saw my pantry packed with cookbooks, you might get the impression I am something of a gourmet chef or crackerjack cook, at the very least. Nothing could be further from the truth. In my own defense, I’m not a bad cook. If I put ... http://www.themillions.com/2010/02/joy-of-cooking-a-novel-experience.html I am moving back in with my father.  It's only temporary--a month at most, or two.  This return to the nest is a byproduct (and benefit) of living in the same city as my parents, and it seems I do it every few years, when I'm at the end of ... http://www.themillions.com/2010/02/my-biographer-will-be-pleased-thoughts-on-personal-papers.html At Pie 'n Burger in Pasadena,  the local ladies gossip over their lunch, the wooden swivel chairs date back to the diner's opening in 1963, and the waitress brings you dairy creamer for your coffee.  Michelle Huneven knows the place well enough to request real milk for her decaf, and ... http://www.themillions.com/2010/02/not-lost-just-rearranged-a-profile-of-michelle-huneven.html It's a business-school truism that great leaders make for messy successions. Not only are their shoes hard to fill; no boss likes to contemplate his or her own obsolescence. (Think of Steve Jobs. Hell, think of King Lear.) And though its masthead is more likely to have graduated from Brown ... http://www.themillions.com/2010/02/draft-dave-why-eggers-should-edit-the-paris-review.html It has come to my attention that a favorite interview question for authors, especially debut authors, is what you did before you were a published. There is the vague compulsion when answering that the more outlandish, the better. The idea is that the reader, and aspiring authors out there, are ... http://www.themillions.com/2010/02/the-writer-career-arc-or-why-we-love-the-susan-boyle-story.html