The Writing Life: reflections by a working writer.

The Writing Life: reflections by a working writer. The Writing Life

Reflections of a working writer, a university screenwriting professor, and the editor of Oregon Literary Review.

Posts from past seven days. For others, see archives (below).

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Extraordinary free info useful to writers when marketing.

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A guide to publishers and publishing services for serious writers, including info on scam agents.

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Charles Deemer

Editor,
Oregon Literary Review

MFA, Playwriting, University of Oregon

Writing faculty, Portland State University (part-time)

Retired playwright and screenwriter.
Active novelist, librettist and teacher.

Email: cdeemer(at)yahoo(dot)com

The eagle flies!

Links:

Literary archive

The Sextant Press

Personal home page

Electronic screenwriting tutorial

References

Bookstore
Highlights:

Finalist, Oregon Book Award

Practical Screenwriting

Love At Ground Zero

More books.

Blogs by (mostly) creative writers:

"Can We Talk About Me For A Change?"
Playwright Debra Neff Nathans

Inkygirl
Debbie Ridpath Ohi, a weblog for writers (resources)

Silliman's Blog
Ron Silliman, contemporary poetry and poetics

Maud Newton
literary links, amusements, politics, rants

Darren Barefoot
Technical and creative writing, theatre, Dublin

Rob's Writing Pains
Journey of a struggling writer.

Mad, Mad World
Cara Swann, fiction writer, journalist, "reflections on humanity, random news & my life."

Writeright
Random musings on a writer's life and times.

Flaskaland
Barbara Flaska's compilation of the best online articles about music and culture.

Write Of Way
Samantha Blackmon's written musings on writing (composition and rhetoric).

Alexander b. Craghead: blog
Writing, photography, and watercolors.

Rodney's Painted Pen
Rodney Bohen's daily commentary "on the wondrous two legged beast we fondly refer to as mankind." His pen runneth over.

Frustrated Writer
This one named Nicole.

scribble, scribble, scribble
Journalist Dale Keiger teaches nonfiction scribbling to undergraduate and graduate students at Johns Hopkins University.

The Unofficial Dave Barry Blog
The very one.

The Hive
The official blog of science fiction / horror author Terence West.

William Gibson Blog
Famed author of Neuromancer and Johnny Mnemonic: The Screenplay.

The Word Foundry
Joe Clifford Faust's "blog of a working writer: tracking writing projects, musings on the creative process, occasional side trips into music, media, politics, religion, etc."

A Writer's Diary
By Cynthia Harrison, who has the good sense to quote Virginia Woolf: "The truth is that writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial."

Bow. James Bow.
The journal of James Bow and his writing.

Ravenlike
Michael Montoure's weblog about writing, primarily horror and speculative fiction.

Globemix
By David Henry, "a poet's weblog from Aberdeen, Scotland."

Modem Noise
By Adrian Bedford, a "fledgling Pro SF Writer, living in Perth, Australia."

boynton
"A wry writerly blog named in honour of a minor character in a minor Shirley Temple film."

Real Writers Bounce
Holly Lisle's blog, "a novelist's roadmap through the art and ordeal of finding the damned words."

2020 Hindsight
By Susan.

downWrite creative
Phil Houtz's notes on the writing life.

Vivid: pieces from a writer's notebook
Blog of Canadian poet Erin Noteboom.

The Literary Saloon
The literary weblog at the complete review.

Rabbit Blog
The rabbit writes on popular culture.

This Girl's Calendar
Momoka writes short stories.

Twists & Turns
Musings by writer Michael Gates.

Plays and Musicals -- A Writer's Introspective
A blog by John D. Nugent - Composer, Playwright, and Artistic Director of the Johnson City Independent Theatre Company

The American Sentimentalist
"Never has any people endured its own tragedy with so little sense of the tragic." Essays by Mark W. Anderson.

Screenwriting By Blog
David C. Daniel writes a screenplay online. "I've decided to publish the process as a way to push myself through it. From concept to completion, it'll be here."

SeanAlonzo.com
Official site of occult fiction author Sean-Alonzo, exploring symbolism, alternative history, philosophy, secret societies and other areas of the esoteric tradition.

Crafty Screenwriting
Maunderings of Alex Epstein, tv scribe, about life, politics, and the tv show I'm co-creating.

Letters From The Home Front
The life of a writer, 21, home schooled, rural living.

Venal Scene
The blog of bite-sized plays inspired by the news (by Dan Trujillo).

'Plaint of the Playwright
Rob Matsushita, a playwright from Wisconsin, "whines a lot."

I Pity Da Fool!
Glenn's adventures in screenwriting.

Time In Tel-Aviv
Hebrew modern literature at its best, by Corinna Hasofferett.

Big Window
Robin Reagler's poetry blog.

John Baker's Blog
Author of the Sam Turner and Stone Lewis novels.

The Writing Life With Dorothy Thompson
What goes on during a writer's busy day?

The Rebel Housewife
Not just a housewife!

Barry's Personal Blog
A running commentary on writing and the writing life.

Bonnie Blog
Maintained by Bonnie Burton of grrl.com.

Writer's Blog.
By easywriter. "From the walls of caves to cyberspace."

Flogging the Quill
Pursuing the art and craft of compelling storytelling, by an editor, Ray Rhamey.

Man Bytes Hollywood
Sharing tools, strategies and resources for the screenwriter's journey.

Mad for the smell of paper
A writing journal.

The Writing Life
A blog by Katey Schultz.

It Beats Working 9-5
A screenwriting blog by a young Canadian screenwriter.

Stealing Heaven From The Lips Of God
Writer & Artist, Dee Rimbaud reflects upon politics, religion, art, poetry, the meaning of life, the nature of God and why toast always lands butter side down on carpets.

Robert Peake
Heart and Mind, Fully Engage ... a poet's website.

Sidestepping Real
By Ren Powell, poet, children’s writer, essayist and editor.

Suggest a writer's blog

The Writing Life...

"An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's."
J.D. Salinger

"All my best friends are writers and are dead."
A friend over beer, Berkeley, winter, 1959

"And it came to pass that all the stars in the firmament had ceased to shine. But how was anyone to know?"
The Half-Life Conspiracy

After October 31, 2006,
new posts are published at

The Writing Life II

(Posts archived here are from 01/10/03 - 10/31/06)

Friday, July 23, 2004

Anthology progress
Spent 3 hrs in the magazine archives today, making progress. About 5 hrs away from finishing this step, going on to the next.

Here are some possible excerpts:

Henk Pander: Why He Paints
by Daniel Yost
12-5-71
"He said there is a strong anti-American sentiment among European intellectuals and that his friends told him he was crazy for wanting to go to such a 'fascist place.' But Henk says he came here and remains, as a more or less permanent immigrant, because 'America is a creative, exciting place with fantastic potential. It is the greatest power in the world, the place where the destruction or salvation of man is going to be settled.'"

The Governor They Call Tom
by Douglas Seymour
11-4-73
"In his early seven years in office, McCall has met more people personally than any other Oregon governor in history and probably more than any governor in the nation. One reason was the weekly open house in the Capitol which he innovated when he took office. ...Unlike some governors, McCall doesn't have a regal idea of the role of the chief executive of the state. He abandons the formality often present in governors' offices. When he meets people, informality is the rule."

Memories of Wayne Morse
by Mike Lloyd
8-11-74
"Morse stood, and when the applause subsided and he spoke, I learned two things: Never judge a man by his pinstripes and never stand too close to the loudspeaker when Wayne Morse speaks.
"If there was anything old about him at first, it vanished when he spoke. He was a whirlwind of wrath, an inferno of energy, jabbing an accusing finger at his opponent, calling forth detailed histories of how the country got into Vietnam and why he did and said what he did then. And what he did and said was so true that it hurt to listen to him now and know that no one listened then."

Jerry Turner: Behind the Director's Mask in Ashland
by John A. Armstrong
8-24-80
"As for the experimental theater: 'I bristle at the term, borrowed from science, and I don't think it really applies. It implies you don't know how the play's going to come out. If you're talking about a theater which has very special audiences and tends to explore areas which a conventional theater doesn't ... I think we ought to take risks...
"It's so easy for a producing organization to always fall back on the tried and true, and if that happens, then we will ourselves become lazy, and we ultimately will not make the contribution that we're capable of making. There should be at least one element of the theater that is risky."

‘Squippies’ in the Outback of Oregon
By David Shetzline
11-23-69
"The Oregonian is an odd one about his artists, though. He stocks his library with western history, trail guides, Oregon lore. Yet too often finds little space for his own novelists, who make much more profound sense of the Oregon experience than any camp manual or photograph collection. And upon his walls hang excellent craft but not much of the more complex, extraordinary work northwest painters can produce. It is as if Oregonians are infatuated with their landscapes and seek works in accord, works blending with the countenance of Mount Hood.
"...Americans are coming. In the next generation they will seek more and more of what we have here, in the Oregon Preserve, the Territory Ahead. If under these pressures we are to accommodate them, we must take greater care of our own artists, our own dissenters. We must attend those who would make great monuments of our style, our special Oregon lore, our individual secrets, our beauty. Mount Hood will not be enough."

Do We Really Have A Right To A Clean Environment?
by Oral Bullard
4-10-77
"There is no longer a new land to which we can journey after we have fouled the old nest. In this way we have limited our freedom, and from that basis we must arrive at new decisions.
"What began, many years apart, as simple, good and basic urges -- individual liberty and the preservation of the environment -- have become complicated by their interaction one with another. The danger is that they will get bogged down in the area of political, legal and bureaucratic opinion until we become convinced that they are somehow on a collision course -- if one survives, the other must go. Somewhere along the line we will have to convert it to a win-win situation and prove we are big enough to accommodate both."

The ACLU: Reexaming Our Rights
By Oral Bullard
7-4-76
"The ACLU has been damned by the right, the left and the middle. It has defended Communists, Nazis, kids with long hair and, in a celebrated Oregon case that went to the U.S. Supreme Court, a Vietnam protester who was barred from passing out anti-war leaflets in the Lloyd Center. It has defended unpopular issues and individuals whose causes it did not espouse for the simple reason it believed those individuals' Constitutional rights were being violated.
"...Civil liberties have always been won by dissent, the American Revolution being a prime example. But the search for freedom began long before that, and somewhere, in some unrecorded time, some person rose to defend himself against the transgressions of the governing group -- and in that moment the first civil libertarian was born."

Breaking the Bond: The Need For Alternatives To Marriage
by Barbara J. Murphy
10-21-73
"Men and women are no longer content to act merely according to custom, hoping in the end some meaning will emerge. What they are really asking for are more flexible roles in society which give individuals more of a chance to develop and utilize their potentials than the traditional marriage structure with its dependence on the dominant male role has afforded. This may or may not result in other than traditional living arrangements. It most assuredly will involve other than traditional premises on which these arrangements are founded."

Translation: The Indian’s Dilemma
By Barry Lopez
7-29-73
"The Indian's world view is generally circular. He sees his life as already complete at each moment. There is, therefore, no need to 'progress'; rather, he expands as he grows older, like a ballooning sphere. The past and the present, not the future, are important to him. He has a strong sense of balance and harmony with the physical world and tends to live by negotiating with his environment. He is an opportunist, not a planner. He does not regard the earth as a hostile place and makes no long range plans to control it.
…"The scientific pursuits of the pre-Columbian Indians of Central America are well known. Less well known, however, is that some peoples, long before the spread of Western Europe to the four corners of the world, had a chance to develop along technological lines and then rejected that matrix. It still strikes some whites as preposterous that an Indian would reject technological convenience, but many of them do. Technology is entirely alien to their world view. You might as well ask the average American to embrace Shintoism."

7/23/2004 07:35:00 PM | 0 comments

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__The Writing Life

After October 31, 2006, new posts are published at

The Writing Life II

After October 31, 2006,
new posts are published at