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).

Video welcome (AVI, 9.8M)

Home.

Site Feed.


Looking for permalinks? Click on time after each post.

Search this blog:


Find any book

Project Gutenberg
Online Free Book Catalog (classics, world lit, etc.)

AA Independent Press Guide
A free online guide to 2000+ lit mags and publishers.

Everyone Who's Anyone in Adult Trade Publishing and Tinseltown Too
Extraordinary free info useful to writers when marketing.

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

Free screenwriting software
Cinergy, a script editor, free from Mindstar Productions. Easily write your screenplay in correct format.

Recommended screenwriting books
Some important reading for serious students.

Spec Script Writing: An Annotated Example
Short guide to correct screenwriting format and writing style.

Today in Literature

The New Yorker

The New York Review of Books

NY Times Sunday Book Review

Make a post


























 

Looking for permalinks? Click on time after each post.

Technorati Profile












 
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

plagiarism 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)

 
Sunday, September 18, 2005  
Reflections on the trip
We began our recent trip as so many trips begin by driving east out of Portland along the Columbia Gorge. I can’t drive here without thinking of Woody Guthrie’s songs about the river. This comes up in my novel-in-progress, Kerouac’s Scroll, since my two old men begin their trip the same way:

After breakfast we quickly picked up the Columbia River and headed into the most beautiful section of the Columbia Gorge. When we had driven along the river for a while, Hooker suddenly yelled out, “It's a big river!” and started laughing like hell. I grinned and nodded. The line was from Ramblin' Jack Elliott's version of Weedy Guthrie's Talkin' Columbia, which was on a record I played endlessly through the 1960s. Ten miles later, just because I felt like it, I said, “It's a big river. My, oh my.”

Orofino, Idaho, was Dick’s home town (Hooker above is patterned after Dick, the narrator after me) and my introduction to “God’s country” and all its mythology and romance. I explain it this way in my short story “The Idaho Jacket” (Roll of Honor, Best American Short Stories 1974):

I'm a city boy and the poker game fits right into the romantic Idaho landscape. When I set Orofino against Los Angeles, I can't comprehend Buck's complaints that Idaho is getting too "civilized," that Idaho isn't the same country in which he grew up, that the hills have been stripped of timber. To my eye, the hills around Orofino are covered with more trees than I could find in all of Southern California. And the Clearwater River is getting polluted, Buck complained, and yet the Clearwater is, yes, the clearest river I've ever seen. Too many people moving in? Into Orofino! How many could even find it on a map? For me, Richard, to enter Orofino was to step into a page from the journal of Lewis and Clark.

The older I get, the more my life and work seem to come from the same whole cloth. All the smaller pieces feel like chapters in one larger work. A body of work, I suppose it’s called. Since I have no close family and have outlived my close friends, “the body of work” is more or less “it” in the architecture of my life, what connects past to present, what moves present into the future. I write, therefore I am, which appears to be my existential mantra in this last act of my journey here. At least I mostly enjoy the scenery.

I am very eager to get into the fall routine of writing and teaching. Still busy and grunt work to prepare for this, which I should be able to take care of this week, and then we begin. I am eager to finish the current drafts and move on to new things while polishing the old.

I am still wrestling with the structure of my Tchaikovsky hypertext. In hypertext, structure is everything: if I begin with the wrong organizational principle, everything will go to hell fast. I know I want to write the story in vignettes taking up one computer screen each – very short, in other words. The question is how to define the hyperlinks. I think most will be in the body of the prose, with perhaps a “continuous” at the end of each vignette. I want to organize this so there isn’t too much repetition from alternative paths through the work – always the challenge in hypertext. There is considerable controversy concerning the circumstances of his death and I don’t plan to take sides with one theory over another but retain the ambiguity while dramatizing the possibilities. I have a notion of adding a musical soundtrack written by John if he is up to it.

I’ll be ready to start this as soon as I commit to a structure, which is to say, as soon as I decide on how to arrange the hyperlinks. I’m also ready to re-read the source material for my epic libretto.

So the fall will see five projects: continue the two drafts and begin rewriting, continue putting together the review, begin a draft of the hypertext, and begin research for the epic libretto. This, with teaching, ought to keep me busy ha ha.

9/18/2005 08:16:00 AM | 0 comments

Comments: Post a Comment
 


Sketch says, "Happiness is sunshine and a bone." Posted by Hello


This page is powered by Blogger. __The Writing Life