Craft Column

Parallel Universe

Well. It was only a matter of time before I joined the pop blog culture; Life has been interesting, and I wanted to share broadly...



Dr. Toughlove or: How I Learned to Stop Over-Verbalizing and Love the Bomb

The following mini-rant is not about regaining our senses of privacy in a self-absorbed digital age. It is not even about a spoiled generation taking back responsibility, disappo[...]



Mother of Creation

Rome and Paris are deeply embarrassing cities for artists and writers who have abandoned their craft. Before I became the manager of creative processes in the service of selling a secure future to the Jewish People, I was elbow deep in the creation itself, often simply in the service o[...]



The Highly Practical Mrs. Parker

dorothy-r-p "I'd like to have money. And I'd like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that's too adorable, I'd rather have money." - Dorothy Parker // I saw this quote about a year ago and tried to feel offended, as a purist, roughly - - if one can be roughly a purist, which in itself sounds kind of ironically Parker-esque. But then I had an interesting year.



Art Vs. Income…After Affilicon ’09

Yesterday my eyes were opened to the fact that I could be a bit less concerned about aethetics and my craft and a lot more concerned about cash, and even getting some sleep...while making said cash. Yes: an affiliate marketing conference. Here's where I discuss it in full. Your thoughts, as always, most welcome.



On Being Timeless

Illustration: Dali's Melting Clocks I have always been troubled by what my mother calls time management. I’m sure other people call it that, too, but I heard it first when I was twelve, trying to get ready for school but repeatedly getting sidetracked for reasons hair-related. “Boy, do you have a problem with managing time,” she would say. I had no idea what she meant, of course, because time, as I knew, [...]



Dust. Wind. Dude.

desert-storm-by-sandman There is a familiar pit in my stomach that tells me I must put something down on paper. So to speak. It's a pit that reminds me of other pits, that makes me 16 again, and 26, all the years joined by a common physiological sense of being carried by an idea or a feeling, literally hungry for something to write. Medical science will tell you that the pit is the work of the vagus nerve in my abdomen, which[...]



Narcissus Online

photo by: la_febbra Today there are no signatures. I sign all my e-mails “S”, and it seems to be good enough. I have corresponded for months with people whose voices I have never heard. I do not know if they have a quick East Coast way of catching your sentences before you say them, or if they’re Midwesterners who listen until you’re well past done, and you’re waiting and waiting for them to say something. I do not know these things because all the lines[...]



Craft Column, Part 1: On Our Earliest Writing

Back in the day, before we were virtual, we used to keep postcards and letters in shoeboxes. The girls would write on stationery, cool yellow sheets about the size of a paperback. Sometimes cute white dots would frame the page, matching in a profound way the very round, bubbly handwriting of the girls whose notes you copied. The boys scribbled and drew cartoons right in the middle of sentences. They were Vonnegut-style letters, before any of us had ever read Vonnegut, disjointed and scrawled and somehow fitting together into a personality, if not a coherent series of thoughts.