The Buffalo News today runs a review of Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Now, I happen to think that On Writing is the single best book about writing that I've ever encountered, but the book came out four years ago. That's what you call "timely reviewing".
The News is also running a short-story contest. I'm considering entering, but the deadline is in just over two weeks, which isn't really all that great a timeframe for me to generate a story. And their required word count is 1500 words, which is spectacularly short for me -- I've only managed to confine myself to that level of brevity once ("The City of Dead Works"), and they supply the opening paragraph, which already hampers me since I don't think I'd start a story thusly. But you never know.
And in one final bit of writing-related business, the News today called to inform me that they will be printing a piece I wrote for their op-ed page. It's a pretty searing personal essay relating to the birth of Little Quinn, and I actually had the essay sitting on my hard drive for over a month while I waffled on whether to submit it or not. When the piece appears I'll post the URL to the online version. I expect that it will be a month or so; I seem to recall waiting that long last time they accepted something of mine.
And now, gee whiz -- no sooner do I decide that I'm no longer going to take the writing thing so seriously in 2005, and return to just writing for myself, that I place a piece and start to feel the juices flowing again. As Mr. King himself says in On Writing, it's like entering your summer cottage after a long winter, turning on the faucets, and seeing that the pipes still work, even though they "creak" a lot.
The personal blog of author Kelly Sedinger, chronicling the adventures of one overalls-clad wanderer.
No comments:
Post a Comment