A year ends and a decade with it. I’ve been thinking in the latter terms recently—like in publishing this list of my 100 favorite songs of the decade. But 10 years provides a whole lot more reflection than does one, even if this one had a lot happen. The decade started out in my senior […]
About a year ago, I started putting a playlist together of what I thought were the best songs of the decade. It was about 4 songs for the first eight months, forgotten about. I can’t remember why I started and I don’t remember why I switched it to being ‘favorite’ songs (a distinction that matters […]
For one year now, I’ve been carrying around and writing in a leather bound notebook that was gifted to me. The first entry is from August 1, 2018, written in a town in Sri Lanka called Ella. The latest entry, written today—August 1, 2019—is copied, along with the former below. August 1, 2018 — Ella, […]
For six months, I’ve been thinking about Page 383. Why? Page 383 is the end of the first draft of my novel. The first draft that I finished in September of last year. That draft, when printed in Arial 12 size font with stretched margins, came out to be 383 pages. And since I printed […]
Years ago, when I was nomadic full-time, I wrote in a notebook that I thought one needed to be in a place for 6 weeks to fully feel lived-in—to get some kind of first real understanding of a city. I don’t know the mathematics of how I came to that number (likely none) but I’ve […]
Biblioteca Vasconcelos is a $100 million library with sawtooth windows spanning wide above floating bookshelves. It is a massive rectangular affair, longer than a football field with seven, maybe eight stories going upward. Well, stories isn’t quite the right word. More like seven or eight landing levels with bookshelves. Each level has a hallway running […]
I want to tell you a story about my favorite band, Pearl Jam. It’s a story I’ve thought a lot about. It’s a story of compassion, death, art, redemption, and much more. The story starts on September 29, 1996. The scene is a now-torn-down outdoor stadium on Randalls Island, just outside Manhattan. The stadium holds […]
Well, 2018 is stubbing out its cigar. Closing its chapter. It was an important chapter in my life. In the story of my life it’d be a chapter with a true character turn, a tension point in the plot. This year was a turn from a bit of normalcy into a great unknown. A great […]
This colorful lovely is a house in New Orleans. For some months, over half a decade ago, it was a house that I called home. Fresh with a new paint coat of whatever colors you’d call those, the house looks as full of its character now as it did those years ago. But this was […]
This article was written for my other site, which features a blog dedicated solely to my pursuits in writing. It’s part of a series I’m doing of culled-together writing advices and how I’m trying to use those advices to write my first novel. This was a more personal one, so I thought I’d post it […]
