dr_pretentious | Black Gate Round-Up, Thanksgiving, And A Not-Quite-Announcement

At 3am on Thanksgiving Day, with a certainty that my toddler would wake at 6am, and that I'd have a fine but exhausting celebration with forty in-laws after that, I clicked on the button to post my essay about Jeffrey Sweet's introduction to playwriting, The Dramatist's Toolkit, on the Black Gate blog. Looking at it now, when it is not 3am, I wish I'd done a few things differently, but there it stands, and it's not bad.

Somehow I missed announcing the previous week's post, on Terry Brooks's book on writing, Sometimes the Magic Works. After the post about John Gardner's classic, The Art of Fiction, I had a perverse impulse to check out some advice from an author Gardner would have dismissed as "an authentic junk mind." Brooks is no Gardner, but he does have some potentially useful additions to the field.

I have to say, writing about a different book every week is eating up a disproportionate amount of both my writing time and my reading time. Between my kids and my students, there's not a whole lot of time left in my week for either activity, so I'm going to have to make the writing-about-books-about-writing thing a monthly topic, rather than what I do for every weekly post until I run out of writing books I like, which had been my plan.

I'm almost at liberty to tell you about the thing I was most thankful for this Thanksgiving. It's not the biggest news imaginable, but it's good. You'll like it. Watch this space.