The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1919. The prize is awarded to works of “distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.” This is one of (at the time of this writing) 10 Pulitzer-winning books that are no longer under copyright and are available free […]
UPDATE: Now on YouTube, only 5 months later! (I’m not embedding video here because it spoils my “no tracking, no cookies” policy.) This text is the script for that video, so you’re missing nothing if you stick to one medium. On winter solstice, the birds disappeared, and the mist arrived. The inhabitants of Nebulah quickly
I’ve been using StoryGraph for a full year, so I have book-nerd stats. Books Read I read 74 books and 28,075 pages in 2025. One book was a paperback; the rest were ebooks. Did Not Finish DNFs aren’t included in the “books read” count, but pages read before quitting are included in pages read. I
A book was recommended to me. The premise was fun, but the author exhibited a writing tic that had me screaming and casting the book aside by Chapter 4. The prose was littered with somehow, somewhere, sometime, someone, and something. Someone tidied my study while I was at the museum. Is it really a mystery
Last post, I floated the idea of writing Grave Oversight 2 as an antidote to my creative malaise. The following day, I dusted off John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story, my favorite dense, demanding craft book. I came to it after perhaps 18 years of being a published writer and absolutely do not recommend it
Most of my income for 2024 came from ghostwriting memoirs for the niche-famous—people significant enough to have a Wikipedia page, but unless you’re into the thing they do, you’ve never heard of them. These books have relatively few but devoted buyers, subjects humble enough to care that those readers aren’t disappointed by a half-assed book,
I refer to Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer by Roy Peter Clark as “the sentence-writing book,” though the scope does expand after the first section, ending with general career advice. I’ve gifted dozens of copies and recommended it to every writer I know, whether they’re writing school papers, blog posts, business emails,
I’ve basically been doing Revision 3.5 on the first half of the book, so there isn’t really “progress” to report. Because I write with continuity (threads of a scene weave through scenes before and after it, and some of those threads extend far), I can’t just pluck out a scene and be done with it.
Halfway through this revision pass! Rejoice and/or weep per your personal “mid level of water in a glass” setting. Roughed in the Hero POV scene that replaces the one from a purged side quest. Managed to pull in his phobia, so it’s not quite completely disjointed. It’s in bad shape, but it serves its functional
Revision resumes with arrival at Big City 1. The story has been sparsely populated up to this point. There’s a shift of dynamic between having the run of the environment and having to work around people who have their own work to do and don’t give a damn about your problems, thank you very much,