Category: writing
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Beautiful Sentences: Tom McAllister
Middle-aged men saw news of the shooting and thought: The world needs me now. They put on their capes and swooped in to the rescue, but when they got there, they found out they had no superpowers. They were just sad men in capes. So they got angry and looked for a woman to blame.…
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Beautiful Sentences: Idra Novey
She had assured him she’d told no one about her trips to his apartment, but she was a girl, and girls were feline, always purring up to one another with their secrets. Idra Novey, Those Who Knew.
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Beautiful Sentences: Tom McAllister
I’m not sure what obituaries are for. You can tell people’s stories, but nothing you do is complete or accurate. It’s just a list of people they used to know and jobs they used to do. We spend so much time trying to be effective mourners, but we have no idea how to do it.…
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Beautiful Sentences: Lydia Kiesling
Why did I have a child? To have a child is to court loss. Lydia Kiesling, The Golden State.
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Writerly resolutions: June status
The novel gained a net of nearly 10,000 words this month, which is a vast improvement over previous months. Doing the 1,000 words of summer thing helped a fair amount even if, during the two weeks of that challenge, I only hit the 1,000 word target a few times. Not much progress on the new story,…
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Beautiful Sentences: Tom McAllister
Shell-shocked acquaintances will say without irony that he had so much to live for, ignorant of the fact that the prospect of having to live like this for another fifty years was not the solution to but rather the cause of his hopelessness. Tom McAllister, How to Be Safe.
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Beautiful Sentences: Bennet Sims
What if he is her paramour from the past tense, cuckolding me from her unconscious, such that her body will break up with me in undeath, leaving our apartment for him? Bennett Sims, A Questionable Shape.
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Beautiful Sentences: Genevieve Valentine
Of course, like most unkind advice, it was correct, eventually, somehow. Genevieve Valentine, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti.
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Beautiful Sentences: Sigrid Nunez
In the news: Thirty-two million adult Americans can’t read. The potential audience for poetry has shrunk by two-thirds since 1992. A “rent-burdened” woman worrying how she’s going to survive in New York City decides to try writing a novel (“and that’s going well”). Sigrid Nunez, The Friend.