My Tash Sultana Problem

Like anything, you don’t start out at the top and you’re always getting better. So I’m not in a competition with anyone. I don’t think I’m better than anyone. I don’t think I’m the best at anything. I just do my thing, and I learn shit from people all the time. Just keep your brain […]

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The Stones, via Salon

I love reading about Exile on Main Street almost as much as I love listening to it. As a few of you know, my short story “Tumbling Dice,” which was written as part of an Oregon Coast Workshop and subsequently published by Analog last year, was essentially a retelling of that album–or at least heavily […]

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Sometimes the Light: A Review

Jerry Maulin is an interesting guy. He’s tall, and strong. When you first meet him, you get a can’t-miss sense of calm that radiates from somewhere inside him. Maybe that’s his super power—a stable center from which to see things. When he talks he uses only a few words at a time but always has […]

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Purple Rain

So, yeah. Prince. I know. He did stuff before Purple Rain and a whole lot of stuff after Purple Rain. He was more than his music. But I want to talk about Purple Rain because … well … I’ve always had this weird relationship to Prince and his music. If you’re reading this on my […]

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Check out KEXP …

I listen to a lot of music while I write. Today I tied into KEXP.org’s Youtube channel. > Here are three interesting and brilliant sessions that prove those arguments … inappropriate. * Start with any of them, and just let the chain roll. You could do a lot worse than just setting it on KEXP […]

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Bowie

I find myself stopping at points this morning, and just letting out deep sighs. There are passings and there are passings, you know? For me, and I assume many others, the loss of David Bowie has hit very hard. It’s a strange sense I have, this thing with Bowie. I loved his work. It’s widely […]

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The Pretenders, U2, and the Boss meet Garbage (or why the short story collection rules)

I’m thinking about short stories today, specifically individual stories, collections, and magazines. And I’m thinking about their relationships to music—or at least to the way music is absorbed today vs. how it was absorbed when I was a kid. I’m thinking about this because for the past few weeks I’ve really gotten into listening to […]

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A little background music

Like a lot of writers, I tend to work with a little music on in the background. It’s important to pick the right stuff for what I’m doing. Generally I want it low, and generally I like to write with things that have fairly straight-forward structure so that my brain can keep pace but not […]

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Parsing art and its creator

I’ve been writing a bunch of short stories that past couple weeks, and somewhere along the line I ran into this 60 Minutes interview with Bob Dylan. It’s got me really thinking about what being a creator means (I started to type “artist,” but I don’t know that it’s the right word. I like “creator,” […]

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