Herding Cats
Inspiration is something you can’t force or predict; it comes when it comes. Given the frequent presence in my writing space of my own feline menagerie (population: 3), I can’t help but fall back on the phrase “it’s like herding cats.” Trying to corral your own creativity is exactly that futile. Inspiration will arrive when it’s good and ready, and not a moment sooner. It’s also fickle. There are many ways to clear your mind and make space for creativity. Many of them involve some form of relaxation—listening to music, gardening, taking a long drive, taking a nap. But getting...
Read MoreQuiet Hours
The thing about the quiet hours that spin out, sometimes feeling endless, between published work is that it only looks from the outside like nothing is happening. Even in the quietest (or busiest-doing-other-things) moments, the engine continues to churn somewhere deep inside. The imagination is never idle, whether it’s busy at a given time working a problem, like character or plot or organization of ideas, or lost in simple everyday fantasy. And the latter is usually the source of the best ideas, the moments when your imagination runs completely free, discovering connections that only become apparent when your conscious mind...
Read MoreParenthood: An Appreciation
On my way home from work last Thursday, the night the Parenthood series finale was broadcast, I noticed a bumper sticker on the slightly banged-up Toyota in front of me: “Life isn’t about avoiding the storms; it’s about learning to dance in the rain.” Every person’s life is both a comedy and a tragedy. Wonderful, absurd things happen. Terrible, soul-crushing things happen. And it’s up to us to figure out how to cope, and strive, and grow, and find the joy where we can. For six seasons Parenthood portrayed that struggle better than any show on television, in the context...
Read MoreTwelve Months, Cover to Cover
The year gone by was full of milestones small and large: gains and losses, advances and retreats, triumphs and struggles. It was a year worthy of a novel, though I didn’t write one during it. Instead, while hunting down lyric permissions for the completed novel-in-waiting (coming in 2015), I tinkered with three different ideas for The Next Book, and I read. A lot. So much, in fact, that I’m inspired by a book I gave to a loved one this Christmas—Nick Hornby’s Ten Years in the Tub, a compilation of his monthly columns riffing on the books he’s read—to deliver...
Read MoreWhy Authors Celebrate on Publication Day
Authors celebrate on publication day for so many different reasons. It’s the culmination of a journey. It’s watching your child step out into the world and find their way. It’s the satisfaction, hopefully, of a job well done, which can be its own reward. But for authors like me—and I know I’m far from alone in this—there is another reason to celebrate: because once the book is published, you can’t effing edit it any more. No matter how good a piece of writing feels on that first pass, if you're like me, you...
Read MoreTravis Ishikawa: The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of
[Posted on my Facebook page last night. These are the moments every baseball fan dreams of.] The beauty of baseball is the drama and stories that the game's ebbs and flows allow to unfold. Yes, the walk-off pennant-winning home run in front of a delirious home crowd is awesome. But when you understand that the player who hit it, Travis Ishikawa, is a 31-year-old journeyman who the Giants let go in 2011, who kicked around between four other teams in 2012-13, who was released by the Pirates in April, who spent the entire summer toiling in the minors in Fresno,...
Read MoreThe Bookshelf Diaries (An Occasional Series): Rob Yardumian, Kate Atkinson, Don Felder
In recent years my reading list has been around 50 percent favorite series (see: Robert Crais, Michael Connelly, Ace Atkins, Lee Child), 25 percent rock and roll (biographies or rock-related fiction) and 25 percent randomly discovered novels selected for craft and reputation more than subject matter. Next time around I may focus on the former—as each of the above-mentioned quartet of authors either just published a new one, or is about to—but this time I’m going to zero in on the latter two categories. Rob Yardumian’s terrific debut novel The Sound of Songs Across the Water is one I’ve mentioned...
Read MorePiecing the Puzzle
I bought my wife a jigsaw puzzle for her birthday, and have been paying for it ever since (metaphorically, that is; I think it cost $14.99). It’s one we had glanced at together earlier in the year, a spectacularly vibrant image of fall colors, looking across a pond at a stand of birches and oaks busy turning riotous shades of red and orange and yellow, with bright green moss ribboning up trunks and peeking through underbrush, with a dappled, slightly cloudy turquoise pond in the foreground. Putting this puzzle together would be challenging, but I felt confident we could handle...
Read MoreHeroes
So, this is awkward. Some part of me has always known this day would come, of course, but until now I’ve been reluctant to share the truth with more than a handful of people. Now I realize that I really should be honest with you about this part of my life. You see… I read comic books. I grant you, this isn’t as big a deal for an alleged grown-up to admit as it used to be. With the geek ascendancy represented by shows like The Big Bang Theory and a slew of popular sci-fi and comic-book-related movies and TV...
Read MoreOf Loss, and Moving on: Thoughts on The West Wing
Most of the great stories ever told involve, on some level, dealing with loss. Hell, most of the pretty good ones, too. It’s an essential part of the human experience: how does loss change you? Is it possible to replace what’s gone? How do you learn to move on? That familiar cycle of loss and grief and struggle lies at the heart of Believe in Me. It gets trickier, though, when what’s been lost is the story’s writer. The Mrs. and I have spent part of this spring making our way through all seven seasons of The West Wing. The...
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