I just got an e-mail from Sister #3 that included a link to a story about a man who dropped dead moments after bowling a perfect 300 game. For those of you who are familiar with my short story “Lane 6″ you ought to be a little bit creeped out.
Only in my story the guy [...]

Forgive me Philip Roth, for I have sinned. First of all, I’m confessing as though I was that kind of Catholic and according to that weird guy at Barnes & Noble you’re an atheist. So I guess that’s kind of weird.
Anyway, Mr. Roth, my sin is that of doubt. I doubted you. Oh you of [...]

I will not tell you how much time I spent chatting with Wolfdogg this morning about computer names. I will also not tell you how many times I said fuck, fuck, motherfuckfuck while trying to get Gideon to connect to Phinneaus, my wireless network.
Let me tell you this, the new Macbook might be slick [...]

I have to admit that today’s victory dance looked quite a bit like the red-shorts girls from John Cougar Mellencamp’s Cherry Bomb video. You know what I’m talking about, right?

Nolan and Liam are using chalk to draw bats on the front stoop. An emergency vehicle is passes by (probably going to the hospital that is two blocks away) with sirens blaring, somwhere we can here a dog bark.
“Is the dog stuck in the fire?” Nolan asks.
“I don’t think so,” I say. “I think the [...]

Nolan and Liam have fashioned a sort of puppet stage using a dining room chair, the table, and a dry-erase board. The set also includes cobwebs that were drawn on notebook paper with a blue-green crayon.
We, I mean I, made a bunch of “creepy” puppets cut out from construction paper and taped to straws. [...]

I haven’t yet gotten an offer from the Dream Job, if you ask me about it I will bite you in the face (I am supposed to hear something “early” this week, which we all know means before Friday in Corporatespeak)
Thinking about the offer and worrying over the offer takes up a lot of my [...]

I have to tell you that I started writing about this earlier in the morning, say around 10 a.m. But then I grew frustrated and quit. However after spending the night at Grumpy’s with The Writers and then coming home to a time-capsule bomb, I had to persevere.
Today is Sylvia Plath’s birthday. Probably, the [...]

Minneapolis’ Central Library named one of America’s 10 Coolest Libraries.

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” — Sylvia Plath

“He and Franzen talked a lot about what writing should be for. “We had this feeling that fiction ought to be good for something,” Franzen says. “Basically, we decided it was to combat loneliness.”

This quote from David Lipsky’s Rolling Stone piece on David Foster Wallace made me gasp. It’s so simple, so honest, and Franzen [...]

Good God Almighty! I wish I could make sweet, sweet love to Lionel Shriver’s WSJ piece about the lack of proper quotation marks in a lot of literary fiction’s dialog. Sing it, Sister! I hate when writer’s don’t use the quotation marks (sorry Junot Diaz). [via]

Today my favorite future evil-scientist Maxwell turns ten. 10! That’s two whole hands. Incidentally, if anyone knows what the name of that Threadless t-shirt he’s wearing in the bottom picture please please tell me. He needs another one and I can’t find it on Threadless to save my damn life.

I’ve come to the conclusion that rockers and rollers who became popular in the early to mid 90s have to stop writing memoirs. These books are mildly interesting, okayly written (please bow down to my Klostermanly ability to adverb), and incredibly hard for me to resist.
Every time I pick up one of these books [...]

Dear Authors,
Listen to me. If you were smart you would write interesting Largehearted Boy Book Notes essays about your book and include good music. I cannot count how many books I have read because of the author’s Book Notes essay. Wait. I will count a few just so you know how many I’m talking [...]