Tao Lin's Blog, page 3

Acknowledgements

I worked on Leave Society's acknowledgements' page today. The first thing I did was check what I put for Trip, my previous book and second book to have an acknowledgements page:

Thank you to my family and friends; to Kathleen Harrison, Finn McKenna, and Klea McKenna; to Tim O’Connell, Bill Clegg, and Angie Venezia; and to my publisher, Vintage.

Then I came up with this:

Thank you to my parents, parents’ dog, brother, nephew, uncle, aunt, friends, partner, editor (Tim O’Connell), agent (Bill Cleg...

Pruning completion

I've continued pruning this week. This will be my last pruning post. I've finished pruning. The past six days, I pruned 91, 151, 122, 66, 88, and 45 words, working by pen/paper and computer in morning for 2-3 hours and at night by pen/paper for around an hour. Part 3 of my novel is now 1003 words shorter than in the second draft. It went from 29,957 to 28,927 words. It took eight days to go through it twice. I pruned an average of 125.375 words per day. After I go through part 4—there are some t...

More pruning

On August 6, I started noting how many words I pruned each day from the second draft of my novel, Leave Society , pruning on the screen and on paper in the morning and just on paper at night.
August 6: 67 words August 7: 99 wordsAugust 8: 62 wordsAugust 9: 234 wordsAugust 10: 244 words
Here is most of what I pruned on August 9 and 10, from my four-part novel's third part, which is called Year of Mountains:
-"Yes,” said Li. “Japan’s government has been promoting forest-bathing since 1982.” 
-began pla...

Pruning

This is the second post in my weekly feature where I post unused material from my forthcoming novel Leave Society . I've been working on its third draft. My editor had some small suggestions on the second draft, including to prune the second and third parts, Year of Pain and Year of Mountains, by around 1000 and 2000 words. Today and yesterday I pruned these sentences and fragments from Year of Pain:
-I wouldn’t have tested them like that. -That won’t help-“Maybe if you’re nicer to her, she’ll let...

Interview I did with Venezuelan newspaper today

1. Your texts tend to be – perhaps ironically – sober, straightforward, precise. Many have said they are minimalist. Does this respond to a time in which we are constantly showered with too much information? Are your texts a way of saying that we need to communicate just enough?

Some of my writing, like Shoplifting from American Apparel, is minimalist and conversational, but I also have writing, like in Taipei, that is florid and in long, complex sentences that I would never say in person. I thin...

LS unused material 1

I want to post unused material from my forthcoming novel Leave Society on this blog once a week. If I do this once a week until it comes out next summer, I'll have done it 52 times, which seems okay/good. This is a sentence I tried to put in the novel for a while but that didn't fit:

In 2009, Mission: Readiness, a nonprofit founded by retired military leaders, published a report titled “Ready, Willing, and Unable to Serve” that said 75 percent of Americans between the ages of 17 to 24 were unfit ...

Pets: An Anthology

Pets: An Anthology is a literary anthology about pets. It includes essays, fiction, poetry, and art by writers on their pets. I was going to blog about every piece in the anthology but then decided to just blog about the pieces by the authors I've met in person.

Introduction by Jordan Castro

Jordan's introduction seemed refreshingly concise and non-belligerent, while also being generous and intellectually stimulating, to me. It begins with a brief paragraph that ends with Jordan recommending "that...

Patreon thoughts

Patreon seemed like a good idea at first, but now I'm not sure. It doesn't seem good for writing that I edit for many days to only be available for ~150 people. Financially, it seems like my goal should be to make my writing available for everyone, so that more people can be interested in my writing, so that more people will buy my books, so that I can make more money off my books, which should be my main source of income.

I'm making ~$400 per post on Patreon now. Maybe it does seem like a good i...

Newspapers and Magazines

I've written for many newspapers and magazines. This post will list and discuss some of the ones I've written for multiple times. I've included normal magazines and also literary magazines. This is an incomplete list. Maybe I'll add to it over time.

Vice (52 times from 2007 to 2014)

Most of these are from three columns I had. One was Tao of Terence (on Terence McKenna and psychedelics); one was iPhone Photos of Taipei (to promote Taipei before it came out); one was Drug-Related Photoshop Art. I wa...

Blog plans

-Blog once a week or more.
-Make posts gathered from unused material for Leave Society.
-Make a post linking to archives of various newspapers/magazines I've written for multiple times, like The Stranger, Vice, Granta, and Thought Catalog.