Darius Jones's Blog: A Writer Begins, page 12

The Writer in the Next Cubicle

I don’t know who you are, or where you’re from, but I know why you come here. Or at least, I think I know why you come here…

You’re probably another writer out there somewhere, maybe stuck in some situation you don’t want to be stuck in. Maybe you work in a bookstore and you’re dreaming of actually having something you write make it onto the shelves someday. Maybe you’re writing for a small website or a PR firm—but you wish you could put your skills to better use. Maybe you’re a teacher or...

Another Writing Tweak: The Refresher

Like most fiction writers these days, I also have a day job. You know, the one you where you go to a central location for 40+ hours a week? But when I’m able to break for lunch or get in early before the boss, my thoughts turn to my trusty side hustle: writing fiction. Well, there’s one little tweak (besides listening to music) I adopted last year for my fiction-writing sessions. I’m going to call it “The Refresher.”

Since I have a day job, I usually have about a week between my writing sess...

Where My Writing Is Headed in 2018

Well, here we are. The great summing-up is done, and now, for the plan-ahead.

To review: Last time, we looked back at my writing in 2017. And despite not submitting works as much as I wanted to, overall, I was pretty satisfied with where my writing is at. Why? Because I’ve remained productive this year. I’ve kept putting words on paper. In fact, I cranked out about 36,300 words of prose. That’s about 7 short stories worth (if you use 5,000 words as the yardstick for a short story). So, I’m...

A Look Back at My Year in Writing—2017

Wow. Another year is here and almost gone. I can’t believe it. I think, overall, it was a good year for my writing…But you always wish you could do more, write more, get a few more words down, get a few more stories accepted.

So, how to sum up a year of writing fiction? It’s harder than you think. Here’s how I would like to divide this up: into the Hard Stuff and Soft Stuff. The Hard Stuff is easily quantifiable: stories accepted/rejected, word counts, that sort of thing. The Soft Stuff is m...

Was the Russian Revolution a Break with the Past…Or a Continuation of It?

You can walk through Red Square, down all the grand avenues of Moscow, through its empty, gray backstreets and you will never find it. You can do the same in St. Petersburg: walk down Nevsky Prospect, past Kazan Cathedral all the way to the Winter Palace. Or follow the winding paths Raskolnikov took through the back streets, but you won’t find it there either. You can go to Nizhny Novgorod or Ulyanovsk or Samara or Volgograd or further south and east and do the same thing: walk down the main...

Writing On

Hey guys,

Really busy over here with work, writing and Thanksgiving next week. So…Not much of a post this time. I was going to do a big, long hairy post about the Russian Revolution—marking 100 years and all—but that ain’t going to happen this time. Hopefully, next time. And then it will be back to the writing theme.

But on the creativity front: I am writing fiction and sticking with it. So, that’s good. I have fallen down a bit on submitting new stories and following up on them. I’m hoping...

Report from New Orleans

Well, I’m back from New Orleans…And it was quite a trip. Last time, I wrote about what I intended to do down there. So, I’m going to break this back down…In fact, the best approach here is to do just one night—one night!—in New Orleans. So, that’s what I’m going to do: the story of one late afternoon and night in New Orleans.

Theater—‘On and On Down Burgundy’
I always wanted to cruise down Burgundy just like in that Tom Waits song (see below). And this time, I kinda did. At least, I saw a p...

A Writer Goes to New Orleans—For Halloween

What is it about certain towns? You know, those that draw in writers? As places to write. As places to live. Or places to do a little bit of both…

Internationally, there’s that perennial favorite, Paris. Then there are some of my favorites: Moscow, Istanbul, Madrid, Fes, Buenos Aires, Arequipa. (Why are so many of these former imperial capitals or ports? Or both?…Anyhow…) Man!—Any one of the towns I could (and sometimes have) set up shop in, find some cheap digs and just write, write, write...

The Greatest Medium

Well, some say the “medium is the message.” This time it’s true. (Or at least the message of this post is about a medium).

I was out on the Oregon coast this summer, as you know. And I had a great time. Deep-sea fishing, crabbing, going to beer festivals. One small scene unrelated to all of them, really struck me though. It was just a simple moment in the local seaside hotel we were staying in. To one side of the coffee table, I noticed a few used books on the shelf.

It was a cold and misty...

The Potential Number of Songs Is Infinite

I forgot who said it, but a long time ago someone said that we would run out of new music. That there was only a finite number of songs and that we were close to running out of new material. You can see a modern form of this argument here. And then shortly after that Mozart (or someone like that) came on the scene and proved him/her totally wrong.

Well, it seems like an untestable hypothesis to me, something you can’t prove or disprove. So, instead of trying to figure this out logically, I’l...