Just contacted a small press to see if they’re hiring freelancers, and the answer is yes! Right now I am booked through August, but I hope this press will have something for me. For all of March I’d stupidly taken a break from freelance work in order to try my hand at a March writing [...]
I am coding a manuscript for the design department, and the pages are very clean, so far just two elements to code—story title (ST) and space break (#)—which made me think of fiction using only words, that is sans poem or letter extracts, or charts/graphs/pictures/etc., which then made me think of the stupid computerized picture [...]
Have agreed to proofread a new novel by the writer I’d vowed to forever avoid, ever since I’d proofread one of his myriad novels in a series years ago.
I need the money.
Maybe I’m wrong to have disliked his other novel so much. Maybe I’m just not his audience, not when review after review of the [...]
Working on a 900-plus-page novel at the office, and my proofreader has queried every instance of a comma-less “too”—i.e., “He laughed too,” as opposed to “He laughed, too.”
It depends on the style the author prefers, of course, plus my boss once instructed me not to globally add or remove such commas, as it really depends [...]
The accountant asked me: “Do you travel?”
“No.”
“Never?”
I was embarrassed. “I’m visiting my brother in L.A. next month.”
“Let’s say instead that you’re going to a writers’ gathering in May—and while you’re there, hey why not see your brother?”
A writer’s accountant, this. My first.
I showed him one receipt. It was a donation (this my first too) to [...]
An editor was in my office. I gently chastised him for passing on my friend’s manuscript. He felt remorse, and admitted that he couldn’t yet bear to part with the book (it’s sitting in his office at home) even though he and his boss decided in the end that we weren’t the right house for [...]
After nearly a month and a half of no proofreading due to another self-imposed writing spree, I sent out a query to my contacts about upcoming jobs. Sadly, not much fiction is being done right now (or perhaps my contacts are shunning me!), but one contact finally proposed a novel. I don’t have the luxury [...]
V, a friend from college who just won an NEA grant, will be here at 6:30, so I’ve vowed to quit the Net-surfing and revise my story from now till his arrival, and then we’re off to dinner at Rai Rai Ken and gossip.
Tomorrow, in the hours before I meet one of my lil’ writing [...]
Last night:
JF: w, please have a sip of my wine.
me: Girl, I’m Asian. It’s like, two sips and I’m done!
*
“You look like you frequent bars,” says the editor.
“Not above Twenty-third Street,” I say.
“Don’t you ever venture above Twenty-third?”
“No.”
“Me either.”
“Why do you need to go to a bar above Twenty-third Street?”
“The author insists. It’s like he [...]
I met two Donnas the other night, both vivacious and impeccably dressed.
*
G ran away from the second Donna. I think G gets nervous around women kookier than she. I’d thought they would get along just fine, but G hopped out of the cab with me, at least ten blocks away from her own stop. Donna, [...]
When J asked me the other day what I would consider to be the perfect final meal, I found it both a simple and a challenging question—simple in that I don’t require fireworks on the plate to be impressed, as one’s final meal should just be one’s favorite food cooked to perfection, but difficult in [...]
Oh fuck (scuse my French)—while I’ve been writing like a NaNoWri mofo, deadlines have sailed past me left and right, and I just realized that another one has been missed. I hope the lady who hired me isn’t too pissed, especially as I already have a history of being late with her.* I hope I [...]
G’s brilliant explanation to her students regarding the appropriate choice of commas or em-dashes to set off a clause. Move over, Strunk & White.
Random line I wrote down on the same page: For God’s sake, darlin’, don’t do it!
A week ago I met an Author who was going to share a table with Edmund White at the Strand Bookstore’s eightieth anniversary literary festival, and I kept asking him what they were slated to do, because I couldn’t wrap my mind around the idea that the festival’s daylong schedule of Author appearances included not [...]
I had coffee and banana muffins with my mother in a Chinese bakery, where we sat before rows of birthday cakes of pastel yellow and pink, some shaped as pigs, some as blowfish, some as bears, and all with large Disney eyes and shiny bits of fruit clustered atop the heads to indicate hair, and [...]
A loud solitude occurs at one o'clock in the morning.
E-mail me: loudsolitude (at) gmail (dot) com.
Surprise me: Amazon wish list.
