Gary Glass

Getting a little more personal with this one …
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Continuing thoughts on writing prose fiction as Greek tragedy. #booksky

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5 Million Words And Counting On developing the material for a book.

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To The Contrary: POV Exists, But YOU Don't On writing without a writer.

#writing

Point-Of-View Is An Illusion Is every story a just-so story?

Point-Of-View Is An Illusion

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The Alchemist's Apprentice: Part 2: Rubedo How the Red King met the Black Queen and the author lived happily ever after.

How making it worse made it better. Because writing a book is weird.

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I Won't Live Long Enough I'm too damn old for this.

I estimate that before it’s done, I will have spent at least 20,000 hours working on this novel. If I cannot finish it, if breath or strength or sanity should fail me, as one day it must, I fear I will regret the time spent on unfinished work. #writing 😟

Queering The Text, Part 1 How LGBT themes weave through the novel.

The white pieces are all coded male, the black pieces female. It follows then that the White Queen and Black King must be trans. #booksky #writing #writers

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Intermezzo On structure, discursions, and breath

Intermezzo: On structure, discursions, and breath

I have a mental defect that makes me type FAULKNER every time I mean to write STEINBECK. I mentioned STEINBECK several times in this week's Substack—I wrote FAULKNER every single time. You know, the author of The Grapes Of Wrath!

#booksky #writing

There are in this sublunary life countless causes for fear — from caves, clowns, ravens, and roundabouts to imaginary numbers, irregular corners, and preachers’ kids.

AN ANATOMY OF TREPIDATION

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#writing #writingcommunity

Deep Meaning: Why I write outside the lines

The latest from The Book That Ate My Life!

#writingcommunity #writing

The novel has many motifs. The mirroring motif is a primary one and it recurs relentlessly, compulsively. The novel itself is a literary hall of mirrors — which is a recurring image: one of the many ways in which the text reflects on itself.

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Swimming In The Semiotic Sea On the uses and abuses of allusion.

If we can’t think past the received verities of our cultural legacy, then the real world will certainly crush us. In short, dogma destroys.

#writingcommunity

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The Potlatch Novel On art as giving.

And I think that, in a sense, the work is just the spontaneous activity of this strange being which imagines it is me. This particular work is just what happens to be going on here in this neck of the woods.

The Prisoner. — We are the captive of our terrors. Questions are a burden for others. We are surveiled, we are interrogated, we are challenged, we are tricked, all to discover a motive, but what are motives more than fantasies we tell ourselves about each other? O jealousy! AOI.

#WritingCommunity

Am I Making It Too Hard? On the vices and virtues of difficult text

One of the hard-learned lessons of writing the experimental Swan is that I must keep re-inventing my approach to it as it keeps shifting and doubling back, restlessly undermining itself. It’s a continual, nerve-racking, and exhausting struggle.

Imaginary Problems The privilege of creativity

As for me, lately there are days when I am so panicky I cannot work at all. Many another morning I go to the desk full of anxiety, fearful even to look at what I wrote the day before. And few are the days I don't despair of ever being able to finish the “the damn book”, let alone publish it …

"Our Book" Book the 10th of 14

These selves we think we are, are like houses built of words, mortared with grammar, whirling in a tornado. The writer’s work is to pull these bricks in mid-career and rearrange them. Perilous creativity! These days, writing a mad book in a mad world, I feel myself, with our hero, coming unjointed.

The Book That Ate My Life | Gary Glass | Substack Dispatches from a literary odyssey. Click to read The Book That Ate My Life, by Gary Glass, a Substack publication. Launched 4 days ago.

So it was that in the summer of the 2,014th year of the Common Era I embarked upon my fifth novel. Hey, I'd already written four books — I thought I knew what I was setting up for. Oh hell no.

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The Book That Ate My Life | Gary Glass | Substack Dispatches from a literary odyssey. Click to read The Book That Ate My Life, by Gary Glass, a Substack publication. Launched 3 hours ago.

So it was that in the summer of the 2,014th year of the Common Era I embarked upon my fifth novel. Hey, I'd already written four books — I thought I knew what I was setting up for. Oh hell no.
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Preamble In the summer of the 2,014th year of the Common Era I embarked upon my fifth novel. Hey, I'd already written four books — I thought I knew what I was setting up for. Oh hell no.

So it was that in the summer of the 2,014th year of the Common Era I embarked upon my fifth novel. Hey, I'd already written four books — I thought I knew what I was setting up for. Oh hell no.

Our works are gifts we give the world. Every story, every song, every dance and picture is a gesture of lovingkindness. No act of grace, however insufficient, goes to waste. And what is grace but art? And what is art but any work well done?