Woo hoo! Welcome to the new, all updated site! I hope that it will give you a flavor of who I am and what I do. Please leave a comment or drop me a line. I’d love to hear from you.
Archive for February, 2010
Welcome!!!
Thursday, February 18th, 2010A Busy Spring
Monday, February 15th, 2010My Berkeley job. My solo show (3 short performances in March, one longer performance in May). A talk at AWP in Denver, a new (shhh) column at Literary Mama, a teaching gig for the Afghan Women’s Writing Project (hot damn), AND NOW a week teaching in Hungary at the technical institute there. Plus taxes. Oh, and mothering, house owning, working out, taking care of dogs. But if I’m not around much or not answering messages in a timely fashion, blame it on the list above.
One-Day Short Story Bootcamp with Elizabeth Bernstein
Saturday, February 13th, 2010My pal and co-conspirator Elizabeth Bernstein is teaching a one-day short story writing class at the Grotto in San Francisco, March 20. Info below! Highly recommended!
Instructor: Elizabeth Bernstein
Contact:eb@elizabethbernstein.com
Number of sessions: 1
Meeting times: Saturday, March 20, 10 am to 4 pm.
Course fee: $155.00
Spots reserved with $50 deposit. Contact: eb@elizabethbernstein.com
Description: In one information-filled Saturday, learn everything you need to know about writing, revising and publishing your short stories. This hands-on workshop will cover every aspect of the craft, using fun in-class exercises and discussion. You’ll learn about all about character, voice, story arc, and point of view, plus how to get started, write convincing dialogue, and create believable heroes and villains. You’ll discover how to use setting to underscore your story, how to fictionalize real people and events, and how to write powerful endings. We’ll talk about the revision process and editing and sharing your work, as well as overcoming procrastination and living the writer’s life. Finally, we’ll talk about publishing and selling your work, including contests and the growing market for flash fiction.
Instructor Bio: Elizabeth Bernstein is a writer, editor, and writing coach. She’s the founder and editor of The Big Ugly Review (www.biguglyreview.com), an online literary magazine that showcases fiction, nonfiction, poetry, photography, music and short films (called “a great literary magazine” by Utne Magazine and “the fantastic Big Ugly Review” by zyzzyva editor Howard Junker). Her short stories have been published in the Los Angeles Times Sunday magazine, the North Atlantic Review and other US and international literary journals. Her short story, “Alice,” won first prize in the San Francisco Bay Guardian Fiction Contest and was optioned by Sneaky Little Sister Films. www.elizabethbernstein.com, www.ebc-books.com.
Saved by the Spotlight
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010It was a bad moment, and it came right before I was supposed to go to bed. At least I had the printout of two thirds of it in front of me to stop me from completely panicking. Somehow, perhaps because I’d saved it so many times in so many versions, my computer kept thinking that “Notes for Expansion” was the “Notes for Expansion” of three weeks ago. Which was a very bad thing, considering I’ve been writing up a storm on my Solo show. Twenty-two pages gone bye-bye. And even the backups didn’t have them…. as if I’d printed, then deleted, the last few weeks of work.
I tweeted my despair. I searched the car for more hardcopy. Then, in a last ditch effort….
Saved by the Spotlight.
I don’t know what happened, but when I searched some key words in my MacBook Pro Spotlight thingy, voila, there was the complete, correct file. I backed up wildly.
Whew.
