Part two of what may be the most interesting dialog I've ever had with another human being (I've had plenty of good ones with dogs) is now live at the Sunday Observer. Pablo D'Stair and I talk all sorts of shop. In his installment we talk about a world without context, the reader as an audience, music, and more. Seriously, and I'm not just saying this because I'm involved, there is some damn good stuff going on here. Read part two, here. Then, be sure to read part one as well.
Extree, extree, this just in, Caleb tells you why you may have shitty taste in books. New article at Slothrop.com just went live, titled "Why You Will Never Stop Reading Books by that Shitty Author You Secretly Love." A taste: My goal here, it would seem, is to strip away the magic and aesthetic pleasure from the reading experience until all that remains is a conscious system of if/thens made to cultivate so much data and worry that you’d be better to build an apocalypse bunker, devoid of all text, than to crease the spine of a highly anticipated blockbuster from James Patterson (though, you’d be wise to avoid the latter no matter my intentions with this blog post). Yes, it seems that way. But no. Rather, it is important to understand the very basics of the free will argument if we are to at all suppose books as a unique…
Increasingly, one of my favorite things is dialogue(ing) with Pablo D'Stair. He's the sort of arm-chair thinker/drinker, literary critic type that I get on well with. Recently, he and I had yet another email back-and-forth, this one for the Montage section of the Sunday Observer ("Sri Lanka's English Newspaper with the largest circulation"), where we wax on about genre vs. literary writing, the sound of language, what constitutes success, and more. Dare I say that this series is perhaps our most interesting dialogue yet (though, I reserve the right to someday find hidden genius in our past discussions). Head over to the Sunday Observer now get all icky with Pablo and Caleb sticky.
Patrick Wensink kindly re-posted my short essay thing "The Author Who Gets Free Drinks: A (Hopefully) True Story," over at his blog, Broken Piano for President, which not coincidentally is the title of his recently released book. Head over to the site, take in the story. It's about Tom Waits, free drinks, and Southwest Airlines. Here's a lick: This is the already true part: in June of 2008 I stood on a beach in San Diego wearing a full suit, paying more attention to my watch than to the ocean in front of me. For a boy from Kansas City, where the largest body of water might be a wort vessel at the Boulevard Brewery, this transposed priority says a lot. I had a flight, and as always, the airline schedule superseded any perceived relaxation. And it’s especially hard to relax when, with my suit beachwear I looked the part of a…
...Phil Jourdan is a damn good runner-up. Here he reads a page or so from my story "Click-Clack" which a lot of people seem to really like (both the story and Phil's voice).
Just live, late, late last night, a new post over at Phil Jourdan's Slothrop blog. Writer’s block has nothing to do with motivation (if the story is working, you’ll have plenty of motivation). It has nothing to do with a weak plot (plenty of great books are weak on plot; The Great Gatsby is “guy moves into a house next to rich guy”…that’s about it). It has nothing to do with your own seemingly problematic writing environment (Chuck Palahniuk wrote Choke while bound up in a hospital bed; you aren’t allowed to complain). Most of the time writer’s block is simply your brain’s reaction to a weakness in your story. Head over to Slothrop to read the post. Leave a comment. Let Phil know how much you love the article. Maybe he will have me back. Also, as a bonus, this article can act as a glimpse of what I’ll be teaching for June’s Tallgrass…
The people in my head often ask me, “Caleb, how are you seemingly in so many places online at once?” The simple truth is: magic. But not everyone is born with this gift (or curse, depending on which side of the superhero spectrum I’m internally agonizing over at the time). Over the years I’ve built up a failsafe system, though, so should Cash-4-Kryptonite stores suddenly saturate my suburb, I’ve got measures in place. Here’s my method. 1. Establish a “content spring” I’m an organization nut. I need structure to survive. Online, when new social media networks materialize daily, organization can be tough. It is important to establish a “content spring,” a source from which most of your content will originate. The goal being to focus content creation efforts in a single place to avoid feeling overwhelmed by so many points of entry. In a perfect world, with perfect organization, you…