 Red Room Writer Profile
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Gerard Jones's Blog
July 7, 2009
- I've been blogging less lately about the trouble I'm having writing my book because I'm having a lot less trouble writing the book. But I feel guilty about neglecting my blog so I keep thinking I should make myself put the book down so I can blog about having trouble writing it. And even if I don't actually put the book down my anxiety about neglecting the blog makes it harder to write the book. ...
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July 1, 2009
- Lately I've been sending my non-writer friends a few links to articles about those of us in the writing trade and our psychological peculiarities. Not the most flattering articles, but entertaining, and supporting that image of authorial eccentricity that makes our generally unglamorous lives look a bit more interesting (and often gets us off the hook for some of our less sterling behavior). One ...
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June 21, 2009
- My son just finished his sophomore year of high school. Something for any kid to feel pleased about, but for Nicky it was a triumph: for nearly the entire year, starting in October, he's been hammered by severe migraines. He wakes up with them, usually two bad ones a week, usually another one or two not quite as bad. The bad ones come with intense nausea, dizziness, agonizing sensitivity to light ...
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June 11, 2009
- When I woke up this morning the gray sky sat low and heavy on my neighborhood, and I felt sluggish and depressed and headachy and unable to stir up the energy to write. Email weather, that's what it was. Then in the afternoon the sun broke through. The stucco gleamed, the windows flashed‚ Frisco wore her finery. Instantly I was inspired: to go to the Post Office, to go the bank, to buy an iced ...
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June 10, 2009
- The black clouds mounted high and the wind howled in from the west and I wanted to write. Does anyone else know this, the weather that fills us like a muse? It's the negative ions, I'm told, some phenomenon associated with the approach of a precipitous front, but it feels more romantic in the moment. Yesterday, on the other hand, I could not write and could not think. Yesterday we were in San ...
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June 9, 2009
- The San Francisco Chronicle just finished a 144-day retrospective of its first 144 years. It was fascinating and fun, but it also begged a question: why celebrate 144 years? Why not wait for 150? Is there some special, local significance to 144? No. It's just that the Chronicle may not survive to 150. It's not even guaranteed to make 145. The death of print surely isn't as imminent as many ...
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June 4, 2009
- From the spring of 1973, when I was not quite sixteen and got it in my head that I wanted to make my living as a writer, until just about a year ago I functioned within the same basic story of how you make it in this business: You write or propose a book, send it to your agent in New York who sends it to editors, get an advance, revise or finish the thing, wait a while, hope for prestigious ...
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May 27, 2009
- That's a photo caption from a San Francisco Chronicle article about the arrival of a Barack Obama statue at the Wax Museum on Fisherman's Wharf. I bring it up here to...well, partly just to share one of the stranger and more delightful captions I've ever seen in a newspaper...but also to emphasize that we live in exciting times. The article goes on to tell how thrilled and awestruck even adult ...
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May 19, 2009
- I'm used to good reviews and blurbs on my books, mostly of the "lucid and entertaining" sort. Sometimes I'll get an "eye-opening" or even "brilliantly constructed." My books are praised mainly (as usually happens with nonfiction) for their interesting subject matter and my ability to lay it out clearly and compellingly. I've rarely gotten much praise for the writing ...
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May 17, 2009
- It's time to move from the new chapter breakdown of The Undressing of America (too quickly approved, as mentioned before, by my editor) to something like actual writing. Despite advice from many quarters that I should jump to the part that seems easiest or most exciting to me, my gut tells me this is a book that needs to be written in order—or at least needs to be started where the readers will ...
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May 14, 2009
- One of the students in the writing class I teach, talking about her nervousness at how her family may react to the memoir she's writing, quoted her mom as saying, "In this family we don't air our dirty laundry in public." I could almost feel the shudder going around the room. Every one of us knew what that meant: trouble. Whatever was screwed up in the family would surely be made worse ...
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May 11, 2009
- There was a time when the news that someone else was already writing a book about Bernarr Macfadden would have paralyzed me. See, I'm contracted to write this book called The Undressing of America for FSG, about how the "culture of concealing" was overthrown in the early 20th Century by the "culture of revealing"—more specifically, how that change was manifested through the ...
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May 9, 2009
- So, after a great deal of stalling and avoiding I finally wrote the new chapter breakdown for my book, The Undressing of America, based on a new direction my editor and I realized I had to go. By committing to jump on it right here in this blog, I actually managed to have it done and off to New York by the end of the next day. My editor wrote back immediately, telling me I'd "done a good ...
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May 8, 2009
- A couple of days ago I said I was going to do some work on The Undressing of America so I'd have something to blog about...and damned if I didn't do just that! Within an hour after posting the entry I was forcing myself into the new chapter breakdown my editor requested a few weeks ago, and then I hit some kind of momentum and I kept hammering at until I went to bed. Unfortunately, most of that ...
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May 6, 2009
- Where did those three months go?Actually, there are reasons for my departure from blogging, and from writing the book I'm supposed to be blogging about writing. Last fall I gave most of my time to the Obama campaign, and after the election I discovered that my financial situation had gotten so bad that I had to take on some work-for-hire jobs to keep my family's head above water. Most of them are ...
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