I started blogging a decade ago because I like blogging. Writing's a kind of lonely thing to do, and I liked the idea of demystifying the process because I loved it as a kid and teenager and as somebody who wanted desperately to write.
I don't read blogs. I'm living the life they're writing about. So why read about it?
I think there's plenty of room for blogs that exist to pay the blogger, or blogs that exist to turn a profit. That's just not the kind of blog I'm writing, and I'm not the kind of blogger that could do that.
When I was 11, I decided to start rapping, playing guitar, and writing songs. Everything really blossomed from there.
I think there are people out there writing original bluegrass songs, but it's hard to get them out on the air.
I just want to keep writing characters who are interesting and complicated people and interesting roles for women, in TV or film or in theater. I think that's like my 'Blues Brothers' mission.
Some of my writing is very subconscious, and that's definitely what happened with 'Body Language' - I looped some basic bossa nova sounds and just started singing.
When I wrote about media and technology, I had a lot of lonely, even intimate book talks. Since writing about dogs, I have a lot of company at book signings.
There are other types of public appearances a writer does in addition to book signings and readings. Each calls for different skills. None of these skills, needless to say, are those that go into writing books.
My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.
Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.
Creative people feel huge ownership of our content; we want everything to be done ourselves. But in book writing, there's a process: editors, PR people.
Book writing is a little different because, in my case, my editor is a year younger than me and basically has the same sensibility as me.
We do not need to proselytise either by our speech or by our writing. We can only do so really with our lives. Let our lives be open books for all to study.
Writing bores me so.
With code, what it means is what it does. It doesn't express, not really. It's a very bounded conversation. And writing is not bounded. That's what's hard about it.
I've been writing about my boyhood, when I was a little kid back on my grandfather's farm where we didn't know about black widow spiders or all that stuff. But writing about that is so easy.
Writing's just as natural to me as getting up and cooking breakfast.
I am never writing a breakup record again, by the way. I'm done with being a bitter witch.
Speaking, writing, and signing are the three ways in which a language lives and breathes. They are the three mediums through which a language is passed on from one generation to the next.
