to write, to live, to work, to laugh

As with all other aspects of the narrative art, you will improve with practice, but practice will never make you perfect. Why should it? What fun would that be?
- Stephen King

The Spring '08/5th Anniversary issue of Elements dropped this past Wednesday - how exciting!! - with several articles by Alex and me, as well as a featured contributing writer who you might know =)

If you want a copy, just let me know, and Alex will send you a box. Quite literally, he will actually send you a box of magazines.

This morning, Alex and I stopped by a Ferrari/Maserati dealership to pick up the Maserati GranTurismo for a test drive. Alex drove while I was content to play the role of attentive, picture-taking passenger. At $125,000, it was quite the ride. Even at top speeds, it was incredibly smooth and agile, turning heads on every street. The Lotus is still my future sports car of choice, but if a Maserati ever ended up in my driveway, I don't think I'd turn it away.


I just got the results for the the Short Story Challenge 2008 that I entered a few months ago, and while I didn't get 1st place in my heat, I got 2nd place instead =) So I don't move on to Round 2, but considering that there were more than 550 writers, of which 45 have moved on to Round 2, and I got 1 of the 30 2nd place spots out of all the heats (mine had 19 writers), I actually did pretty good!! (Did you catch all those numbers??) Check out the results page:

http://www.nycmidnight.com/2008/SSC/1stRound/15.htm

Then there was this interesting bit of news from the photographer (ImageWorksNYC) who recently took my headshots - one of my pictures is now up on one of his websites:

http://www.imageworksnyc.com/headshots

As for VM, we got a new round of drawings and layouts this week, and with them, progress looks promising in the next few weeks.

So that's about it for updates this most busy of months. Still writing, still editing, still plugging away. It gets tough, and perfection is elusive, always two steps ahead of me, making me slap my forehead every other day. But hey, perfection is overrated. Sometimes a flaw here or there, a question mark or two, makes you smile more than if you hadn't noticed anything at all.

And with that, here's the cutest tree ever:

making it work with tim gunn

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.
- William Faulkner

Several things happened today. I lost my voice. I had an audition. I interviewed Tim Gunn. I paid off my graduate school tuition. I revised Chapter 1 of my novel.

Oh, did I mention I interviewed Tim Gunn? You know, everyone's favorite fashion mentor on Project Runway, host of Tim Gunn's Guide to Style, author of the book with the same name, educator extraordinaire at Parsons The New School for Design, and chief creative officer of Liz Claiborne.

Yeah, that Tim Gunn.


I first met Mr. Gunn very briefly last May at a Book Revue book signing in Huntington, and from the talk he gave there, I could already tell that he was as eloquent, knowledgeable, and passionate as he appears on television. Now, after a lengthy interview in his office in the city, I can say that all of those things are more than true, and he just so happens to also be one of the most personable and down-to-earth people I have ever had the pleasure to interview. In every way, he is the Tim Gunn everyone who is a fan of his could hope for him to be - and then some.

We spoke about his position at Liz Claiborne, where he has been reinvigorating the company and its many brands, breathing life and energy back into it, about Project Runway and Guide to Style, about his time at Parsons, and about his overall role in the fashion world today. More than anything, Mr. Gunn has become for many people a figure who bridges that cloudy realm between the runways in NYC and the mess of a closet we all have at home. When everyone has something to say about how everyone should dress, Mr. Gunn teaches a philosophy of personal style, owning your look, and - say it with me now - making it work!!

Well before many of us met Mr. Gunn, he was an educator and administrative force at Parsons, a mover and a shaker, helping to reshape a department and mold a new generation of fashion designers. But when we did finally meet him several years ago, we found a fashion mentor, of all things, and of the nicest, most intelligent kind. And before long, and rightfully so, he was not only giving advice to aspiring designers, but in addition he was giving much-needed style advice to people who can't nor care to sew - to the people who aren't so much concerned about what's "in" as to those who want to feel good in their clothes all the time.

So now we have Tim Gunn - educator, host, celebrity, author, company executive, and mentor.

People wait on line for hours to meet Mr. Gunn, shake his hand, ask him questions, and find out what he thinks about how they're dressed. What some people would never dare to ask because of what the answer might actually be, they ask him, because they know that he is qualified, interested in giving feedback, and above all, genuinely honest, in the nicest of ways.

You'll surely hear more about my interview with Mr. Gunn as the article nears completion (just enough to entice you to read it when it's published), but for now, know this:

Today, at the interview, he pointed out just how cute my dress was and what a perfect fit it was, and as I actually jotted down that important point in my notebook, I was trying to hold back perhaps the biggest smile someone with a such a scratchy voice and stuffy nose as I had today could ever hope to have =)

Thanks, Tim Gunn, for helping us all, make it work.

with little sleeping and much reading

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.
- Samuel Johnson

These next few months are going to entail a lot of reading. For starters, I have that class on Cervantes and Don Quixote. Just about 100 pages into the book, I can see what all the fuss is about.

For those who don't know the story - and I'm sure you are few - Don Quixote is the story of a man, Alonso Quixano, who becomes "mad" and loses his grasp on reality from reading so many books on chivalry and romance. He decides that he must become a knight-errant and travel the land doing good, saving people from injustices, and offering it all up for the love and honor of his Dulcinea of El Toboso.

One of the world's greatests works of fiction, if not the greatest, Don Quixote was something completely new - it marked the crossover from the chivalric romance and the modern novel as we know it today. In it, Cervantes undermined the conventions and traditions of the chivalric and pastoral prose that had been popular up until his time. While the literary custom at the time was often to imitate the writers and figures who had come before, he instead took something that he believed had become very stale and out of it created characters richer and more alive than the literary world had ever seen. Cervantes was greatly influenced by many other writers, but for what he did with Don Quixote, there was no comparison.

To say he was a well-read man would be an understatement - Cervantes read everything and lived a life that reads, appropriately enough, very much like a book of adventure and woe and intrigue and love.

And so here I am, reading Don Quixote, reminding myself that, like Cervantes, I really have to start reading more of, well, everything. They say the problem with most poets is that they don't read much poetry, and the problem with a lot of writers is that they don't read much of other people's work.

Cervantes would have thought this preposterous.

Read, read, read. And then, when you're done, read again.

At some point, when you're not reading, you'll find you've written something, better and more informed than you ever could have imagined.

a busy month, indeed

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.
- Somerset Maugham

To say it's been a busy month is an understatement... which explains why I haven't had any new blog posts in nearly as much time =P

With the magazine, school, book writing, anniversary celebrations (4 years!!), a short story competition, that other magazine (hint hint), a weekend conference, website redesigning in the works, Chinese New Year shows, and just overall to-do-list madness, it's been a little more than hectic.

And of course, during it all, I've had a thousand ideas and plots and characters race through my head, out of which I've managed to get, maybe, a handful down on paper.

Fortunately, though, I have been writing, and much of it is thanks to the writing group I recently joined. A lot of times, you get bogged down with work, and the writing, because nobody's watching the clock waiting for it to be finished (except for you, that is), gets pushed to the side, leaving you even more frustrated and stressed out. It's an irritating circle, but it makes it all the more worthwhile when you break out of it - even if the moments are few and far between, and the busier it gets, the harder it gets.

Another thing I had working for me this month was the SCBWI Annual Winter Conference. I heard some amazing authors/illustrators/
editors/agents talk about the business, their writing, their drawings, the creative process, their inspiration, their readers, and the overall market. It was really a great experience. Topping the list was meeting two amazing editors in small group sessions. Hopefully, I'll be submitting something to them in the near future...

I had originally intended to blog about the conference the day I got home on Sunday, but I just never got the chance to - not even the following weekend!! So here we are, almost two weeks later, and the plan is to blog a little bit more about the experience in the next few days.

Maybe - just maybe - I'll even post the first poem I've written in a long time, which I just so happened to write during the conference.

I know you're excited...

Stay tuned...