Two Months in Two Paragraphs

A quick recap of what I’ve been doing since August instead of blogging:

I vacationed (or staycationed). I started Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse,” which somebody should have made me read sooner. I wrote about some neat work being done by two biologists and a physicist who are using algorithms and massive amounts of citation data to create what they call a Google Maps of scholarship. I tried to sort out some nagging thoughts about what happens to individual authors and their work in a publishing/information ecosystem that’s geared more and more toward accumulating massive amounts of “content” and then breaking it up into chunks for readers/users to digest and remix. I kept to my policy of working away at my own current fiction project instead of talking about it. I made a lot of sugar syrup for the hummingbird who spent the summer visiting my yard. And this morning I read Shirley Jackson’s “Notes for a Young Writer.” I needed a pep talk/craft workshop, and her advice is excellent, no matter what age you’re writing from. “The essence of the story is motion,” she says. Read it if you haven’t. You can find it in the collection “Come Along With Me.”