Allow me to share with you a nugget for my readers who are fiction writers. This is from an essay on the great Victorian novelist George Eliot by Joseph Epstein, from his recently published essay collection Essays in Biography: One of the modern fiction workshop laws is that a writer should always show and never […]
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5 Keys to Success for Aspiring Writers (Not) to Follow
January 29, 2013 
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Today’s post is inspired by an award-winning fantasy and science fiction author I interviewed during my cross-country road trip, Michael Swanwick. For a time in the early 2000′s he played a character online by the name of “Unca Mike,” who took a different approach to writing advice: Most writing columns offer sound and useful advice […]
Read moreWhat Would You Like to See on The Artist’s Road?
December 20, 2012 28 Comments
This is your chance, dear readers, to weigh in on the types of posts you’ll see over the next year on The Artist’s Road. I’ve arranged below a list of categories into which Artist’s Road posts could most comfortably be fit. It’s a bit of a challenge, because while this blog has a theme–living the […]
Read moreStop Super-Sizing the English Language!
October 31, 2012 54 Comments
Hurricane Sandy has come and gone, and I sit here in Alexandria, Virginia, once again marveling at our collective ability to over-hype. I don’t mean to play down the impact of this storm, just because I never saw the high winds and tree losses the experts had predicted for my area; plenty of folks on […]
Read moreWrestling with Art vs. the Market
October 9, 2012 18 Comments
We all know William Shakespeare appealed to the common man, with stories that touched on moral truths built upon jokes about sex and farting. He followed a path well paved by giants like Euripides, who in a tragedy about the slaughter and enslavement of a population slips in a fat joke. I can imagine a […]
Read moreCrustacean Christmas Revisited
December 9, 2011 17 Comments
Have you ever typed “crustacean Christmas” into Google? It probably says something about the oddity of our family tradition that an Artist’s Road blog post about it is the first entry on that list. Today I’ll provide a sequel post, but first some quick background. It started with a Christmas tree ornament my wife purchased […]
Read moreGuest Post: Mr. Bacon Goes to the National Book Festival
September 26, 2011 30 Comments
Many of my readers have been demanding that Mr. Bacon have his own blog. If I were to allow him to do that I’d have few readers left, so instead I’ve allowed Mr. Bacon to write a guest post. Enjoy. I time-traveled yesterday. The Washington, D.C., Metro system transported me to the National Mall and […]
Read moreA Stylish Blogger
May 16, 2011 22 Comments
I’ve avoided having to pick my “Fave Five” friends because I’ve never had a phone from T-Mobile. Here in the United States, the mobile phone carrier advertises a service with free calls to five friends. Who would want to learn they are at best my sixth favorite person? I face that dilemma now. Through the […]
Read moreCreativity Tweets of the Week 02/25/11
February 25, 2011 16 Comments
The winds of change are sweeping through the Middle East. That wind dissipates on the shore of The Artist’s Road, however. Our Friday tradition of providing a roundup of our best weekly tweets on creativity, inspiration and writing long predates the reigns of here-today/gone-tomorrow despots named Mubarak or Gadhafi (or Gaddafi or Khadafi or Qaddafi […]
Read moreOur Annual Crustacean Christmas
December 13, 2010 13 Comments
Indulge me in a little diversion from my usual post of providing tips on creativity I’ve learned through interviews with creatives. I’d like to share a family tradition we have here of making borderline-tacky Christmas displays. We draw them onto plywood, jigsaw them out, paint them and display them. Here’s this year’s entry, a 7′ […]
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