William John Bert

Julian Barnes has been a favorite author of mine since I borrowed stole Metroland from my friend Mark last winter. Reading Barnes makes me wish I knew some French, since he drops sentences, phrases, and occasionally passages of it, sans translation, into everything he writes, or at least everything of his that I’ve read. But [...]

Google’s new toy, ngrams, graphs the relative frequency of words and phrases occurring in books published over an arbitrary time period from 1500 to 2008. Let’s go. (All search the English Fiction corpus from 1908 to 2008 except the last, which searches American English, 1858-2008.) shot through,stippled,dappled,limpid,limned ashamed,abused,forgotten,determined i love you she cried,i love you [...]

Congrats to my friend Mark Polanzak, who won the 2010 Pint and Pen Contest. The contest rules: Type up (and print out if you must) a story that includes the words PINT, PEN, BUKOWSKI and HARPOON. Entries must be typed, in reverence to the brilliant Charles Bukowski. The word count must be between 500 and [...]

In my old dog, new tricks post, I mentioned that, though I used to blog, what you’re reading now represents my first use of WordPress. Was it hard to set up? No. It doesn’t hurt that I have a computer science background, including an undergrad degree in the field. Of course, when I was in [...]

Tuesday night was the final workshop of the three-part Caught in the Act series that I’ve been leading at 826DC. I played trombone in high school band, and I remember the teacher telling us that the most challenging pieces weren’t the flashy allegro fortissimo showpieces (however much we enjoyed them) but rather the lento piano [...]

Fellow 826DC volunteer and all-around awesome person Anna started a Tumblr to collect photos of people’s morning commutes. I thought that was a great way to turn what can be one of a day’s most unremarkable stretches into something seen anew, so I contributed a couple photos and plan to send more. At the moment [...]

I’m going to do something I haven’t done before: post some of my writing, but not a finished piece. I just finished John Gardener’s The Art of Fiction a few days ago, and I’ve decided to do some of the exercises he provides at the end of the book. For example: Take a simple event: [...]

Tuesday night was the second installment of Caught in the Act, the creative writing workshop series I’m leading at 826DC. It went really well–class size doubled (to two!) and we produced an entire new draft, this time from the point of view of the person who did the catching. My involvement with 826DC goes back [...]

So I’m actually not new to blogging–I blogged for about a year from 2003-2004 and, though it may lead to embarrassment, I’ll even link to the old thing, which is still up: Pleonastic Ephemera. (I’ve also participated in several private group blogs for sharing writing with geographically-dispersed friends.) Pleonastic Ephemera was on Blogspot, which is [...]