One of my earliest babyhood memories is realizing that my head was so huge I couldn’t move it. From the shoulders up I felt like a small section of garden hose jammed into a bowling ball. And I really yearned to move my head, too. I wanted to participate in the life I could hear happening just outside the room I was in: my mom in the kitchen passive-aggressively banging pots and pans, my dad virulently bitching about his job,... Read more
By way of researching a book of mine (“I’m OK – You’re Not: The Message We’re Sending Nonbelievers and Why We Should Stop“), I posted a notice on Craigslist sites all over the country asking non-Christians to send me any short, personal statement they would like Christians to read. “Specifically,” I wrote, “I’d like to hear how you feel about being on the receiving end of the efforts of Christian evangelicals to convert you.” (To that I added, “I want... Read more
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The book business is reeeeeeeeeeeeeally slow; it is like unto the rest of our media as the Pony Express is to email. Insane. Anyway, it means that whenever anything actually does happen with any book you write, it registers (to you, anyway) as a fairly big deal. This week four things happened with books of mine, which I figured I’d now bore you with. First, on Tuesday I found at my door a box delivered by UPS that turned out to contain the first copy... Read more
Hello, students at the Kazakhstan Institute of Management, Economics and Strategic Research! Your teacher (whose name I do not know, but on my blog she uses the intriguing screen name of “Kazakhnomad”) asked me to write to you. My name is John Shore. I make a living writing books. Writing is a great way to make a living, because it means you get to sit on your rear end all day. I live in the city of San Diego. If you are... Read more
A couple of readers were kind enough to ask me to elaborate on a point I made in My Last, Best 10 Tips On How To Make It As A Writer, about how talking and writing are “exact opposite uses of the language.” So here’s my case for why, even though it seems like being a good talker would make you a good writer, writing is, in fact, no more like talking than mime is like opera: Spoken language is very... Read more
Take it seriously. It’s just about impossible to make a living writing, so doing so means Fanatical Focus. When I decided to start making a living a writing, I wrote (for free, for all kinds of local publications) every night after work for four to six hours, and throughout every weekend. Six months into that I was offered my first job as an editor; three months after that, I was making a great living as the main entertainment features writer for (then) new website of the San... Read more
First of all, I want to again thank everyone who wrote to express their sympathy for … well, what I wrote in My Stepmother Passed Away. I’m going to wait a day or two to see if any more such comments come in; I’ll then gather them into a single document and mail them to my father. He’ll cry to read them, I know. So again let me thank you all for the role you’ve played and will play yet in my family’s processing of this... Read more
This morning my father called from across the country to tell me that his wife of 40 years — my stepmother since I was 10 — had passed away. The chemotherapy for her cancer proved too much. This woman was the first person who ever showed me what real work is. She had been raised as poor as poor gets in northern rural Minnesota; farm people who dig at ice and pray it grows food. At 15 she ran away... Read more
I’ve been astounded by how many people have read my “How To Make a Living Writing,” and “How To Make a Living Writing, Part Two.” The tone and tenor of the comments left on those posts is truly gratifying. (I wish I had more time to respond to them, but lately I’ve been eyeball deep in a 60,000 book that’s due in about a week [!] and has been devouring my time like the Cookie Monster on a mallomar.) You know what’s weird?... Read more
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