Author: Anthony Dobranski
-
Dark Consciousness
I have decided to come clean. I am not an atheist. People who note the Abrahamic and Gothic mythologies behind my novel might be a little surprised to hear I ever thought I was an atheist. Thing is, they’re my mythologies too. I’m as entitled to use them to tell my difficult tales as the…
-
Progress Report
I’m sorry to have gone dark the whole summer but I was busy. We’re building a house, my dad had heart surgery, we even had a vacation — but mostly, I’ve been working. With the huge help of star editor Kathryn Johnson I finished the third draft of my novel, retitled it (another post to…
-
Worms made the world and the world is their art
I have written in the past about my wonderful compost and its happy population of worms, which do much more of the work of composting — pretty much all of it, in fact — than I ever suspected when I threw a few into the container. A recent Science News article on fossilized worm burrows thus…
-
Political naiveté and general uselessness
A little while ago I posted a thought that perhaps the Republicans might see their way to backing some form of congressional voting for DC, with an eye toward upping the party’s standing among the moderate and meritocratic citizens of our nation’s capital. My, I am naive. I have been reading Geoffrey Kabaservice’s excellent and…
-
Hey Republicans – show DC some love!
My hometown of Washington DC has a poor tradition of executive governance — or a tradition of poor executive governance — for many historical reasons, from patronage to developer money to strong social divides. It also hurts us to be so monolithically of the Democratic Party. Last Tuesday was the primary election, which is effectively…
-
My hero Grover Norquist
The cost of the new extension of Metro mass transit trains out to Dulles Airport has ballooned and will continue to do so. A well-designed bus system would be as efficient but cost vastly less. Buses are cheaper than trains, with volume sources for parts and no need for expensive rails. With dedicated lanes, a bus…
-
Interleaving
In a marathon session a week ago I interleaved the chapters of the manuscript. As I posted earlier it was Kathryn Johnson’s idea. Until now the points of view alternated in long chapters of 8,000-10,000 words. By alternating individual scenes from these chapters I now change viewpoints every thousand words or so. A few chapters…
-
Zombie corn
For the past three years I have composted our household plant waste. Coffee grounds, tea bags, kitchen scraps, forgotten vegetables gone bad. Our pet rabbit’s nitrogen-filled litter. We keep 3 gallons a week out of the waste stream, I have given no leaves for autumn collection since I started. Living lighter on the city land.…
-
2nd draft editing, part 1
I am taking a class on revising manuscript from Kathryn Johnson, a novelist and writing mentor. Unlike other workshops there is no group critique and little discussion. Johnson has read pages from each of us but it’s about helping us do it ourselves. She holds us to account at the start of each class on…