Author: Benjamin
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Post #22: So Much Gray
There’s been some interesting debate in the wake of Amazon.com’s strange decision to urge its customers to scan items in brick and mortar stores and then receive a discount from Amazon if they buy said item through the website, rather than in the store, whether it be a Best Buy…
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Post #21: Where My Boys At?
An aspect of my NANOWRIMO experience not yet chronicled here is the amazing group of students at the high school where I teach who also took on the 50,000. A few reached their goal. Many came along for the ride and produced a substantial amount of writing. They thrilled and…
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Post #20: Under 500 Words on an Album that Changed my Life, Part Two
The summer of 1992, when Extreme’s Three Sides to Every Story came out, I was fifteen and a sophomore in high school. The album, compared with its multi-platinum predecessor Pornograffiti, sold only 700,000 copies and was largely considered a commercial failure. But that deserves some context. We all know that…
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Post #19: Best of Lists and Middle Class White Guys
Here’s a couple of articles I found thought provoking. The first, by Roxane Gay, examines the “Best of…” lists that have become such a part of what establishes literary “excellence.” Gay makes a compelling case regarding their legitimacy and usefulness. http://therumpus.net/2011/12/toward-a-more-complete-measure-of-excellence/ The second is by Benjamin Hale, a writer who…
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Post #18: Finish Lines
As I wrote my 50,000th word this month I was at a coffee shop alone. I’d gone in a few thousand short of my goal, ordered coffee and a peanut butter cookie, then set to work, vowing not to leave until I’d finished. I didn’t. A thrill went through me…
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Post #17: Crawling Through the Nearest Window
Doing National Novel Writing Month is exhilarating. I think this is mostly because I’ve never written, outside of education, for a capital “D” Deadline and the need to complete X quantity by Y date is a utilitarian sort of enterprise that’s added a different timbre to this writing experience than…
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Post #13: Blue Dot
Blue Dot is the presumptive title of the Sci-Fi/Horror novel I’ve started for National Novel Writing Month. As a writer of mostly literary fiction, I decided if I was going to go for broke with nanowrimo and do a novel in a month, I might as well go all out…
Benjamin Roesch 