Jim Tomlinson
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a writer's journal
My writer's journal is on hiatus while I work on the novel. I look forward to resuming it soon.
In the meantime, whenever I have a few free minutes, I'm keeping in touch with the world through Facebook. Feel free to look me up there.
Friday, April 10,2009
I've been reading Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. The novel, published in 1862, is reported to have been read by soldiers on both sides during the American Civil War. As I'm reading, I'm trying to imagine a character in my novel-in-progress, a Union soldier, who, having somehow come across the book, is reading it. How does reading it shape how he feels about things, how he experiences the war? What does it intensify? And what aspects of military life does it help him endure? I like the possibilities in this.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
A couple weeks ago, Josh Kegley wrote an excellent profile that appeared in the Lexington Herald-Leader. And a few days before, he reviewed Nothing Like An Ocean. In the recent rush, I neglected to mention them here.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
It's been a busy few weeks since the launch of Nothing Like An Ocean. Following a signing alongside Kentucky writers Mary Ann Taylor-Hall and Richard Taylor at Morris Book Shop in Lexington, I was delighted by a strong turnout for my Friday night reading and signing at Joseph-Beth Booksellers. In coming weeks I'll be doing a couple of radio interviews for the book, and then the Southern Kentucky Book Fest on April 18.
With most of the book promotion work behind me, I'm really looking forward to getting back to work on the novel. It is such a different mindset for me, hunkering down and retreating to the private writing mind vs. being a public person, an honest-to-God, hat-wearing author. I know there are writers who navigate the divide smoothly, shifting gears quite effortlessly. That's not me, unfortunately. I seem to need blocks of writing time away from public events. And that's what I've got now.
For the past two weeks I've been watching the John Adams series from HBO on Netflix DVDs. I'm especially interesting in how David McCullough and the screenwriters humanized the historical characters, Adams and his wife, Washington and several other founding fathers who play significant roles. My novel-in-progress doesn't deal with such iconic characters, but it does risk sliding into historical stereotypes: civil war soldiers, their wives and families waiting back home, the young Shaker woman adrift on the war torn countryside. How to make each of them specific and human will be a challenge. The John Adams writers avoided the pitfalls. Maybe I can do the same.
Monday, February 16, 2009 - The official publication date for Nothing Like An Ocean remains March 6th, but copies are being shipped to customers already by online retailers. Copies are also beginning to appear on local bookstore shelves. So the book seems to be more or less published. - Larry Muhammad of the Louisville Courier-Journal wrote a feature article about me and the book. It appeared in yesterday's newspaper. It includes a couple of surprise quotes from Crystal Wilkinson and Silas House, two Kentucky Writers who have been most generous with their help and support as I was learning the craft. There's a focus on my age in Muhammad's article, which I understand as a writer, the need to shape a feature story. It's nothing of real significance, though, in what makes me a writer or in what I write. When I'm writing, I'm not thinking of age. I could be thirty-eight, for all I know. Or forty-three. Really, I could. - Saturday, February7, 2009 - Online Issue #4 of Freight Stories is out today and in it my story Angel, His Rabbit and Kyle McKell, alongside fiction by Lee Martin, Daniel Wallace and others. The story is also in my soon-to-be-released Nothing Like An Ocean.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Kentucky was hit with an ice storm earlier this week, and we were without power for three days. Many areas still have none. Temperatures stayed below freezing after the storm, so we huddled in one room around a kerosene heater and managed to stay reasonably warm. There was much damage to trees, though, and some homes, too. Here are two photos taken once the sun came out.
We had a battery radio which we kept tuned to the station broadcasting updates on local recovery efforts. But there was no TV, no internet, almost no news of the outside world, and only candles to read by in the evening. The upside is that it gave me a chance to catch up on my reading, books from the stack beside my chair that I'd been wanting to get to, first Kent Haruf's Plainsong followed by Haruf's Eventide and a start on Marilynne Robinson's Home. And it let me reflect on the mindset of "roughing it," as it might apply to characters in my novel-in-progress. So on a personal level, the outcomes of this storm were not altogether bad.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Over the holidays I put together a craft class for the Eastern Kentucky University MFA residency, where I was a visiting writer. The subject I'd settled on was Controlling Time: Sequence and Pace in Fiction. I chose examples from favorite authors to illustrate how they shape a story by controlling the sequence of events delivered to the reader. I'd also prepared two brief writing exercises aimed at understanding the elasticity of time in fiction -- how a year can pass in one paragraph and a few seconds in another. When time ran short, I discussed the exercises briefly and urged the students to try it themselves after the residency.
Friday evening I gave a public reading. That's me above (photos by Jennifer Keith) setting up the story I'm about to read, the title story from the new book, Nothing Like An Ocean. It's a longish story (about thirty-eight minutes), but my voice held up in good shape, and the story seemed to be well received by students and faculty. At least it felt that way, unwinding at the reception afterward.
All in all, it was an enjoyable two days. I came away inspired by the enthusiasm and energy of the EKU MFA students. The program seems to be off to a strong start.
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