Climbers on Mt. Everest at the base of the Hillary Step.
It Always Seems Impossible Until It’s Done
Greetings, Dear Reader. I’m dictating this blog entry while walking on my treadmill, so please excuse me if I ramble or my “smart” phone substitutes…
Aloneness
Lately, more than ever, I’ve been thinking about a quote by the late, great playwright Sam Shepard: “Aloneness is a condition of writing. You look…
Chris Orcutt’s Favorite Short Stories
Two weeks ago, I wrote about the backstory of my short story collection The Man, The Myth, The Legend, explaining what was happening in my…
My Prodigiously Convoluted Yet Miraculously Productive Low-Tech Writing Process — Part 2 — With a Few Modest Writing Secrets
In the first installment of this piece, I described the first half of my writing process: Writing the first draft in longhand or on a…
WANTED: A 21st Century Author Promoter
I love writing. I love sitting down with half a dozen fresh Blackwing 602 pencils, sharpening them to a razor edge and filling up pages…
Farewell, Facebook. Ta-Ta, Twitter. I’ve Got Writing to Do.
I’ve been tired of social media for a long time. However, like a drug addict, I’ve continued to take hits off it, hoping to get a…
Paying Attention as a Fiction Writer
I have been writing fiction since I was 13 years old, when I first read Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger and was swept away not only by the…
To All So-Called Authors: Stop Doing This; You Look Like Idiots
Maybe I shouldn’t be giving away my writing secrets. Maybe I should be like Ernest Hemingway, who, with the exception of a couple of Paris…