BooksofJobe.com

Coastal Transmissions From an Oregon Transplant

Writing

  • The Reddit ‘No Sleep’ Experiment

    So do you guys reddit? With all the mandates on writers to use all forms of social media (including my reluctant creation of an account with Google+, which I’m still trying to get a feel for), I assumed that most everyone would have at least dabbled with the internet behemoth. After reading a post from… Read more

  • The Oddity That Is The Encouraging Rejection

    I’ve become accustomed to rejection. I’m still in the early stages of my collection, as yesterday I received lucky number 13 if you’re scoring at home. But this one was different. To paraphrase, it read, in part: Thank you for submitting your story to our online magazine. Unfortunately, our editors did not feel your story was… Read more

  • Semicolon Cleanse: My Addiction to a Punctuation Mark

    When I started writing again a couple of years ago, I rediscovered something I had long since forgotten—the semicolon. It hadn’t gone anywhere; no, it was there all along, just sitting there on the sidelines waiting for me to pick it back up and start using it again. And now that I’m back to writing,… Read more

  • My Writing Resolutions for 2014

    Lose weight. Quit smoking. Exercise more. Stop drinking. It’s that time again, when people use the new year as a chance to wipe the slate clean and hit the reset button. Stop their bad habits and start over fresh January 1st with a new beginning. They share many of the same resolutions; some manage to… Read more

  • How Writing Heightened My Senses

    “When a regular person gets sick, they take an aspirin.  When a writer gets sick, they take notes…” This past July I found myself in the hospital – as a visitor, not a patient. It was the first time I’d been in a hospital in years. I was there early in the morning, and as… Read more

  • ‘Unpacking the Suitcase’ and The Pain of Knowing What You Don’t Know

    I want to start by wishing best of luck to all the writers out there crazy/brave enough to embark on the insanity that is NaNoWriMo. For the uninitiated, November is designated as National Novel Writing Month, and if you sign up for the challenge the goal is to write a complete draft of a novel… Read more

  • Lacking Focus: It’s Not That I Have ADD, It’s Just…Wait, Where Was I?

    Coming up in a few weeks I have a week’s vacation scheduled. A glorious nine day period (including weekends) of NOT WORKING. Taking my vacation during the fall started kind of at random, but has become a tradition five years strong. The week of Veteran’s Day I take the entire week off. Last year my wife… Read more

  • Oh My God, I’m 40

    “I’m 40 now…I’m half dead, basically. 40’s a weird age. You get to this point where, like, you’re not old enough for anybody to give a shit that you’re old. Nobody’s like, ‘I helped a 40 year-old guy today, and it felt really good to do something for him.’ Nobody spends their holidays delivering hot… Read more

  • The Curse (and blessing?) of Being an OverThinker

    I was watching a reality show last week where teams of three would go madly racing from one city to the next. One of the teams got in their truck to go to the next destination and the truck wouldn’t start. None of the three men on the team were very mechanical, so they started… Read more

  • What Pro Wrestling Taught Me About Character Development

    Starting when I was around 12, I loved Saturday nights. My parents would let me stay up late to watch my favorite show: Saturday Night Live. I don’t remember the exact year I got hooked, but it was during the Eddie Murphy/Joe Piscopo/Billy Crystal days. But some Saturday nights ended in disappointment. I would be… Read more