"A little company during the workday. I used to think that I was the only one hunched over a keyboard in soiled pajamas, rummaging through the catalogue of my failures and intermittently weeping. Now, I open Twitter and see that I am not alone. I am part of a vast and wretched assembly of freaks who are not fit for decent work and thus must write, or wither. I am fortified by their failures, and I hope they take succor from mine. Some of those out there are established, some are just starting out. I don't give a whit about your accomplishments—all I care about is your facility for describing the fine grain of your work-related suffering, in less than 140 characters, preferably 100, so I have room to add a footnote."

-Colson Whitehead in Publishers Weekly on willpower, the Internet, and writing

A special invitation

I am the Questionmaster so if you need me I will be biting my fingernails in the corner. Dare I hope for a special appearance?

Here's a live link to the chat.

Nudge, nudge

I'm over at the A.V. Club this week talking about THE INTUITIONIST.

I've been trying to turn it into a verb ever since

Highlights of last night's Rumpus event at the Highline Ballroom:

• Michael Showalter has a book coming out! It's called MR. FUNNY PANTS and the excerpt he read consisted of absurdist word games.
• After Showalter biffed the URL of the site, which was not that funny, Sam Lipsyte did a callback to it before he read, which was.
• This is the second time in four months I have seen Lipsyte and Colson Whitehead on the same bill. Are they in cahoots?? Nah, it was probably just a coincidence. (Whitehead was really funny, but funnier last time.)
• Speaking of Lipsyte, The Rumpus held a short fiction contest where contestants had to use one line from his novel THE ASK. Four winners read, but one was clearly better than all the others, and that was Maureen Miller with her unforgettable riff on punctuation. Miller also performs an important public service in running a site for parsing rap lyrics ETA and has some other funny stuff you can read here.
  

Fun times. My friend A and I were so close to the action that the women we were sharing a table with turned out to be connected to the Rumpus founder and he came and sat with us during some sets. Were you there? Who was your favorite performer?

Colson Whitehead on "...J. Alfred Prufrock"

From the reading I went to last week:



The event was called "Love: A Rebuke," so the emcee for the night insisted before every reading that we offer unironic love to each author up, as if it wouldn't have occurred to us otherwise. I especially liked Heidi Julavits' excerpt as well.

Calling dibs on "The Cubby"

Everything about Colson Whitehead's essay "What To Write Next" is awesome, but this description of the fabulist novel jumped out:

This is the perfect genre for writers who may be tempted to throw out manuscript pages when they get stuck — with magic realism, you can just conjure up a flaming tornado and whisk troublesome characters away. “Where’s Jasper?” “Remember that legend I mentioned 25 pages ago, about the Flaming Tornado of Red Creek?”

Elizabeth, I think he stole your meterorite test and turned it into a viable plot option. How does that make you feel?

Anyway, if you like this essay and haven't read HOW I BECAME A FAMOUS NOVELIST yet, try it, you'll like it.