Today is Jack Kerouac's birthday. Tomorrow is mine. Well whaddaya know about that? Jack was something of a gateway drug for me. Through Jack I graduated to more exotic literary thrills. Much more like him in my youth than now, I would have to say the biggest of the many, many, many differences between he…
Craft Note: A Dictum for Sheer Fiction
One dictum I coined to keep my writing on track is this: Do things in prose the Hollywood machine cannot reproduce. For me, this means exploring characters, and even objects and other phenomena, from the inside out. It's writing that trades the forward momentum of plot for the deep dive into character or situation. It's…
Roadrunner Thrice: Jack Kerouac Meets The Velvet Underground On 128 When It’s Cold Outside
There are a number of recorded versions of "Roadrunner" by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, but this extended live version released as a single on Berserkly is the one that really does it for me. Richman takes the listener on a long ride around the highways of Massachusetts "late at night when it's cold…
Ed Desautels' Maximum Fiction 