Sara Ryan

Trying to psych myself up and not out. Same coffeeshop, same mix CD. We’ll see how it goes.
P. S. If you’ve been reading me for a while, it will probably not surprise you that I very strongly recommend the latest in the 33 1/3 series, John Darnielle’s Black Sabbath Master of Reality, whether or not [...]

1. Can’t stop listening to Busdriver.

Anyone have some “if you like Busdriver, you’ll like…” suggestions?
2. Love this post from Jonathan Carroll that begins: “Part of creating is letting go.” I needed to hear that. You, too?
3. A chicken with a skull necklace:
4. Been thinking a lot about this quote from Mark Haddon, whose A [...]

The room is pretty much packed. They’ve just asked anyone who’s next to an empty seat to raise our hands, so I do, and smile invitingly at a guy who’s still standing, wearing a white oxford with a blood-spatter pattern over a Wire t-shirt. Then I realize, duh, that’s Richard Price.
He’s pleased by the size [...]

I’ve just spent the last half hour or so entering my recently inherited Pogo collection into LibraryThing. When Dad first started collecting Pogo, he wrote his name in the books. Sometimes, underneath, he’d write the city he was living in. Every time I pulled a book off the shelf to enter its title, I looked [...]

I learned two new words: bershon, circuitously via YPulse (by which I mean that YPulse linked to something and that linked to something else and somehow I ended up clicking on this, and rickroll, via Jessamyn. I do not anticipate engaging in rickrolling, but I expect I’ll dig up a bershon photo or several one [...]

Describing the moment when a story first began to take shape:
“…then ensued in my mind what a student of chemistry would best understand from the addition of the tiniest little drop of the right kind, precipitating the process of crystallization in a test tube containing some colorless solution. It was at first for me a [...]

Handy Tip, courtesy of Shannon Hale and Libba Bray: If you’re in a restaurant and you are in a hurry because you have a signing to get to, use the ketchup bottle as a microphone and begin singing an improvised version of “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” with lyrics such as  “And I need to OR-DER [...]

1. We are hosting a cool cartoonist for the next few months. Since she’s been staying with us, we have cooked at home more than we have in an embarrassingly long time. Yay for the good influence of houseguests!
2. SF! I think I’m going to WonderCon. I don’t have the tickets yet but I think [...]

The sensationalistic title of Sudhir Venkatesh’s book, Gang Leader For A Day, is the only thing about it I dislike. In 1989, ponytailed and fresh from following the Dead, Venkatesh started out as a grad student at the University of Chicago. He wanted to study the impact of poverty, specifically on young black men growing [...]

I’ve been reading Nicola Griffith’s enticingly packaged and very enjoyable memoir, And Now We Are Going To Have A Party: Liner Notes on A Writer’s Early Life.
It’s making me think a lot about, among other things, how to optimize your life for writing. Not just in the obvious ways, like, you know, making time to [...]