Saturday, December 29, 2012

David Foster Wallace Wannabee Submits A Story

I used to post longer pieces. This link's to a post from a couple years back about Stewart Brand's answer to climate change, Whole Earth Discipline.

For the last few months, I've concentrated on writing profiles of systems thinkers -- Faces of Wisdom --  for Duluth's Zenith City (semi) Weekly. Here's my profile of gardener and soil builder John Jeavons

I finished my newest profile, on 350.org founder Bill McKibben, today. I tried to write it yesterday, but wound up at 1200 words. I'm usually published at 800 words, but my editor, Jen, likes me to write long. She says, "I can cut, but I can't add." Still a third is a lot to cut gracefully, so I wrote a second version, 900 words long.

(Ironically, I proposed a series like the old Ripley's Believe It or Not, with fewer than a hundred words.)

David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster (start with the fourth one down) is a collection of published essays, as submitted. It's interesting to see what wound up on the floor.

Maybe someday.

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