PicoBlog

Here’s a quick look at three things I think could decide the final series. The first leg is tonight at 10 p.m. ET and airs on TUDN in the U.S. The second leg is Sunday at 8:30 p.m. ET and also will be on TUDN. I hoped to go even longer on the series but was doing an in-person interview here in DFW for a newsletter I think you’ll really enjoy next week!

If you enjoy these exercises, you might like my self-paced Flash Fiction Intensive. Welcome to the seventeenth installment of “What to Write This Week.” One way to breathe life into your writing is to experiment with new forms. Of course, there are no new forms under the sun, so what I mean is: forms that are new to you. For fun and enlightenment this week, you'll be going outside of your comfort zone, writing in a form you've likely never used before.

“Only three people have ever really understood the Schleswig-Holstein business,” occasional British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston is reputed to have said. “The Prince Consort, who is dead; a German professor, who has gone mad; and I, who have forgotten all about it.” I do wonder sometimes whether there’s at least a little bit of self-aggrandisement going on in that quote. The Schleswig-Holstein question was messy and complicated, but hardly incomprehensibly so.

Jesus - the eternal Word (John 1:1-3) - came to earth and lived among us as one of us (John 1:14). Just like you and I have a “hometown” and have places where we “grew up” - so did Jesus. There were three towns that Jesus lived in. Here’s some of what we know about those places. Bethlehem means “House of Meat” in Arabic and “House of Bread” in Hebrew. Bethlehem had good pasture and farmland, so it lived up to its name.

Milton Nascimento wrote “Cancao do Sal/Salt Song” on a typewriter at a desk job, recalling the sight of workers toiling in unforgiving sun at the Cabo Frio salt flat near Rio. The workers were in the news at the time; a strike brought national attention to the low pay and grueling conditions faced by the men, women and children (!) employed there. The song was recorded in 1966 by Elis Regina, and became a hit.

1× 0:00 -14:19 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade.In college during the early 90s, an English Lit professor told me I should read The New York Times Book Review. Since digital media wasn’t upon us yet, I schlepped to a different town every Sunday to buy the Times because none of the convenience stores in my town sold it. I had never read a book review section before, so devouring literary criticism on the weekend sounded pretty good as a 20yo English major.

It’s been a big week for people who like space. On Thursday, the rover Perseverance landed on Mars where it will remain for one full Martian year—687 Earth days. The ultimate goal is that the rover will help scientists determine whether Mars has ever been a living planet and, at least where people like Elon Musk are concerned, whether humans could make Mars a home away from home. Of course if the movie The Martian taught us anything it’s that people living on another planet are going to need a way to feed themselves.

If you had the chance to send one piece of advice to your younger self from a decade back, what advice would that be?  I asked this question on Instagram recently.  Fifteen people responded to this and the results are listed at the end. I’ve never liked the premise of this thought exercise though: It creates a temporal paradox It annoys or disappoints the younger you What’s the point? When presented with this question, most people would choose to pass on a key nugget of wisdom - something that the current you knows that the younger you weren’t aware of.

Hello friends, Lately I’ve been transcribing my journals. There are 25 of them and they span from May 1, 1988, when I was 19 years old, to January 23, 2010—which happens to be the day I finished writing the first full draft of Wild—when I was 41. I decided to begin this transcription project several months ago when I sought out one of my journals to do a fact check for an essay I was writing, but after I found what I’d sought, I didn’t put the journal down.