This analogy holds for proposals of many kinds.

You want to say, I have a cooked chicken, leftover rice, and soy sauce in the fridge, but I need a pot to make some fried rice, which by the way will taste so good you'll want to come over and have some -- 100 of my friends always do.

You don't want to say, I'm hungry, and I know how to cook, so give me some money for a trip to the store and I'll figure out a meal -- trust me.

Publicizing Um on Wordsmith.org's author chat - read the transcript.

The writer's life today (or, why I want to write for video games):

Instead of accepting the industry’s turmoil as a given, then, some young writers and editors are just shrugging their shoulders and giving up on it before it gives up on them.

Like horses.

One of the books I love the most is Toolbox by a Mexican poet, Fabio Morábito, which was translated from Cajas de herramientas by Geoff Hargreaves. This is the first paragraph of chapter about "oil":

Oil is water that has lost its get up and go, its cheeky forward drive. Having exhausted all its routes, it's discovered treading over ground it trod before. It is water that has turned its back on the world. It is de trop. It has forfeited its old rights of way across the floor and now has to step to one side of favor of fluids younger and grander. It is luxury water, which after so much flowing has felt the weight of experience, maybe bitter experience. it's as if it had other water at its service; hence its sumptuousness, not far from prostration, for where there is sumptuousness, there's always somebody on his knees, tied with bonds.

Last week I appeared with Ammon Shea at Real Art Ways in Hartford, Connecticut, reading and talking about books. (He talked about his, me mine. Maybe next time we can swap.) His is a word book: he spent a year reading the Oxford English Dictionary. But it's not a word book like a lexicographer would do, it's a delightful book about the experience of reading a book that's a list of words (and he's working on another book about reading books that we don't think of as books: phone books, catalogs, etc.).

Anyway, I had a blast, and here are two photos:

The second paragraph of my new essay, an homage to my time at the Dobie Paisano ranch, up at Design Observer:

Cutting cedars is a lot like writing, but it doesn't replace writing, and I've never gone out until I've done my daily. Standing, searching, bending, cutting, standing: it's repetitive work but has its art, too. You have to jam the clipper mouth around the tree stem below the dirt so the stump can't find the light and send up sprouts, but not so low that you grab a rock and chip the blade. Always in the back of your mind you have to know the line you're walking and working, more to guard yourself than for cedar-cutting efficiency, because the bigger trees would rather beckon you into the thick stands, where they grow fourteen, twenty feet high, and deep in their midst, where no sun ever reaches, the dry branches will first blind then skewer you, and there you'll wither and twist out of sight of the sky. Jerky gifts for coyotes.

And with that I'm also a contributing writer at Design Observer, where I've been happily writing sporadically for a few years. (An archive is here.)