Skip to main content

Daily Routine



My routine is to write on the bus. I work in Seattle and live in Tacoma and so my writing salon is the Sound Transit bus, the 590. Both the north-bound (in the morning) and the south-bound (in the evening) is my literary capsule, driving through time and space while I am cocooned in my thoughts.

I often write about people I see on the bus. If any of my characters seem familiar, and you take the 590, I may be writing about you.

My inspiration often comes from seemingly inconsequential occurrences. As an example, seeing the rivulets of water tracing the glass on a rainy day, or overhearing a conversation between two people where one person says, in exasperation, “They can’t keep us in suspense like this!”

From these small happenings I spin great tales in my head, with ideas cascading off of one another and building momentum until I spill over with excitement about the images that I conjure up with my vivid imagination.

And then I get to my destination and I get off the bus and I am just like a regular normal person again.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Life Changing

It is hard to explain how I feel, now that I have found my calling. I remember when I was a little boy and my dad used to say how much he loved his work, how he was always excited about it, and how it didn’t feel like work to him. As I grew older I envied him, and anyone else who had that experience, because I didn’t share the sentiment for most of my adult life. Let me be clear, I never hated my job. I just didn’t feel like it was what I was supposed to be doing. I felt that there was something much more important that I should be doing with my life than working for someone else. And now, having finished my first book and being well on my way with writing my second, I am loving every moment of it. The most amazing thing about writing, for me, is that I can spin off on tangents and follow rabbit holes and when I am done, as long as I come back to somewhere near the surface where I started, no one knows that it wasn’t a perfectly orchestrated writing technique that I had plan...
Post a Comment
Read more

Missing Pieces

After I finished B. Coming Burl, I was fortunate to have many people read it who had grown up with me and knew for themselves, or who had grown old with me telling them my stories of a misguided youth. Several of them reminded me about stories that I either (1) had to edit out during revisions, or (2) had forgotten to include. So now I have decided to share a few of these missing pieces - teasers for those who haven’t read it, and a bonus for those who have. One story was from way back in the mists of my youth, when I was about four years old. We would make periodic pilgrimages to Nogales, Mexico as a family to buy essentials. I have fond memories of the small family-owned grocery store where my dad would buy café combate in small burlap bags, which the owner would grind for us in the back of the store, filling the space with the most amazing smell of fresh coffee. We would buy salsa from the factory and my brothers would buy fireworks to blow things up when we got home. Th...
Post a Comment
Read more