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Since I didn't have any pressing projects in the studio at the moment, I did the old random drawing game that I do to warm-up once in a while. The subject I pulled out of the bowl was: cat. The media: (Yep! You guessed it) chalk pastel.

I don't know what it is - I don't do this very often, yet chalk pastel has been the randomly selected media most of the time. And, as you may already know, chalk pastel and I don't really "click."


Luckily, this encounter with chalk pastel was much more pleasant than the previous ones. Where those drawings will remaine forever buried on the drawing pad, I actually kind of like this one . I don't know what it is with blue, though (if you recall the sickly blue pig of a couple months back - shudder). I guess I'm drawn more to greens, blues, and purples more than I am to the pinks, oranges, and yellows.

I think the many hours spent with the colored pencil on the last project actually helped with this one - I think I learned a lot about color and being able to actually achieve some of the colors I'm after. I'm thrilled to have a better understanding in that area that I'm sure will carry over into other aspects of my work.

Who knows! Maybe now I'll feel a bit less threatened by chalk pastels. I'd love to try working on colored paper sometime soon.

“The rest of the band waits, they're letting the groove get in the pocket, hit bottom. It does; and now two drummers join in, they weave a polyrhythm that brings in one guitar and some pops from a banjo, oh this groove is young, but it's growing, and people are starting to move. Now a singer steps up to the mike, puts out some blues that two more singers turn to gospel, harmonies deep and wide that make you want to believe.” 

That's a blazing passage from Spaceman Blues by Brian Francis Slattery, a first-time novelist who took his experiences with music, immigrants, travel, and politics, boiling them in a hallucinatory stew. 

He's our special guest this week, talking about writing tips, day job survival, novel publishing, and musical language. 

Welcome to my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson's mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.

Jason Boog:
Your novel sings. There are remarkable musical sections sprinkled throughout, and your sentences sound stunning when I read them out loud. You play music in real life. How did you inject music into your prose, thematically and line-by-line? Any advice for fledgling writers looking to make their prose sound more musical, more rhythmic? What did you listen to while you wrote the book?

Brian Francis Slattery:
I'm so glad you hear the groove in my writing--it makes it more fun for me to write like that, and I hope it's more fun for readers to read it. Continue reading...