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I was thinking about sentences. I thought sentences were living things, with limbs. Living things, with branching limbs, pliant brains, beating hearts, wills. I invited a handsome sentence into my home, and despite my welcome, it sat there, glaring at me, suspicion written in its full-stop eyes. I made the sentence tea, I gave it sweet biscuits, I told it a wry pun, I clapped it on the back, I praised its relatives; all was in vain—it sat, silent and disapproving. So I moved on to a paragraph.

That’s me winging it a couple of days ago, a moment after reading This Will Change How You Think of Sentences Forever.

When something writes itself, as my above nonsense did, prompted by the brick-by-brick of sentence building, it’s like a flash from a striking bird’s wing going overhead. What was that? So much fun for a writer, being lofted on the wings of birds, and it doesn’t happen that often.

Other than being grabbed by the neck of sentences, I’ve started to test a layout of my whiskey memoir in Vellum, a much-praised book layout program. (At a much-painful cost of $250.) I’ve only begun, though it looks promising. They are quite tricky: they will let you lay out the whole book as a free trial, but you can’t export it to any publishing format without buying it. Clever as well as cruel, eh?

I will continue to send the manuscript to some selected agents and small publishers, but I know from experience writers can’t bank on that. (What can writers bank on? Erasers?)

Today I applied to be a volunteer for a literacy program at my local library, trying to resist in a small way how the current administration is a big supporter of book banning and literary expression. Jarring how much toss-the-Constitution-in-the-trash is possible in the first couple of weeks of a new administration—President Musk is a marvel.

But do manage to have some fun while the walls rattle…
Updated February 5, 2025

This Now page exists at the behest of that clever fellow, Derek Sivers, who provides instructions and encouragement for putting such a page on your site. Thanks Derek!