Author: Alan Carl Nicoll

I am The Bleak Philosopher and a writer. I am also an ex-con and my site is monitored by the feds. Try my blog for thoughts on writing, book reviews, diary extracts, unprofessional philosophizing and neuroscience, whatever I can think of to make this blog interesting. Sometimes accused of having a dry wit.

“You Need an Angle”

This two-minute read from March, 2018, is worth bringing again to the attention of writers–a good lesson from Hemingway in the Paris years.

The End is Near

Desktop2In clearing the top of my desk this late evening (pay no attention to the remote controls), I found a stack of pages from the diary I wrote while in prison.  As is likely to happen while I’m straightening up, I started reading.  I found the following, from July 4, 2015:

10:35 AM, reading Hemingway, A Moveable Feast.  The first chapter impressed me.  Five pages of intense, lumpy description full of lovely touches where every word seems so well fitted into the whole, like each a piece in a mosaic, that I could rarely find one that I would change.  A quote (Scribner, New York, 1964-2001):

“All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of…

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Prison Diary: On Writing Fiction

Here are some notes on writing and “my method,” especially related to producing first drafts; from March of 2010.  This was written early in my prison career; I will post further material on writing from the Prison Diary (which continues for another six years) as I get it dictated into the computer; this particular material...

Novel Plans: Diary 3/19 to 3/25/21

A title occurs to me:  The Curse of Lolita, or perhaps Lolita’s Curse, though the latter seems misleading.  Or how about The Blessing of Lolita?  I am not taken with it.  Later thought:  The Lolita Curse; this is the best version.  I’ll live with it for a while and see.  I’m thinking satire, which is not what I had in mind.

Fynn Novel: Diary, 3/9 to 3/18/21

Highlander:  I’ll be as honest as I can given that I’ve only ever read your tweets.  You seem to me to be a liberal philosopher, slightly damaged, but feisty, a bit cantankerous, but we all get that way with age, and Impassioned about not only your beliefs but with ideas.  You like to share.