10th September
2009

She’s six years old and has three failed adoptions and suffered a number of smaller atrocities, but now she’s sprinting up the beach against the wind, clutching the pink leash of a borrowed Labrador, the wind swallowing the frantic shouts of her foster mother and the dog’s owner.
She strains cold air through her teeth, not [...]

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23rd July
2009

Any reader who is also a writer understands that questions will rattle in your head as you wend your way through a work of fiction. Unlike regular readers, you can’t simply be subsumed by story, sinking into the world that the author has labored to create. Like a retired engineer you have to kick the [...]

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12th July
2009

I’ve been so absorbed with our short film project that all my free time has been taken up by production meetings, script revisions, scene breakdowns and fund raising. Fiction is squarely on hiatus for the moment, though I’m still sending out the odd novel query.
Novels are like a marathon. Here’s my process: wake up obscenely [...]

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7th May
2009

Don’t call me kiddo. I REALLY hate it. People been calling me that way too long. Fever and Ma and Uncle Spade all call me kiddo, and it makes me crazy. See how I ain’t smiling? People who know me, know that means trouble.
So begins the new novel by J. Adams Oaks, Why I Fight, [...]

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12th April
2009

That’s a question about creativity raised by the film “Starting Out in the Evening.” It follows an aging and mostly forgotten literary novelist who is forced from his routine when a young graduate student enters his life, ostensibly to research her thesis. It is a wooden and stilted film with some (mostly) unintentional awkward moments, [...]

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4th April
2009

Any story needs a sense of place. This is what keeps a narrative from happening inside of a void. A sense of place is different from setting. Setting is merely a point on the globe. A backdrop. A sense of place has sights, sounds, smell, dirt that feels a certain way when crumbled in your [...]

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