<p>Today&#8217;s blogpost will be a little different. I&#8217;m still catching up after a week-long cold, which in some ways was a welcome break: it was hard to worry about things like work and publication when I pretty much just wanted to read and sleep all day. A lot of reading got done, especially several books &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2019/04/16/very-small-post/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Very Small Post</sp

<p>A slightly later blogpost this week… I’ve been down with a cold for a few days, and my brain has been pretty scrambled. Working on getting back into gear. This week I thought I would explore the “ministry” aspect of writing again; it’s something I’m thinking about a lot. One of the fascinating, and challenging, &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2019/04/10/music-words-and-community/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Music, Wo

<p>It’s been another quiet week on the querying-and-waiting front. Part of me understands that this process simply takes a while; another part of me protests things like I didn’t think it would be this long! Waiting can be exhausting: riding the daily rollercoaster of bracing yourself for the worst, relaxing for a while, trying to &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2019/04/02/good-and-not-so-good/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-tex

<p>Today’s blogpost may be more in the nature of a vent (oh dear!), but I’ll try to keep it concise… If you’ve followed the blog over the past couple of months, you know that my second novel, Fourteen Stones, is currently on submission with agents. A few agents have been checking out the full manuscript. &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2019/03/26/work-that-matters/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Work that Matters</span></a

<p>Lately I’ve been thinking – and posting – a lot about forgiving mistakes, recognizing when I don’t know how to do things, and accepting my imperfections. All of these are important and challenging things for me to contend with, because of that “need to be perfect” and “need to know” I’ve written about before. This &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2019/03/19/success/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Success?</span></a></p>

<p>Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about mistakes, learning, and growth. More on that shortly… Today I had reason to look over the different kinds of work and jobs I did last year. Often, when I look at things like my jobs and income, it turns into an exercise in embarrassment and self-criticism. Seriously, what’s &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2019/03/12/reaching-for-the-new/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Reaching For

<p>I’ve always been the kind of person who needs to know how things are going to go. When I drive anywhere, no matter how familiar or innocuous the route might be, I always visualize myself getting to my destination and then getting home again. When I get ready for any kind of event, a class &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2019/03/05/need-to-know/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Need to Know?</span></a></p>

<p>There’s a wonderful passage in the novel Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett. My copy of the book is buried in a stack somewhere, so I can&#8217;t pull up an exact quote, but the passage goes something like this: Two deities are talking about their respective groups of followers. One of them, a “small god,” has &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2019/02/26/one-equals-fifty-one/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">One Equals Fifty-On

<p>Ministry. What does that word mean? What, especially, does it mean for a writer? Lately, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. As a writer, and a teacher of creative writing, and a musician more than sometimes, what’s the main direction for all of my work? What am I doing in the world? What is &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2019/02/19/ministry/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Ministry</span></a></p>

<p>Riffing off of last week’s “Conversation with the Zhinin”… You’ve been hanging out with your characters again lately. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, because you’ve finished writing the book they feature in. (At least, you’ve finished it as far as any project is “finished” until publication, when it’s too late to find &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2019/02/12/experiments-in-dream-space/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-t

<p>You go for a walk, alone. Maybe it’s the kind of gray-sky winter day with a breeze that makes you walk faster: a good day to eat up the miles. Maybe it’s the kind of early-spring day when you can feel the season turning, but it hasn’t quite happened yet. Or maybe it’s summer, in &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2019/02/05/conversation-with-the-zhinin/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Conversation with the&nbsp;Zhinin</span

<p>Thinking about challenging times, here on the blog. Last week I wrote about the struggle many artists face as they try to keep doing their work after, maybe, learning when they were young that they were wrong to be “that kind of person.” A lot of us did absorb that message: if we were writers, &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2019/01/29/doing-the-work/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Doing the Work</span></a></p>

<p>The blog reawakens after a long sleep… Hoping this is a return to some regular posts. Today’s post falls under the header of Random Thoughts and Reflections for 2019. If you’re like me, an artist who needs some encouragement in going about your work, I hope this helps. As artists and creative people, some of &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2019/01/22/being-loved-because/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Being Loved &#8220

<p>Welcome back to the blog! This week&#8217;s post is a little different. I love featuring the work of my literary-fiction colleagues, and look forward to going back to that for our next post, but this week we&#8217;re taking a step into comic fantasy. &nbsp; Along with Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Christopher Moore is one &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2018/02/09/zen-for-ten-36-beethoven-and-lamb/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-

<p>Welcome back to the blog! I promise I&#8217;m working on a more regular post schedule; life has been happening lately with unusual speed. But I&#8217;m glad to be back, and I&#8217;m delighted that today&#8217;s post features the work of my friend Meredith Doench, novelist and writer of short fiction. Meredith and I met several years &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2018/01/28/zen-for-ten-35-tuesday-after-lunch/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span clas

<p>Hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday season! Here&#8217;s some new listening to help usher in the New Year. For today&#8217;s post, I&#8217;m delighted to welcome my friend and colleague Susan Ingram. Susan is a fellow Baltimore writer; she and I studied together in the Johns Hopkins MA program in fiction, and she is a &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2017/12/29/zen-for-ten-34-the-coaster/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader

<p>After a longer-than-expected hiatus, Storytelling and Sound is back! Today&#8217;s guest is my friend and colleague Tom Andes, with whom I was in workshop twice at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshops. Tom is an outstanding writer and workshop mate, and I&#8217;m delighted to feature his work today. Tom&#8217;s writing blends crime fiction with a rich, descriptive &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2017/12/12/zen-for-ten-33-the-hit/" class="more-link">Continue

<p>Today&#8217;s guest on the Storytelling and Sound series is award-winning, internationally published poet, fiction writer, and essayist Susan Tepper. I&#8217;m delighted to have the chance to feature six of Susan&#8217;s beautiful prose poems in today&#8217;s post. When I read these pieces, I fell in love with them immediately. The lyrical, rhythmic language, the evocative imagery, &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2017/11/09/zen-for-ten-32-dear-petrov/" clas

<p>Today’s guest on the Storytelling and Sound series is Taylor Larsen. Taylor&#8217;s debut novel Stranger, Father, Beloved was released July 2016 by Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon and Schuster. It was chosen as one of Huffington Post&#8216;s Hottest Reads of the Summer for 2017, one of the New York Post&#8216;s Summer Must Reads, and one of Ploughshares&#8216;s Best &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2017/10/26/zen-for-ten-31-stranger-father-beloved/" class

<p>Today&#8217;s guest on the Storytelling and Sound series is Craig Terlson, whose novel Fall In One Day was released May 2017 by my own publisher, Blue Moon Publishers, and has received a terrific reception. In this week&#8217;s video, I&#8217;m reading a short excerpt from the novel and have paired it with J. S. Bach&#8217;s Sinfonia &hellip; </p> <p><a href="https://krisfaatz.com/2017/10/12/zen-for-ten-30-fall-in-one-day/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="s