Go by train

Sunday, April 14, 2019

One of my favorite things so far on this tour has been taking Amtrak trains. I took one from Philly to NYC, Portland to Seattle, and yesterday I took The Coast Starlight from Seattle to San Francisco.

I had a nice little sleeper car, but I spent most of my time between the diner car (free meals with a sleeper — I ate very well) and the observation deck, which was surprisingly uncrowded.

The train is just a whole different vibe than flying. On planes people are sort of territorial and paranoid and a little aloof. On the train, everyone’s a little more chill. I felt incredibly relaxed after a day of riding.

The clouds parted a bit for some blue skies on my way up to Seattle.

Here are some photos of Oregon out the window…

Most surprising was getting up in the mountains south of Eugene and seeing all the snow and the trees which seem to be a mile high. After a big dinner in the dining car, I went to sleep and woke up to a sunrise in Sacramento:

And the last little bit around the Bay Area was especially pleasant in the morning light:

I highly recommend it at least once. If you’ve got the time, take the train.

You’re next

Saturday, April 13, 2019

Seen on tour in Portland, Oregon: a particularly bitchin’ memento mori.

Shut up and listen

Friday, April 12, 2019

Some interviewing wisdom from Robert Caro’s piece on researching his LBJ biographies, excerpted from his book, Working:

In interviews, silence is the weapon, silence and people’s need to fill it—as long as the person isn’t you, the interviewer. Two of fiction’s greatest interviewers—Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret and John le Carré’s George Smiley—have little devices they use to keep themselves from talking and to let silence do its work. Maigret cleans his ever-present pipe, tapping it gently on his desk and then scraping it out until the witness breaks down and talks. Smiley takes off his eyeglasses and polishes them with the thick end of his necktie. As for me, I have less class. When I’m waiting for the person I’m interviewing to break a silence by giving me a piece of information I want, I write “SU” (for Shut Up!) in my notebook. If anyone were ever to look through my notebooks, he would find a lot of “SU”s.

Filed under: silence

Airplane mode

Thursday, April 11, 2019

One thing I didn’t even consider when writing Keep Going is that people would read the “Airplane Mode can be a Way of Life” chapter on an actual airplane!

I’m flying almost every day on tour this week, so I’ve been in airplane mode a lot. (Writing this from the Burbank Airport, however — never pay for wi-fi!)

How writer Kio Stark keeps going

Wednesday, April 10, 2019

My friend Kio Stark, author of the books Don’t Go Back To School and When Strangers Meet, sent me a message yesterday and I asked her if I could share it here. (Maybe we’ll make this a regular thing? We’ll see.) Here’s what she said:

I just wrote a new strangers newsletter, and not having sent one in 6 months, I realized that writing it is one of my best “keep going” strategies. It’s small and doable, and reminds me that I am good at writing. Because it’s about documenting interactions with strangers, it also pushes me to pay more attention when I’m out in public with other humans.

It started as a blog in 2009 — they were very short back then — as a way to keep in touch with my writing self while I had a day job. I used to write them on my lunch hour. They were maybe 100-150 words tops. The newsletter ones now are longer because I don’t have a day job anymore…

Kio told me that a lot of those short pieces on her blog eventually made it into her novel, Follow Me Down. (A very Show Your Work! type of case study.)

You can watch her TED talk and subscribe to her newsletter here.