Sunday, August 17, 2014

RyanBigge.com is the new BiggeWorld

Hey everyone. I totally screwed up and failed to renew biggeworld.com. So after 14 years, it is dead. Or, to be more accurate, it has been replaced:

I could point out that I didn't receive a renewal notice from Dotster, but this isn't the time to quibble. The old site was pretty terrible and this is the nudge I was waiting for. In the next few weeks I'm going to work on RyanBigge.com

Look for more SEO inspired blog posts in the next few weeks.

Tuesday, August 12, 2014

I'm on the radio as part of Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids

Do you have a radio? Want to hear me embarrass myself? Then tomorrow is your lucky day. On Wednesday August 13 at 9:30am eastern time listen to CBC radio. I’ll be reading from my grade 5 diary as part of Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids (GRTTWaK)


Here’s a teaser:

April 18
Today I got seven wrong on a decimals exercise sheet. I got some speeches from mom.

There’s also a podcast version of GRTTWaK. Not sure when the animated series is set to debut.


Saturday, August 09, 2014

Speculation Fiction

Last weekend I read the Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill in three or four sittings. A good book. A difficult book. Those two qualities aren't mutually exclusive:

For years, I kept a Post-it note above my desk. WORK NOT LOVE! was what it said. It seemed a sturdier kind of happiness.
***
We had told people. We had to untell them.
***
If he notices something is broken, he will try to fix it. He won't just think about how unbearable it is that things keep breaking, that you can never fucking outrun entropy.
***
He is ten years younger than we are, alert to any sign of compromise or dead-ending within us. "You are not allowed to compare your imagined accomplishments to our actual ones," someone says after the boy who is pure of heart leaves.
***
Some women make it look so easy, the way they cast ambition off like an expensive coat that no longer fits.
***
But my agent has a theory. She says every marriage is jerry-rigged. Even the ones that look reasonable from the outside are held together inside with chewing gum and wire and string.
***
There is nowhere to cry in this city.
***
These are the sorts of things they talk about in the Little Theatre of Hurt Feelings.
***
People keep flirting with the wife. Has this been happening all along and she never noticed? Or is it new? She's like a taxi whose light just went on. All these men standing in the street, waving her over.
***
She would not have let one of her students write the scene this way. Not with the pouring rain and the wife's broken umbrella and the girl in her long black coat.
***
Even if the husband leaves her in this awful craven way, she will still have to count it as a miracle, all of those happy years she spent with him.
***
The wife has a little room now, one that looks out over the garden. She makes a note to herself about the book she is writing. Too many crying scenes.