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Six months ago I sat in the front row of a long, narrow room in La Silla Electrica Comedy Club in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and thought to myself, I would do anything to perform here. I spent the next six months writing and performing in bars, clubs and restaurants around the city. It was a…

The joke was about socks and nobody laughed. Let me explain. There are lots of subway vendors in Argentina. These vendors sell all sorts of things — stationery, bread, pens — but most often, I’ve noticed, they sell socks. Black socks, white socks, pink socks, polka-dot socks, Messi socks. The next time you’re in Argentina…

This story is wandering along. It seems to be narrowing in on the relationship between two friends, as well as one family, that live in a futuristic, post-climate crisis city. It’s not quite like anything I’ve written before. The plot feels secondary to the main character’s relationships with the people around him. It’s fun to explore…

I’ve started drafting on yellow legal pads. It’s been a good change. When I’m working on a new story, I have the bad habit of revising too soon, touching up sentences until they feel just right, and writing perfect paragraphs only to delete them a week later. It’s easy to do that when I’m typing,…

The thing they don’t tell you about revising a novel is that it totally sucks. I think it will be fun to really polish this piece — to make the sentences nice and neat, to come up with more descriptive phrases and evocative imagery, to make the humor sharper — but this current stage of…

A little over a week ago I finished a first draft, which is to say that I wrote an ending to the novel and then went back to the very first page to start revising. But the term “first draft” feels too conclusive. There are entire chapters that are missing and entire chapters that need…

Writing Time: 4h My many devoted fans have spent the last month clamoring for an update. Where’s Ben? What happened to him? Has he hung up the pen for good, defeated by the cruel and unforgiving publishing industry? These are the kinds of subject lines that I read every morning, only to delete them in…

March 28 Writing Time: 5h Three hours in the morning, two hours directly after lunch. It was nice to finish all of my writing in one burst, but left me pretty exhausted afterwards. March 29 Writing Time: 2h I wasn’t feeling well today, but I managed to sit down for two hours at Wild Goose…

Writing Time: 4h I’m a little disappointed with my writing time today — I had rehearsal and a stand-up meeting and the afternoon hours I had hoped to spend writing just disappeared. Still, I got three hours done in the morning and another hour done in the evening. I learned that a walk around the…