I'm moving out on out (and hopefully up)!

Dear Friends,

I'm moving my blog over to Medium.com. It's the same great taste in a different place!

Check me out at https://medium.com/@NoelCCilker, and follow me to get my latest entries. I just posted one there about communicating with relatives after Hurricane Irma and comparing that to the 1906 earthquake.

Thanks for being such supportive subscribers!

Love,
Noel




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Letting others have their say but counting them for me

Image
A lot has happened since I posted a month ago. The biggest accomplishment is that I've hit about 25,000 words in my rough draft. That's in the vicinity of 25% completion, although with all the cutting and editing I'm going to have to do, it could be considered less. One thing I'm noticing is that I'm using a lot of quotes from primary and secondary sources. A LOT. This sometimes makes me feel a little guilty because I wonder if I should count them toward my daily goal of 1,000 words. After all, all it takes is some copying and pasting of a paragraphs-long firsthand account and suddenly I'm the most efficient writer in Berkeley! A thousand words by lunchtime! But is it a cop out to take someone else's words and add them to my count? For instance, here's a paragraph I wrote about the service in some early Chinese restaurants in San Francisco. Keep in mind this is a rough draft with no editing. "Gwai-lo" in the first line is a Cantonese word for...
Keep reading

Narrative History and Speculative Peep Shows

Image
I find, from time to time, that it's difficult to explain to people  exactly  what it is I write. "It's history," I say, "but it's not a textbook. It's going to read like a novel." "Oh, so you mean a historical fiction?" I'm asked. "No, it's all true, all nonfiction. It's more like a historical narrative, I guess." "Oh," is the usual response I get, usually accompanied with a quizzical expression of someone who doesn't get it but would rather talk about something else. I really don't know what to call the genre. The closest I've found is Narrative History which is taking history and telling it in story form. This genre allows for more speculation, more dramatic elements and, for the reader, a more exciting and engaging bit of history. The problem I face, though, is how much license can I take and still have it counted as a history book? Passages like this easily count as history...
Keep reading

Protesting With the Pen, Part I

Image
Previously I wrote how President Trump's travel ban was not a new idea to American history. Over a century earlier, President Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act in response to fears that the Chinese were gobbling up jobs and leaving red-blooded Americans out of work. But even before that, in the thick of the gold rush, California Governor John Bigler announced that he wanted to "check this tide of Asiatic immigration." What's fascinating is what happens when people respond to restrictive actions by those in power. Usually the most vocal are either VERY supportive or VERY opposed, and often sink into the mud with insults or disrespect for the other side. There are people, however, who rise above the rancor. Many times they are the people who are the most targeted, and rather than lose themselves in a sea of angry voices, they call on thought and reason to register their protest. These are often in the form of open letters which sometimes become seminal d...
Keep reading