#writing

Test writing from Quill

How to Self-Promote Your Novel

Had fun doing the last video so figured I'd do another.

How to Write a Novel on a Manual Typewriter

Transcribing a novel with my manual typewriter is most of what I've been doing with my free time. Today I had the day off for Juneteenth and no kids so thought "if I'm doing something cool and I don't make a video and share it, did it even really happen? Et voila."

Something I've appreciated about writing out a book long hand is that I can put a bracket around each section I write at a time, and put a date to it and sometimes a note; "Written in the lobby of a Charleston Hotel", or "On a free weekend while the boys are visiting their grandparents".

Transcribing it this morning I hit a striking bit. One section I noted was written at my then-girlfriend's apartment while she worked from home. The block ends abruptly because she finished work and we were free to go out for the evening. I wasn't always very disciplined or diligent with the writing because the next block is two months later and notated that the relationship had ended.

Of course anything you read that gives the illusion of a single cohesive telling was in reality punctuated by thousands of bits of life, but it's striking to be able to see it spelled out. To know that on a girl's dining room table I wrote "from where I lie" and then I closed my notebook and clicked my pen, not to reopen the notebook or click the pen again until two months later when I'd sigh and scribble down "I heard the shuffle".

And now, alone in my apartment on a holiday I type them out continuously as a single sentence.

I don't have any real justification for it, but when I was about to start on my latest novel in February of 2025 I decided I was going to write it out longhand, which I'd never done before.

Maybe part of it is that I spend all day in front of a computer for work and didn't want writing to be more of the same. And maybe the speed and ease of typing makes me more inclined to fill space with things that aren't necessary. But ultimately I probably just thought it would be neat to have a whole book written out by hand.

Well, 15 months later, I finished writing it out. It shouldn't have taken that long but there were long gaps where I let the notebook gather dust for months at a time. It was only after my break-up when I stopped going out or talking to people that I started putting every free minute into it and got across the finish line.

Phase two now, which is equally fanciful and hard-to-justify, is transcribing it with my manual typewriter. I'm not doing any meaningful revisions as I do this. It's just kind of fun and produces what I think is a pretty cool-looking manuscript. I guess it does force a pretty close reading to remind myself of anything I may have forgotten about.

Hunter S. Thompson supposedly typed out The Great Gatsby once just to absorb the style. Don't know how that relates to my situation but it does pop into my head.

I need to update this antiquated site to make it easier to share TikTok / Instagram / YouTube videos, but who has the time?

As a kid, I used to be much more interested in publicizing myself than creating any work worth publicizing (eg. in high school, my friend and I decided to make an independent film, and our first order of business was making film-branded t-shirts).

Getting older and looking back on it, I felt so embarrassed, I swung the other way and worked on things and never told anyone about them.

But now, I'm trying to land somewhere in the middle, and in the midst of a constantly shifting publishing-ecosystem, I figure its worth taking advantage of the egalitarian entry point of social media, so I've (cynically) started a series of mini-videos snarkily reviewing the first lines of novels.

Hopefully I can build up some kernel of literate followers that might make it easier to pitch myself to publishers.

You can check out the first entry in the series (Reviewing the opening lines of novels) at:

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@pgmccullough/video/7536000328789921054

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DNEuSITRAp6/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/00ZtWDz94j8

Would appreciate any TikTok followers...

View from the inevitable Hampton Inn in Monticello. Fun contrast to an Instagram post a couple of weeks ago at the Four Seasons in Casablanca as though that were real life.

I've wanted to write about the past couple of months. Fasting through a Lent that encompassed my fortieth birthday and the thirtieth anniversary of my dad's death and concluded with falling in love and finding myself alone again in the cave Mary Magdalene lived in somewhere outside Marseilles. But you flip through Netflix and feel so overwhelmed with the sheer volume of stories; of what value is ones own? I think Ayn Rand had a quote that was something like "Just because it happened to you does not make it interesting."

On the flight back from Morocco I sat next to a girl who journals then throws them away. I always felt like those were the real writers. It might represent a larger flaw of mine, that if no one reads it and loves it, it (and by extension I) has no worth.

Petition for phones to not autocorrect "its" to "it's". Half the time my phone gets it wrong and it's error is mortifying.

I was tempted to frame some grandiose post around this, but then the day went by and meh... Some time last summer after weeks of just sort of idly goofing off at the gym, I finally thought I'd give myself a concrete goal; a mile in 10 minutes on the treadmill. It was miserable but I managed and realized it was not difficult physically, the constraints were entirely mental.

I aspired to be able to run a 5k (5 kilometers = 3.107 ​miles). Knew I could, but it always seemed difficult to imagine. Doing 1.25 miles was hard. So was 1.5. so was 1.75. And 2. I fought to hit each one and then, having proved I was capable of it, never let myself do less.

Funny enough, after 2, none of the other increases were that hard.

Anyway. It's a tiny accomplishment that probably puts me into the elite company of the majority of all healthy adults. But I worked every day at it for months, no one knowing or ​watching. No one holding me to it or caring if I abandoned it.

I think most of the most meaningful things we do in a life are like that. I've been working on a novel even longer and in much the same way.

No real conclusion.

RIP to this trusty little Sierra Slip-On Incense Cedar pen I picked up over the summer at East Village Postal and have had on my person every day since. The top finally stripped the barrel. Was very fond of it.