Taylor and Travis are getting married. Everyone is talking about this. Now I must, too.

Travis, of course, plays football, which immediately makes him of zero interest to me. Also, no character in a book, film, or song will ever be named Travis. Yuck. Imagine these famous lines with his name:

Obviously, I’m missing something. Also, my wife says I’m being a grump, or just stupid, for ignoring her. And my wife is not Swifty 3. So let’s move on to Taylor and writing, because people already have, as in this workshop, “Write Like a Popstar.”

Continuing the discussion I began in our last, very exciting post, I will quickly mention a few more writing books because I believe they can help you. Just don’t get bogged down in them and forget to write. You can be sure that Taylor and Travis read these books to each other on their date nights.

In my first post, back in 2016, I wrote about Jessica Page Morrell’s Thanks, But This Isn’t for Us: A (Sort Of) Compassionate Guide to Why Your Writing Is Being Rejected. I stand by these thoughts.

You can’t go wrong with Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, and I guess that proves I’m not a grump, O my wife, because I really resisted reading this thing. The overall tone is ornery; King wrote a chunk of it while he was in terrible pain from being run down by a van in the middle of the night. But the book came along at the right time for me. I felt as if Stephen King were giving me permission to write again following a lengthy silence.

Elizabeth Benedict’s The Joy of Writing Sex (good sex scenes should always be about sex and something else) is enlightening and fun to read. It was published in 1996, when Taylor was listening to Britney and Travis was playing T-ball, but sex is still sex.

I’m not going to tell you that Bruce Holland Rogers will always be helpful in Word Work: Surviving and Thriving as a Writer, but he’ll always be friendly and I found some real inspiration in these pages:

“Even if the overall odds are terrible, a story that you wrote in the glow of overconfidence has an infinitely greater chance of publication than the story you didn’t write while you were feeling more realistic.”

Rogers includes something I have never encountered in a writing book. He believes that writers can’t make it without willpower and discipline; no argument there. But he also believes that willpower and discipline wear out. “What helps more is to profoundly overestimate your chances for success,” he writes. “This isn’t just a matter of positive thinking. You’ll perform best if you actually change your state to something that’s close to hypomania.” Dear Readers: Would one of you (other than Taylor) please try that and tell me how it goes.

Lastly, I want to mention Jane Anne Straw and Unstuck: A Supportive and Practical Guide to Working Through Writer’s Block. It’s not a great book, but Straw is unflaggingly honest, and frankly, reading about how screwed up she is, and her writing clients, I felt better about how screwed up I am.

Straw says good things about your writing practice, writing as a process and a product, “positive interactions with the page,” and the importance of showing up for yourself. She also suggests that you take your book on vacation. Just as sales people follow the rule of ABC (always be closing), you should always be writing. The only complication with this advice is taking your book on vacation while you are also taking your partner on vacation. On a nine-day road trip through the Great Cities of the Pacific Northwest in July, I managed to write three days out of nine while successfully maintaining my marriage. A .333 batting average was probably the best I could have hoped for.

And that’s my writing advice for my favorite tortured poets, Taylor and Travis.

Word count: 68,217. Sometimes I leap forward and sometimes I’m learning to crawl. That’s Steve’s version.

Keeping cool in the dog days of summer.