OddsnSods09

4 Oct. With one exception, any publication opportunity . . . is worth seizing; ever-widening ripples move out from even the smallest splash. Something more like a self-contained plop is all you’re likely to get, however, if you resort to a vanity press. Vanity publishing is not the same as either subsidy publishing or self-publishing, though the terms are often used as if they were synonymous. Subsidy publishing is best defined by its guaranteed audience; self-publishing is partly defined by its realistic efforts to find an appropriate audience; vanity publishing frequently involves no audience at all. ~Judith Appelbaum, www.advicetowriters.com

4 Oct. I have made three rules of writing for myself that are absolutes: Never take advice. Never show or discuss a work in progress. Never answer a critic. ~Raymond Chandler

3 Oct. Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself. ~Truman Capote

3 Oct. Don’t trust a brilliant idea unless it survives the hangover. ~Jimmy Breslin

2 Oct. Do not pay any attention to the rules other people make…. They make them for their own protection, and to Hell with them. ~William Saroyan

2 Oct. Over the years, I’ve found one . . . simple rule. If you tell yourself you are going to be at your desk tomorrow, you are by that declaration asking your unconscious to prepare the material. You are, in effect, contracting to pick up such valuables at a given time. Count on me, you are saying to a few forces below: I will be there to write. ~Norman Mailer

30 August: I can’t remember how many times I advised students to stop writing the sunny hours and write from where it hurts: No one wants to read polite. It puts them to sleep. ~Anne Bernays

30 August: Who will teach me to write? a reader wanted to know. The page, the page, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly, affirming time’s scrawl as a right and your daring as necessity; the page, which you cover woodenly, ruining it, but asserting your freedom and power to act, acknowledging that you ruin everything you touch but touching it nevertheless, because acting is better than being here in mere opacity; the page, which you cover slowly with the crabbed thread of your gut; the page in the purity of its possibilities; the page of your death, against which you pit such flawed excellences as you can muster with all your life’s strength: that page will teach you to write. ~Annie Dillard

29 August: This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, argue, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek. To seek: to embrace the questions, be wary of answers.  ~Terry Tempest Williams

25 August: The private eyes of classic American noir dwell in a moral shadow land somewhere between order and anarchy, principle and pragmatism. They’re too unruly to be cops and too decent to be crooks, leaving them no natural allies on either side but attracting enemies from both. Their loneliness resembles that of cowboys, those other mournful individualists who pay for their liberty with obscurity, and it makes them at least as intriguing as their cases, which usually start as tales of greed and lust but tend to evolve into dramas of corruption that implicate lofty, respected institutions and indict society itself. What allows the detectives to penetrate these schemes is not their intelligence, chiefly, but their autonomy. Private eyes are skeptics and outsiders, their isolation the secret of their vision. ~Walter Kirn, reviewing Thomas Pynchon’s novel, Inherent Vice. NY Times, Aug. 20, 2009.

25 August: 1) My biggest fear all the time is to lose the real inspiration. If you sit and think carefully and systematically about something, your fear is that such thinking will cancel out the real emotion.  2) Like rough traveling, I think the learning’s best done alone. ~Graham Swift, who taught himself to write fiction.

25 August: The difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money always costs a lot less. –Oscar Wilde

8 August: Narrative nonfiction is nonfiction that illuminates through story (memoir, history, true crime, etc.) ~Nathan Bransford

4 August: . . . everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. ~ Sylvia Plath

31 July. The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium. ~Norbet Platt

7 July: The perils of wrestling with a pig:  You get dirty; the pig likes it. 

6 July: The tears happen. Endure, grieve, and move on. The only person who is with us our entire life is ourselves. Be alive while you are alive.  Thanks Jon.

5 July: He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it. — Douglas Adams.

5 July: What folly made young people . . . think they were immortal? How much better . . . if they could remember the end. Carrying your death with you every day would make it hard to waste time on unkindness and anger and bitterness, on anything petty. That was the secret: remembering your dying time, in order to keep the stupid and the ugly out of your living time. . . . Curious . . . how, if you knew a person long enough, he could elicit every kind of emotion from you, every possible reaction, envy, admiration, pity, irritation, fury, fondness, jealousy, love , disgust. But in the end all human beings became candidates for compassion, all of us, without exception . . . and if we could recognize this from the beginning, what a saving in pain and grief and misery. . . . ~Rohinton Mistry: Family Matters (shortlisted for the Booker in 2002).

4 July: It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.  ~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up.

6 June: Another tree. Another massive river red, but this one crashed to the ground long ago. Its form now a grey column downed and lying with dignity like an ancient temple pillar. But from the skeleton roots, creeping along its side like silver dough, the base of a new tree shooting upward and green.

People pay big bucks to read expensive self help books or attend pricey seminars with certified enlightened folk to get this kind of message.  The mountains chuckle and drop a rock or two.  ~Jane Leonard, Northern Territory author, in her article, The Secret of Happiness.

30 May: The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.  ~Joan Didion, US author.

1 May: Maxine-isms sent by Jon:

  • Don’t believe everything you think.
  • You’re not yourself today…I noticed the improvement immediately.
  • If there is a tourist season, how come we can’t shoot them?
    (Anyone who lives in a tourist spot, as I do, would understand this sentiment.)

28 Apr 09:  Thanks to cousin Nola for these:

  • Blessed are the cracked, for they let in the light!
  • I used to have a handle on life, but it broke.
  • Don’t take life too seriously—no one gets out alive.
  • Earth is the insane asylum for the universe.
  • Out of my mind. Back in five minutes.
  • Consciousness: That annoying time between naps.
  • Ever stop to think, and forget to start again?

26 April 09: From  NEWSWRITE, Issue 184

  • There has only ever been one idea in art, and that is to communicate what it is like to be alive today. Damien Hirst
  • All writers are optimists. Thomas Costain, Canadian journalist
  • Don’t wait around for the Registry Office of Free Creativity to grant you a permit to express yourself. It’s time to find, forge or create your Artistic Licence and live your very own writing life. Sally Swain

09 April 09:  Thanks to Jon for these quotes about politics

  • Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But then I repeat myself.  Mark Twain
  • Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.  P.J O’Rourke
  • In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other.  Voltaire (1764)
  • The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.  Mark Twain
  • The government is like a baby’s alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other.  Ronald Reagan
  • I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle. Winston Churchill

8 March 09 Time may be a great healer, but it’s a lousy beautician. Anon.

12 Feb 09

Whether it is a good thing or a bad thing, smashing things up is sometimes very pleasant. – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Printer’s sign: You can have it Cheap. You can have it Quick. You can have it Accurate. Pick any two.

Words. 22 January 09

  • Stewardesses: Longest word typed with left hand only. Lollipop: Longest word typed with right hand only.Typewriter: Longest word that can be made using the letters on only one row of the keyboard.
  • No word in the English language rhymes perfectly with month, orange, silver or purple.
  • The only English word that ends in the letters ‘mt’? Dreamt
  • Palindrome words (same spelling back to front):  racecar, kayak, level.
  • What four English language words end in ‘dous’? tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, hazardous.
  • Two English language words have all five vowels in order: abstemious, facetious.

Stephen King, from his website. 14 Jan 09 I get my ideas from everywhere. But what all of my ideas boil down to is seeing maybe one thing, but in a lot of cases it’s seeing two things and having them come together in some new and interesting way, and then adding the question ‘What if?’ ‘What if’ is always the key question.

9 Jan 09

  • I’m sick of following my dreams. I’m just going to ask them where they’re going and hook up with them later. Mitch Hedberg, comedian
  • I have a new philosophy. I’m only going to dread one day at a time. Charles M. Schulz, creator of Peanuts cartoon
  • One must live in the present tense, but I have always lived in the present tensely. Bette Davis
  • My formula for living is quite simple. I get up in the morning and I go to bed at night. In between, I occupy myself as best I can. Cary Grant
  • If you can’t annoy somebody, there’s little point in writing. Kingsley Amis
  • I dreamed a thousand new paths. . . I woke and walked my old one. Chinese proverb

8 Jan 09  John Updike recently died. Some Updike quotes (from Wikipedia)

  • Men are all heart and Women are all body. I don’t know who has the brains. God maybe.
  • What a threadbare thing we make of life! Yet what a marvelous thing the mind is, they can’t make a machine like it; and the body can do a thousand things , there isn’t a factory in the world can duplicate the motion.
  • Of plants tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot.
  • He had met the little death that awaits athletes. He had retired.
  • America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
  • Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
Mary Robison’s short stories, gathered right now in Tell Me.
Because she works in a small space, but packs the whole sad world in there, and her characters do human, generous and faith-full things I can never forget.
Donald Barthelme’s short stories (Forty Stories, Sixty Stories).
Because they’re compact and erudite, a pleasure to read, la-dee-da, meanwhile they’re pricking your skin with little arrows and making you feel more than you meant to.