Prose heaven. I love description and also the English countryside, so can’t help myself, have to post a couple more paragraphs from the master, Patrick O’Brian, out of the eleventh book, The Reverse of the Medal, in his 20-volume sea opus. It’s a great example of the value of specificity for a writer, as well as an [...]

Sometimes you’re dead and sometimes you’re livin’
Sometimes you’re pickin’ and sometimes a-grinnin’
Sometimes you’re wishin’ and sometimes you’re fishin’
And sometimes you’re going home.
Songs beyond day and souls beyond givin’,
Sunsets in morning and sunrise at evenin’,
Saints are a-sinnin’ and sinners believin’,
And sometimes you’re going home.
It’s just like a wish and it’s like a dead fisher,
Just like that [...]

How come smart guys are bummed out so much? I mean, what’s the point in being smart if you can’t figure out a way to be happy? Not much use being intelligent if all it does is turn you into a well-spoken miserable whiner.
This came to my attention recently as I was scouring the internet [...]

Well folks, here we go, my first movie review ever. Someone on Twitter said they would send a DVD of this movie to any blogger who would post of review of it, so on a whim I said sure, and sent them my address in a Twitter message. To my surprise, a few days later [...]

Perfection alert! Perfection alert! Tweet tweet tweet!
I’m about to paste in a long passage of the most delightful prose to come down the pike in many a century, by my lights. From the book Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian, the first in a series of British naval adventures during the Napoleonic wars.
His two main characters, [...]

Just read the memoirs of Julia Cameron, revered author of The Artist’s Way, and have to comment. It was the strangest of many strange reads in my life.
Long have I admired Julia Cameron, and still do, even after reading that dissonant autobiography, maybe even more now, regardless of her acuity of judgement. She has been [...]

Got this new project going and have to share. It’s a continuation of the writer’s exercise I did with Sandra Jensen: each writer creates a character, then you start writing back and forth to each other as if those characters are really alive and corresponding.
What they will talk about, or even be, is something that [...]

Finally back in the saddle on the Mordant Misadventures, though they ain’t the MMs anymore. No name yet for the new bit with a new partner. May make another page for it, if I can figure out how.
Big snow today. Wet and juicy. The dirt is slurpin’ it up. Go plants!
Other than that, Cesar Millan [...]

Something there is in me that loves a mouse. They are so small and brave. Sure do provide a lot of protein to our feathered friends and four-legged wild buddies. They’re like little busy bodies, curiosity and hunger, little gray furry bundles of life itself wiggling and darting, hiding and scooting, munching.
I once lived in [...]

Been looking at the wall a lot, but nothing yet. Will keep you posted.
LWIII

I need to stop thinking so much. Since November I’ve been hitting this writer’s life thing pretty hard, and I’m buried in words up to my cranium. All I can think about is words. I see something I love or hate and boom, I’m suddenly buried in words, thrashing through symbols. I can’t even eat [...]

Done ‘er. Just sent off the query letter. Have to say complaining in public before writing it was pretty effective. I only fainted twice. May have to do a little more in the complaining line.
Also, damn me, I told the truth. Why do I have to keep doing that?
Well, on her site she said, “Quirky [...]

(Sorry about the redundancy in the title, since any time you have to brag on paper about how awesome you are when you know you ain’t, it’s a tad hellish, unless you’re a used car salesman/writer.)
The first thing to do when writing a query letter to a publisher, literary agent, or editor, is to go [...]

Don’t blab or brag.
LWIII

Bingo. It happened. I’m now officially as annoying as I always wished I could be.
I have an agent.
Her name is Belle “Shifty” Cabal. Tough talker, skinny as a rail – though beautiful, in a you’re-skinny because-you-have-a-liver-problem-now kind of way. She wears a fedora and man’s pants with cuffs. Speaks low and husky, calls me ‘dahling’ [...]

Today we’re going to say something new. No idear what yet, but something I’ve never uttered my whole life.
Words cannot express things;
Speech does not convey the spirit.
Swayed by words, one is lost;
Blocked by phrases, one is bewildered.
The oak tree in the garden.
Once you see it, dreams fade away.

That’s not it, but it’s getting there, since [...]

Learned a new thing about editing during November. A very valuable lesson.
You see there’s this thing, this feeling. It’s very subtle, at least in me, and hardly even there at all, unless you know to look for it. It’s the kind of thing you only learn after thousands of similar experiences, because you can’t even [...]

Thank you mister placeholder. Quiet time’s over folks (or folk I might say, since I imagine I’m the only one checking this anymore).
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Sorry. Just warming up. Haven’t done this in a while. Blog sure is [...]