February 2012
1 post
October 2010
1 post
February 2010
1 post
January 2010
1 post
December 2009
4 posts
November 2009
5 posts
“Simplifying the complex is a matter of choosing what to leave out.”
– Grace
October 2009
15 posts
“I take pleasure not in making sense of the world but in pointing out what...”
– Grace
4 tags
NaNoWriMo 2009
Should I attempt National Novel Writing month this year? 50,000 words smashed into 30 days of holidays, cooking, shopping, planning, family, and mayhem? Literary suicide? Insanity? Or motivation to actually finish something?
I completed the challenge once, three years ago. The past two years I tried, but not really. I don’t know if my story is developed enough to attempt again this...
“When common courtesy ends, law begins.”
– Grace
“The difference between truth and fiction is that fiction must make sense or...”
– Mark Twain
Why Crime Shows Are Popular
1) Instant bad guy vs. good guy scenario. Who’s easier to hate than a killer? Or a thief? Or a pedophile? Viewers are instantly on the side of the “good” cop/detective/agent no matter how uninteresting they are as a character because they instinctively want to see the bad guy brought to justice.
2) Formulas work. The...
September 2009
42 posts
The Truth About "Originality"
“Originality is the art of concealing your sources.” - Benjamin Franklin
“What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.” - Dean William R. Inge
“Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.” - Laurence J. Peter
“About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.” - Josh Billings
...
“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken...”
– Anton Chekhov
“Drama—what literature does at night.”
– George Jean Nathan
“What I like in a good author isn’t what he says, but what he whispers.”
– Logan Pearsall Smith
“Prose is architecture, not interior decorating.”
– Ernest Hemingway
“There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.”
– Alfred Hitchcock
“Words are like sunbeams. The more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.”
– Robert Southey
“Your first job as a fiction writer is to imagine yourself as a sadist …...”
– Jessica Page Morrell