AS THE EARTH RETURNS IN its orbit to where it was last year, here is a look at the top ten posts The Metaphorager’s readers enjoyed (I hope) during the past twelve months:
My Favorite Jewish Joke – 80 Views
As it says. I have a couple of others; but this one, with its Hidden Truth, never fails to amuse and amaze.
How To Wash The Dishes – 53 views
A discipline drawn from months and years of twice-daily practice.
1. THERE IS A CERTAIN COMPULSION to the act of writing: an unscratchable itch that won’t let the fingers refrain from their fruitless but busy task, whether on paper or keyboard.
2. To ask writers “Why do you write?” is to confess an ignorance of this basic graphomanic drive. One writes because one can’t not write, just as one breathes because one can’t not breathe. It is a function of having a particular sort of bodily structure, of brain or lungs or soul. Just as creating is joyful — physically pleasurable — refraining from creativity can be quite painful. Continue reading “5 Thoughts: The Grand Old Process”
1. ONE OF THE CHICKEN-OR-egg challenges of modern media (social and traditional) is their pervasive sense of nonlinear immediacy, by which I mean the everything-at-once flattening of the artistic landscape. Continue reading “5 Thoughts: Seminal v. Derivative”
ALTHOUGH THEY RELY ON THEM, few people say they actually trust the news media. (I call it “Ross’ Paradox.”)
Everybody has a story. And many want to share it.
Newswriting is a form of reality-creation, wherein readers trust you to describe the world beyond their immediate perceptions. Don’t ever abuse that trust.
Every face is a door, and if you knock just right, you’ll be invited in to witness wonders.
“MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN ABOUT the quaint and lumbering buopoths native to the Exilic Lands and other curious places – but to this day, little remains understood about the shy beasts beyond the proverb that ‘they will haul all day on a fatberry-cake and a kind word.'” — from Road Bound
That’s the in-universe explanation from one of my Prosatio Silban stories. Outside the stories, it’s a different matter entirely…
Prosatio Silban in his galleywagon / Illo (c) 2008 Alana Dill, http://youbecomeart.com Click to enlarge.O Fellow Connoisseurs of Mythic Fiction (and Gastronomy), please: Lend me your eyes.
For many years now, I have been writing occasional fantasy tales about Prosatio Silban: a self-defrocked holyman turned mercenary cook in a far-off land containing a vast and disparate multitude of ancient and oft-commingled peoples, creatures, exiles, cultures, prophecies, landscapes, and cuisines. They vary in length from one-half to ten-and-a-half printed pages, with most ranging between three and five.
I enjoy writing them (“Do it for the buzz,” quoth Stephen King). I also enjoy having people read them. Thus, should the Universe so allow, I will here publish one every Thursday morning until further notice. (If you like what you read, you may also want the preface and introduction, as well as every story published up to now [plus ancillaries].) The subscription box at upper-left (or, if you’re on a tablet or phone, the box way below) will enable you to receive them via email as they become available. (Or, should you want 85 of them in one place (plus ancillaries!), may I suggest the e-book?)
Please enjoy. And if you’re so inclined — kindly spread the word.
1. ONE OF THE THINGS THAT frustrates me as a writer is my own self-limitation. Specifically, I am speaking of the notoriously difficult and bothersome Third Thing.
2. The Third Thing works like this. I will write a sentence that begins, say, with a simple thesis: “There are three things that Elmer worried about…” Two examples will occur to me right off the bat: “…death, taxes, and …” It’s what comes after the “and” that always gets me.
DO WE RESEMBLE OUR TOOLS, or do our tools resemble us? (I’m including in this equation notional tools like webspace, word-processing software, Facebook’s post-ranking choices, etc.)
IT ENDED LIKE THIS: “MRS. J—–,” I said evenly, “you should work for the city sewer department instead of teaching English — because you know more about scat than you do about good writing.”
Except I didn’t say “scat.”
And that’s why I didn’t graduate from high school.
Some background is in order: Mrs. J—– co-taught senior AP English at my Walnut Creek high school. She was a bitter, vindictive, tenured old woman who terrorized the other teachers, to say nothing of her students, and she had it in for me from day one. Continue reading “Confessions of an Earnest High School Dropout”
