A BREED SIMILAR TO ORDINARY humans, but responsible for much of their culture. Occasionally considered too cocky for their own good until posthumous reevaluation shows they were right all along, the bastards. Some would call them the salvation of humanity; others wouldn’t call them a cab.
Tag: writers
A breed apart from ordinary humans, and responsible for much of their culture. Some would call them the salvation of humanity; others wouldn’t call them a cab.
Harlan’s Secret
“People on the outside think there’s something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn’t like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that’s all there is to it.”
— Author and critic HARLAN ELLISON, my first inspiration and sometime/longtime influence, as quoted on http://www.advicetowriters.com, a website worth visiting
Question of Essence
DO YOU PRACTICE AN ART form, or a life form?
Pithyism #xxiii
ONCE YOU REALIZE THAT YOU’RE not (insert your favorite author here), you can begin to make your own good things.
Just Off The Block of My Head
IF THERE IS ANYTHING SCARIER than writer’s block, I hope I never discover it.
For me, writer’s block is more than just an inability to string together something pretty or useful. It’s like losing half or more of my personality.
Everyone sees the world differently; writers even more so. There’s a sort of constant subconscious framing of experience that we all do just to survive with some sense of perspective. To a writer, that perspective is a little closer to the surface, a touch more accessible, like a good friend who’s constantly mumbling beauty under his breath. When that friend goes away, nothing seems fun anymore. It’s worse than a bad breakup, because at least you can serenade your ex, at least until the cops show up. But the writer’s friend has no spatial location, nothing to grab onto or plead with. It must, like the court order, be merely endured.
See? If I didn’t have writer’s block, that would have been funny.
But eventually the clouds lift, or you plod through them with a shovel, mixing metaphors to beat the band until something just
clicks
and the world suddenly makes sense again.
For a while.
Pithyism #11
TO WRITE WITH TRUTH AND heart, one must be able to see; and sometimes, to not look away.
Tools: Spacejock Software
THIS POST IS BEING WRITTEN in yEdit, one of Simon Haynes‘ many fine Spacejock Software products. He doesn’t know I’m writing it, and until I stumbled across his website I didn’t know he was a famous Australian science-fiction author with a taste for helping others get started in the field.
But as he offers some really neato tools for writing — yEdit, a text editor which lets you set a word-count target and track it as you type; Sonar, which manages story submissions; yTimer, like yEdit but in minutes instead of words; and the novel-assisting yWriter — as well as some sound advice (well, it helped me anyway). Check his site for additional tools and links to what looks like one hell of a terrific space-opera self-parody.
O Hamlet! O Holden!
ONE OF THE SPARE JOYS of bohemian pretention is, and perhaps always has been, writing sad poems in the rain, letting each misty drop efface and blur the tortured scribble; pearls of moisture like the very angels’ tears weeping for the world’s slow sadness, pooling and puddling to rinse and run again.
Try doing THAT on an iPhone.
A Great Line I’ll Have To Work In Somewhere
“IT WAS AT THIS POINT in the narrative when those skilled in the nuances of the oral tradition began chuckling with anticipation.”
How The World Works
“WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU MISS a deadline?” asked the high-school student shadowing me in my capacity as newspaper reporter.
“You don’t,” I replied.
“No, I know,” he said. “But what happens if you do?”
I just looked at him. “You don’t,” I repeated. “You just don’t.”
And sometimes, life really is that simple.
Jack Horkheimer, A”H
HIS CRACKLY EXHORTATION TO “KEEEP Looking Up!” now residing in the ears and cassettes of those who loved his weekly five minute-PBS-slice of observational astronomy, Jack Horkheimer, AKA “The Star Hustler,” passed through the luminiferous aether this morning on the way to consult Mr. Sagan about young DeGrasse-Tyson. Mr. H will be missed as much for inspiring stargazers to look out into time as for inspiring nerds to keep it real, old-school (e.g., Demosthenes or Galileo):
Recognized by his TV sign-off “Keep Looking Up”, Horkheimer revealed that although he intends to be stargazing well into the third millennium, nevertheless he has already erected his own tombstone with the following epitaph:
“Keep Looking Up was my life’s admonition,
I can do little else in my present position.”
Pithyism #104
WHEN COMPUTERS SUPERSEDED TYPEWRITERS, SPELLCHECK superseded the dread of whole-page retyping — and encouraged laziness.