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Writing, reading, rambling thoughts...
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Mark Twain's Advice
I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English--it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them--then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.
- Letter to D. W. Bowser, 3/20/1880
Twainquotes.com
I'm Eligible to be Nominated! Who knew?
Ah, there are such interesting things to be learned by Googling oneself. I admit it. I did it and guess what I learned?
I'm in my second year of eligibility to be nominated for a John W. Campbell Best New Writer Award!
I honestly have to say I have no idea how this happened, since I've never heard of this award before today. The fact that my story "Before Paphos", published in 2007 at Strange Horizons, is even eligible has to mean that someone had to notice it and like it enough to make sure it made it into the pool of eligible nominees. I think.
Being on the list of eligible nominees is a long way from being nominated and even further away from winning, but it's nice to be noticed.
Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately for them, I don't know anyone who is a voting member or they'd be getting a few dozen pleading emails from me over the next few weeks. Do you know anyone??? :-)
Who's Looking For Love?
Years ago, I entered a contest where the object was to create, using seventy words or fewer, a personal ad for a literary character. This was my entry:
About me:
I am no beauty. In truth, I am plain. However, I am clever, kind, loving, staunchly moral and upright. Perhaps I am more forgiving than I should be.
I am looking for:
A relationship with no secrets!
Note: To be considered, any swarthy gentleman in possession of a shadowy manse must agree to a thorough inspection of all buildings—attics included.
Contact me at jneyre1847@email.com
I didn't win, or even place, but I thought it was cute enough.
Okay, technically, Mrs. Rochester wasn't in the attic, but I was nipping at the word limit.
More fun with Gimp 2
I used another photograph of mine to create this. I don't even know what to call these things. Maybe a digital postcard? A web-poster? Who knows.
I'm having fun with Gimp 2 though, which is free for download, by the way. Go here: Gimp.org.
Blushing
One of these days I'm going to learn my lesson about poking fun at other peoples' writing, grammar or spelling errors.
A few days ago, I posted a blog entry ridiculing those who confuse these words: to, two and too.
Thinking myself clever, I used an online tool to create a book cover and called it "Using Homonyms for Idiots." Imagine my embarrassment upon discovering today that to, two and too are not homonyms; they are homophones.
I discovered this quite by accident while reading an article called "Fastidious spelling snobs pushed over the edge: Books, blogs and obsessiveness mark a brand-new war of the words" on MSNBC's website.
Just to make sure, off I went to the dictionary and wouldn't you know it, I got the two terms mixed up.
According to Dictionary.com "two words are homophones if they are pronounced the same way but differ in meaning or spelling or both (e.g. bare and bear)." Of course, the words to, too and two fall into this category.
According to the same source, a homonym is "a word having the same sound as another, but differing from it in meaning; as the noun bear and the verb bear." So, homonyms are spelled and sound the same but have different meanings, like fair (as in, "That's not fair!") and fair (as in, "Let's go to the fair.").
Yipes, I feel like the idiot now. I've learned my lesson. No more throwing stones at glass houses, while I'm obviously living in one.
By the way, I found the link to the MSNC article through my favorite news-aggregate website Fark.com. The link was accompanied by this hilarious headline, "Failing economy may be brining out more Grammer Nazi's."
Gotta love those Farkers!
Then I'm Pretty Productive.....
I made this! Last Spring I took a digital picture of some flowers in my front yard. Then I used Gimp 2 to modify the picture and add the quote. I thought the quote appropriate considering....
Marion Zimmer Bradley Advice
Though it was many years ago, I enjoyed reading Marion Zimmer Bradley's Avalon books. She died in 1999, but a website is still maintained by The Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust. Along with promoting reprints of her books, the site also features several articles about writing, written, of course, by Bradley.
The articles are all over ten years old, naturally, but still offer sound advice about how to get published, grammar, and a few other topics. There are only nine articles in all, but I found each one very informative.
Check it out if you're interested:
Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust
What I'm Reading
I just picked up Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather. I'm only about six pages in, but am already finding myself again astonished by her wonderful, poetic prose.
When I was in college, I wrote an entire essay about these two paragraphs in Cather's novel My Antonia:
Presently we saw a curious thing: There were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disc rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining our eyes toward it.In a moment we realized what it was. On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disc; the handles, the tongue, the share--black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun.
Even while we whispered about it, our vision disappeared; the ball dropped and dropped until the red tip went beneath the earth. The fields below us were dark, the sky was growing pale, and that forgotten plough had sunk back to its own littleness somewhere on the prairie.
Whenever I read something so exquisitely descriptive, capturing a moment in time so perfectly, I can't help but think, Oh, geez. I could never do that.
Thoughts like this can often lead to a writer's most potent enemy: self doubt. To combat these feelings of never being good enough, I have to give myself a pep-talk. I tell myself that, no, I will never be able to write like Cather, or Kafka or Hemmingway or anyone else. I can only write like me and that has to be good enough for me.
Post Rejects
For those of you not familar with the site "Post Secret," this blog may not strike you as funny, but I think it is hilarious.
Post Rejects is a parody of Post Secret. Postsecret.com is a website where people are encouraged to share their secrets via anonymous postcards. Post Secret is terribly, terribly serious and has spawned symposiums and even coffee table books (and probably some bucks for the site owner). It was inevitable that a parody site would soon arise.
Here's one of my favorites from the Post Reject parody site:
Wow, it's like they looked right into my soul....
Fridge Poetry
Word play is a great way to get ready to write. I like this online "fridge poetry" site. It is oddly relaxing just to drag words around and see what happens. I like seeing what others have left behind.
Here's an example:
"You don't abuse hedgehog farms."
Hmmmmm.....
Give it a try!
isnoop
Crash
I've debated with myself a while about whether to post this poem or not. I don't write much poetry, because I often feel I don't understand all the rules of meter, etc. I could never remember the difference between blank verse and free verse when I was in school. I just don't feel as comfortable working with poetry as I do with prose.
I suppose, though, that writing isn't about being comfortable. Maybe writing about what makes us uncomfortable really brings out what is important. I'm not sure.
I wrote this poem over two years ago. That woman's face still haunts me. I wonder about her and others like her. I wonder what her day was like, her yesterday and tomorrow. I wonder if there was something I could have done....
Crash
In line at the supermarket
One lane over,
She leans with her elbow on the cart, knuckles on her hip.
She stands there nonchalant,
with a shattered face.
She is old and tiny.
Straggles of gray hair
Held back from her face with a pink ribbon.
Of course, she’s wearing long sleeves and jeans,
Even in the heart of summer.
Her eyes bug out,
but only because her cheekbones are crushed.
A nose without a bridge,
just a little, fleshy bump in the middle of her face.
A face blunted, edgeless,
leveled by cudgel fists.
Ah, yes. He’s there.
The big, he-man.
He’s old too, but tall and broad-shouldered.
Pink scalp shines through the gray stubble of his crew cut.
His hands, those hands, grip the
Shopping cart handle.
Oh, I hope they hurt him.
In winter. During rainstorms.
All the time.
I hope the pain is throbbing, deep-aching,
fire needles in the joints.
A small, daily payment
For the beatings.
When he turns his head to speak to her
I see her anxious expression as
She looks up at him,
like a child, wary, frightened…
heartbreaking.
A slight rocking back on her heels, not a full step,
but enough to convince me,
her face was no accident.
Shaking, enraged, outraged, I suppress the urge
To rocket canned goods at his head or just
Take him to the floor with a running tackle and
Bash his head into the gray-spotted linoleum in
Front of the magazine racks.
I want to hurt him. I really do.
Imagine what she must want.
And yet, I do nothing,
nothing, nothing,
nothing.
A Book I'd Like to See
I'm not really one of the grammar police, everyone is entitled to make a mistake or three, but some things do drive me nuts. This book should be required reading in all high school English classes.
Want to create your own book cover?
Slinging Slang
It is no secret I love the English language. I'm especially fascinated by slang--how it is created, used, changed and how it creeps into standard usage.
I found an interesting article at The Nation online on the subject and thought I'd share it.
Pixies, Sheilas, Dirtbags and Cougar Bait: Modern Slang
I found particularly interesting, in this year of "Joes," the part of the article listing the various types of slang "Joe-somethings." Someone I know uses the unique (as far as I know)slang term "Joe Bag-of-doughnuts" instead of the more common "Joe Schmo" or "Joe Six-pack."
This leads me to wonder, as the author states is the case with him, whether others have personal slang that is unique to their relationships.
Share in the comments!
A Perfect Example
A few days (weeks?) ago I put up a post about dangling participles. Here's what Strunk and White have to say about participial phrases.
"A participial phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject" (13).
The same holds true for a participial phrase at the end of a sentence. In other words, writers have to make sure they are actually saying what they think they are saying.
Writers breaking this rule run the risk of making themselves look ridiculous. Even the Associated Press sometimes has trouble.
SRC="http://license.icopyright.net/user/viewFreeUse.act?fuid=MTUxNjE0Ng==" WIDTH="100%" HEIGHT="100%" MARGINWIDTH=10 MARGINHEIGHT=10 FRAMEBORDER="NO" SCROLLING="YES" STYLE="border-width:1; border-color:#000000; border-style:solid;" > Teacher OK after crashing into bear on a bicycle from Associated Press
Is the circus in town? Doesn't the headline make you wonder exactly where the bear got a bicycle in the first place?
A sentence in the body of the article is just as confusing.
The bear rolled over Litz's head, cracking his helmet, and scratched his back before scampering up a hill above the road.
So, the bear was wearing a helmet? (Always a good idea when biking, btw.) The bear's helmet scratched the biker? The bear stopped and gave himself some itch relief before scampering away? What? Aaaagh!
A great writing exercise would be to take the headline and that awfully confusing sentence and rewrite both.
For the headline: Bicylist Recovering After Crashing Into Bear.
Wouldn't that work better?
I suggest it would be best to break up the sentence: Litz's helmet cracked when the bear rolled over him. The bear also scratched Litz's back before scampering away up a hillside.
Whoops! I did it too! Litz's back didn't scamper up the hillside. See, the participial phrase describing the bear is too far away from the word bear. The "scampering up the hillside" is supposed to describe the bear, but because the noun "back" appears in the sentence after after the subject, the phrase now refers to "back" instead of "bear." Make sense?
Let's try again:
Litz's helmet cracked when the bear rolled over him. The bear also scratched Litz's back. Apparently unharmed, the bear scampered up a hillside.
Doesn't that better convey what most likely happened?
Writers have to analyze every sentence for goofs like this or we just end up looking silly and readers end up confused.
Romance Covers Redone
You know it is so easy to make fun of cheesy romance novels, that I probably should not do it. I found this site, though, that just cracked me up.
Here's an example of Longmire's "re-imagined" romance novel covers:
And one more:
If you'd like to check out more, visit
Longmire Does Romance Novels
It's hard to know which is more ridiculous, the romance novel cover art or the stories. At least Longmire made the covers more interesting.
Flash Fiction Again
My fondness for short fiction is no secret. My love for Flash Fiction isn't either. It is amazing to me, how a story with so few words can sometimes be nothing short of dazzling.
I'm late getting around to Flash Fiction Online again this month and found August's offerings a little disappointing.
The online magazine has had better months, but among the also-ran stories, there is one little gem. It is a re-telling of the Tortoise and the Hare,a tale rife with political undertones and a wonderfully snarky ending. Ah, the power of "everybody says so!" and partisanship.
Here's where you can find it:
The True Story of the Tortoise and the Hare
If you'd like to read the other stories, here's the link to the homepage:
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