Quote of the Day: Inspiration

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model. Vincent Van Gogh

Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.
John Updike

Popular posts from this blog

To SASE on Not To SASE that is THE Question.

Ok, I think too much digital ink and time has been spilled on the subject but since Ms. Snark didn't post my comment on her blog, I feel drawn into the fray. For those few of you who don't know an SASE is a self addressed stamped envelope usually requested or required by agents, publishers, magazines, and others for inclusion with any submittals of work for review. This morning, the blogshere is a buzz with two opposing views, one by rising author Joe Konrath , and the other by anonomous literary agent, Miss Snark . And the comment I made that was not posted: "A Tale of Two Tragedies: First, a good writer fails to find the good agent because an SASE is not included in the submittal and the agent refuses to read writer's work. Second, a good agent fails to find the good writer because the writer didn't include an SASE. What a shitty plot. You decide." Ok, I gave her qudos for her reading 100 synopses, but quashing freedom of speech -that's just wrong. Ok, m
Read more

Sex, Bad Sex, and More Bad Sex

Since I'm not getting any, I may as well write about it. For most guys, any sex is good sex. But to write a sex scene is difficult, sometimes embaracing, and even the best writers struggle to get it right. The literary world actually has a Worst Sex Scene Award . Author(s) P.J. Parrish have hilarious blog posts about sex , bad sex , and the written word. Check out an exerpt: "Did you know there are actual awards for bad sex scenes? For nine years now, the Literary Review has been handing out its Bad Sex award to 'draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.' " My favorite is the 2004 winner,Tom Wolfe's throbbing passage from I am Charlotte Simmons : "Hoyt began moving his lips as if he were trying to suck the ice cream off the top of a cone without using his teeth ... Slither slither slither slither went the tongue, but the hand that was what she tri
Read more

Life . . . as we know it

Image
There's a revolution going on. It doesn't feel like it. It rarely does, but there is. Life, as we know it, is changing very dramatically and very quickly. All of us will feel the changes. Writers and artists are feeling the first effects. As we moved from an agrarian society to an industrial society, from the horse and buggy to the car, telegraph to the telephone, many workers, jobs, and technologies were replaced and disrupted. Some industries and workers transitioned effortlessly. Others were trampled or left behind. The current rapid advancements of technology are making businesses obsolete at a record pace. So comes the Creative Age, or what some have called the Information Age. We've been in the Information age for about twenty years. But now, the useable products are coming to the marketplace in a big way. The convergence that all the techno talking heads have been hawking for years is finally producing real products; the Blackberry and Ipod for example. The Creative
Read more