Original Content

I Particularly Liked The Part About Personal Shame Being The Writer's Most Common Accessory

2010-03-12T10:48:00.003-05:00

Author Ben Esch (that is the best author photo ever) wrote a blog post called The Journey is the Inn that:

1. Makes Chaucer sound zenny, and

2. Is all too true.

Seriously beginning authors, you'd better like sitting alone with your computer screen in a room piled with paper and junk and collecting research books and professional journals you'll probably never have time to read and trying to avoid letting your teenage kids find out that their after school jobs pay better than yours because that's what Esch is talking about when he says, "Try to enjoy the process of writing."

I'm always complaining because I don't have more time to do those kinds of things.

So Is Starting School Like Dying?

2010-03-11T19:40:00.005-05:00

I'm going to admit that I sometimes have trouble grasping what's really going on in books. Sometimes I think too much while I'm reading. Sometimes I don't think enough.

I think I get Garmann's Summer by Stian Hole. I think it's about fear--everybody's scared. I was just left feeling, Well, okay. And?

Garmann is a six-year-old boy who will be starting school soon. The coming event frightens him. Three extremely elderly aunts, who, as illustrated, would probably be his great-great aunts, come to visit. Garmann asks them if they're afraid of anything. He also asks his parents. Each adult is afraid of something. Grown-ups, too, feel fear, and I guess that's supposed to be comforting.

But one of the aunts, it turns out, is afraid of dying, and Mom is afraid Garmann will be hit by a car while crossing the road. And, you know, those fears just aren't on the same level with being afraid of starting school. Okay, maybe I'm not taking Garmann's fears seriously enough. But I think a fear is serious even if it isn't as big a fear as the fear of death. It doesn't have to be on a par with death to be important.

For a much more positive response, check out Fuse #8's review.

I'm guessing the plot for this book began with premise--the idea of a child fearing the unknown of starting school.

More On Evil Plots

2010-03-11T19:07:00.005-05:00

I found a transcript of an interview on plot at Oz and Ends. Deborah Lynn Jacobs is the author being interviewed. It's a long transcript, and if you skim, you'll need to do a lot of it. But Jacobs talks about starting her books with a premise and then coming up with a character.

In an earlier post I told about Cynthia Lord's workshop presentation in which she gave a talk on a classic plot structure involving giving a character something he or she wants and then creating obstacles to that character getting it. Jacobs' description of starting with a premise involves the question "What if?". She appears to keep asking it throughout the plotting process. "What if?" is another classic method for creating plots. It's probably closer to what I do.

Earlier this month, I considered doing a self-study program here at O.C. that would involve creating scene cards for books I was reading. Yeah. Like that's going to happen. Plus, it would be giving away too much of other writers' work. But what I may try to do here is determine how the plots of books I'm reading are created--do they have plots that are driven by a character's wants and inability to get them or did they begin with a premise?

So you can look forward to that.

How Many Times Have You Thought About This While Reading?

2010-03-10T10:35:00.005-05:00

Nathan Bransford had a post recently on Archetype vs. Cliche. I would also throw the word stereotype in there. Also trope and motif.

If writers can claim that they're working with archetypes, that's a good thing because it implies that somehow they're working with the original pattern. Stereotypes, no. I often read that some author's work indicates her knowledge of the tropes of her genre. But if you're using the tropes of your genre, aren't you running the risk of using cliches?

I think what we're talking here is connotation. Some words connote better things than others. Archetype and trope connote something good. Stereotype and cliche connote something bad. I like motif, myself. Motif, as it turns out, is good. Very, very good. You've heard it from me.

But is the author saying she works with motif and maybe archetype enough? Doesn't someone else have to say it, versus saying that you work with stereotype and cliche? Who makes the decision? Do writers get to say to reviewers and readers, "You've got that all wrong! This is not a stereotypical schoolyard bully story. It's archetypical!" Or "No, no, no. I was using the evil mom motif that turns up frequently in children's literature. My character is part of that archetypical pattern!"

I suspect that one person's archetype is another person's stereotype. Tomato/tomahto.

Desire Is The Source Of All Unhappiness And, Possibly, The Source Of All Plots

2010-03-08T19:22:00.004-05:00

Cynthia Lord's plot talk on Saturday involved what might be called the classic structure of giving characters something they want and then throwing obstacles in the way of them getting it. The characters overcome the obstacles and, voila, you have a plot and a book. I've heard elementary school teachers talk about a variation of this, advising students to give characters a problem and then give them obstacles to solving the problem.

While I have been trying to generate plot ideas by working out character desires for my recent books, I've always felt uncomfortable with the Wants/Obstacles/Resolution writing plan. I used to think it was formulaic, that you'd end up with one of those inspirational overcoming-adversity things that are all so much alike. But that's not fair because this kind of plot structure would also work for thrillers and mysteries ("I want to find the murderer"), survival stories ("I want to live"), romances ("I want to love somebody"), journey stories ("I want to go home"), and any number of other types of books, depending on the characters' wants. Any plot structure can probably be described as a formula. One person's structure is another person's formula.

A more reasonable reason for being uncomfortable with this plot creating format is the fact that it still doesn't help you come up with the various plot points. What will my character want? What will the obstacles be? Come on. We're still talking about pulling those out of thin air.

On top of that, for some of us a story begins not with a character but with a scene or situation. We may not even know who in that scene is the main character, forget about what he or she may want. I'm into ordinary people finding themselves in extraordinary circumstances. Coming up with a desire for those ordinary people may not be easy because they are in situations they've never been in before. All of a sudden they're supposed to want something?

I am giving this a great deal of thought, and you can be sure I'll be getting back to you on it.

Agency And Wholesale Models

2010-03-08T11:00:00.003-05:00

I have been vaguely aware of what's been going on over at Amazon relating to the sale of e-books. Perhaps that's the way to approach anything, because it has slowly become clear(er) to me. Pimp My Novel has an explanation and brings us up to date on the players.

I Missed A Sequel

2010-03-07T19:56:00.002-05:00

I liked N.D. Wilson's 100 Cupboards, so imagine my surprise when I learned at Eva's Book Addiction that the third book in the series has been published. Meaning, of course, that I totally missed the news when Book Two came out.

Hmmm. 100 Cupboards might make a good gift for someone I know. I'll have to remember it.

I found this information after visiting last month's Carnival of Children's Books at Whispers of Dawn.

Retreat News

2010-03-07T19:05:00.003-05:00

Yesterday's retreat at Whispering Pines was not as retreaty as the one I do each January. There was no snowshoeing, yoga, or reading in front of a window while night falls over a mountain meadow. But I did get lunch and a thirty-minute walk, so I can't complain.

Cynthia Lord was the author/mentor and the reason I went because she was giving a talk on plotting, which is hell on earth for many writers, myself included. Now, Cynthia Lord has only written three books, and two of them are just coming out this year. Yet she's a very popular speaker at both schools and literary events. Some jaded types might say that happens when your one novel is a Newbery Honor book. I think it's more likely due to the fact that she is a very fine speaker. She was remarkable with both content and presentation. She also made the best use of PowerPoint of anyone I've ever seen. I'm talking both in terms of slides supporting content and ability to use the program.

Now the group critique I took part in during the afternoon was very interesting for a couple of reasons. First, I have to say that the material I heard yesterday was much better than I expected. I was a member of a writers' group for a few years earlier in this decade. That group was made up primarily of unpublished writers, which I suspect was the case yesterday, too. The quality of what I was hearing yesterday was better than what I often heard in my old group. I don't know if this was because there are many more options for beginning writers to learn craft now and I'd see that in any group critique situation or if these were all SCBWI members and, as such, were more likely to avail themselves of such opportunities. Second, these people were also very sophisticated readers and could express themselves confidently. (Probably more so than I did.) I know that at least three of the people there were members of writers' groups and were experienced at giving feedback.

As a result of the discussion of my offering--a few pages from the 365 Story Project--I am going to make some significant changes on Day One, which shouldn't be too difficult to do. I'm also going to change the name from Middle Ridge Road to A Year on Middle Ridge Road. So it was a productive day for me.

An Unfortunate Coincidence

2010-03-07T08:36:00.005-05:00

While I was at a writers' retreat yesterday, I learned about a new book called Happy Face by Stephen Emond. The cover and title couldn't help but catch my eye, given how similar they are to Happy Kid!.

Then I read what the book is about--"a shy, artistic boy who decides to reinvent himself as a happy-go-lucky guy after he moves to a new town." Happy Kid! is about a boy who is "friendless, mistakenly taking super-difficult accelerated courses, and infamous for allegedly being involved in a violent "incident" on the bus" "...but a self-help book from his well-meaning mother changes all that. Magically, the book seems to know all about him. And it wants him to improve his life."

Happy Kid! was published four years ago, which is probably a generation in publisher years. Nonetheless, it's hard not to be frustrated.

Happy Face's author even lives in my state.

UPDATE: After fifty minutes or so of exercise and a hot shower, I have started moving on. Also, is the Happy Face cover supposed to be a paper bag? Because that would make it different. Let's say it's a paper bag. Yeah. Ommmm.

If You Have All The Time In The World...

2010-03-05T10:53:00.002-05:00

...you might want to look at The Top 100 Creative Writing Blogs and Top 100 Blogs to Improve Your Writing in 2010, which I found at a month-old post at Practicing Writing. I look at a few of the editor/agent/writer business blogs I follow three times a week while I'm eating. I eat more than three times a week, but I do other things during other feeding times. What I'm trying to get at, here, is that the three-times-a-week schedule explains why that post is so old. Not being seriously insane, I'm not even going to try to look at those 200 blogs. At the rate of a few blog posts a day, three days a week, I'd be stuck on the January/February 2010 posts until...ah...ah... I don't have time to do the math.

Maybe if Civil Guy sees this, he'll do it.

Prologues...Bleh

2010-03-05T10:46:00.002-05:00

As a reader, I must say I agree with Why Prologues Often Don't Work at Pub Rants. I feel the same way about epilogues.

Ah, Yes. Time Suck.

2010-03-04T19:49:00.003-05:00

Varian Johnson, who appears to be a structures guy (a term you'd be familiar with if you belonged to a civil engineering family) as well as a YA novelist, did a guest post at Justine Larbalestier's blog on the subject of time suck.

Ah, yes. Time suck.

Back when I had more time, I wasted so much of it. Back ten months ago, the Internet was my major time suck. I had to kill an hour or more each morning before I began work. I called it my transition time or prep time. Then I kept going back to news' sites and e-mail over and over again during the day.

Because of the family problems that arose last year, I have much less time. As a result, with the three days a week I have left to work, I've had to set up office hours just as Johnson describes. The Internet and e-mail are not part of office hours, at least not the morning office hours. I don't do any of that until after I've gotten some work done. When my family members call me on those days, I keep telling them I'm working. I sometimes e-mail people in the evening to tell them, "I'll be working tomorrow. I'll get back to you tomorrow night" as a little hint that they should leave me alone. (People who need hints rarely take them, I've found.) I don't do Internet research for other family members' health problems during office hours. I don't do personal paper work during office hours. I don't do personal financial work during office hours. I must have been spending a lot of my work time on these kinds of tasks because I'm doing them in the evenings now, and I find that I don't have anywhere near as much time to read blogs and listservs, which is what I used to do in the evenings.

Oddly enough, though, now that I have less time to work, I find that I'm staying on task much better. I can't get everything done, but at least I know I'm working.

Johnson talks about making time however you can. The thing you have to accept about that is when you make time to do one thing that means you aren't going to be able to do something else. I made time to work during the day by doing personal stuff at night, which means I can't be as connected to the kidlitosphere as I used to be.

I am confident that someday someone will find a way to get more hours in the day and more days in the week. I hope I live to see it.

Again, I found the Varian Johnson post through Cynsations.

This Speaks To Me

2010-03-04T19:25:00.005-05:00

Strong Writers Do This at Writer's First Aid could have had my name on it. In it Kristi Holl talks about self-study programs, an idea she says comes from a book called The Art of War for Writers. I've done self-study programs in the past, and I can totally get behind the idea of writers as warriors.

In the comments to this blog post, someone talks about creating scene cards for novels you're reading, not writing. I've read about that. It's supposed to help writers develop a sense of how plots work. (Hmmm. A little muscle memory for plot, since we were talking about warriors in the last para?) I was going to do it a while back. I was going to use a notebook, had it next to my bed so I could make scene notes while I read. And that's as far as I got with that particular self-study program.

Hmmm. Maybe I'll try doing this particular self-study program here at Original Content. I could try working out the plot points in some books I'm reading, trying to develop some plotting muscle memory.

I found Writer's First Aid by way of Cynsations.

Sally Goes Everywhere

2010-03-03T19:38:00.003-05:00

Recently I happened upon some of the late Stephen Huneck's picture books about Sally, a dog that really got around. Though Huneck did attend the Massachusetts College of Art, according to a New York Times article, more than one account says he taught himself to carve and do woodcut prints, making him more of a folk artist than you usually find these days. The Times article called him an outsider artist and said that at the height of his success he was running a multi-million dollar business.

My favorite of the Sally books that I've seen so far is Sally Goes to the Farm. Sally's Snow Adventure would have beat it, but it has a strange shift in the doggy point-of-view from first to third person, something the publisher should have caught.

You don't see much in the way of humans in these books. The dogs take part in human activities--driving tractors, riding on sleds--but they're always dogs. They never wear clothes or hold jobs. These are simple stories that are illustrated with a strong style. I can imagine a family collecting all of them and wearing them out with repeated readings.

Sally's Great Balloon Adventure will be published next month.

I'm Probably The Same Person No Matter What I'm Doing

2010-03-02T19:09:00.007-05:00

Today at taekwondo I was training with Gen, who is a lovely woman, very sensitive to others' needs, very caring. She is one of those martial arts students who is always encouraging others during drills and even when sparring. In spite of the fact, by the way, that she is an imposing, if not frightening, sparring partner.

Anyway, I am not any of those things. I am not an imposing, forget about a frightening, sparring partner. I'm also not the kind of martial arts student who encourages others with comments about how well they're doing. I'll offer to stop if I think someone is going to pass out or ask if people are okay if I think they're injured. I'm not a monster. But I'm not the kind of training partner who goes, "Good! Good! You're doing great! Don't forget to breath! Only another half minute! You can do it!" My attitude tends to be, "Breath or not. I don't care. When do we get to do poomse?"

While training with kind and generous Gen this morning, I started worrying that my sucky attitude in the dojang might be representative of how I behave in other parts of my life--say, during group writing critiques. This is significant because this Saturday I'm attending the day program of the Whispering Pines Writers' Retreat, which includes informal group critiques in the afternoon. It's been years since I've been in a group critique. In fact, I haven't done it since I was one of the speakers at Whispering Pines four years ago. I'm very fearful I'll sit there with a mindset that will be the group critique equivalent of "Breath or not. I don't care," and everyone will be able to tell.

I may have to leave early to pick someone up at a train station. That might not be a bad thing.

Should We Start With Theme? Can It Even Be Done?

2010-03-02T18:52:00.004-05:00

I've been going through some old writers' workbooks gathering my thoughts for a project I'm getting started on. I keep finding notes I took on various books on writing that I read over the past few years. I often don't even remember the titles of these things. I'm hoping I absorbed something that I'm not aware of consciously.

I do recall Rust Hill's Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Today I found a note I made while reading Hill: "The theme of the story--begin stating it from the very beginning."

I've been thinking about theme a lot this last year because of a discussion at the child_lit listserv. In a discussion of what makes a book YA, some people said that theme was as important, or even more so, than point-of-view. This, then, would justify classifying a book as YA even when main characters are adults speaking of their adolescent past. I had always believed that that point-of-view was a factor that made a book adult because the main characters were recalling experience through the filter of an adult's mind. YA, I thought, was from the point-of-view of characters who were in the midst of living their young adult lives.

So over the past year I've been thinking that maybe writers should have a good grasp of their theme(s) while they're writing. That note I made sometime in the past reminded me of that. "The theme of the story--begin stating it from the very beginning." Maybe that should be the case with novels as well as short stories, which was what Hill was primarily concerned with in his book.

Here's the thing, though...I've read (and heard) authors say that they're only aware of their themes after they've finished a work. That was certainly the case for me with my early books.

If there are any writers out there, do you think starting with a theme would be a good jumping off point for writing a book? Better than other jumping off points?

Zenny

2010-03-01T11:14:00.003-05:00

How do you write a book? The answer, by way of Practicing Writing, is:

"The only way to write a book, I�m fond of telling people, is to actually write a book. That�s how you write a book."

Quoting Anne Enright.

Yes, Read Aloud

2010-02-26T19:32:00.004-05:00

Jim Trelease's Read-Aloud Handbook had a very big impact at Chez Gauthier. I went to hear Trelease speak at our local elementary school when my oldest child was still a toddler. I brought his book home with me. His contention that boys model their behavior on their fathers and need to see their fathers (as well as other men) read, meant that the Gauthier boys had both parents reading to them (on alternating days) for years. They continued to read, themselves, into adolsecence, a point where conventional wisdom tells us that many males stop reading. And, surprise, today they tend to share their father's books and magazines rather than their mother's.

This makes me wonder what would have become of them if they hadn't had a reading father to model themselves upon or, even, a reading father who didn't know he needed to provide a model for his children. (This is what I call proactive parenting versus reactive parenting, by the way. But this isn't a parenting blog, so I won't say anymore about that.)

Just a few months ago I gave a young teaching family member a copy of The Read-Aloud Handbook for Christmas because I just can't let it go.

The book really has significance for me, so I'm happy to direct you to Jen Robinson's "reaction" to it.

Literary Adventures At The Laundromat

2010-02-25T18:51:00.004-05:00

I have a sad Laundromat story to tell. I made my usual Thursday afternoon excursion to my local Laundromat where I have been a regular, off and on, for years and am on a first-name basis with Linda, the day manager. We're on a Laundromat routine right now because we've had some water issues here at Chez Gauthier that we're too exhausted to deal with. It's far, far easier to just go to the Laundromat, especially if I can get my favorite parking space by the front door.

Okay, well, whenever I go to the Laundromat, I get maybe twenty minutes to read. I always bring a book. I got my washers loaded (I only needed three this week), and I can't find my book. I was ninety percent certain I'd placed it on one of the baskets of laundry. I went out to the car twice to see if it had fallen out... lifted up my coat that I'd left on one of the machines...Nothing.

Gail, I said to myself, you didn't put it in one of the washers, did you? Because if you did, you're toast. Once these things are loaded and locked, it's like liftoff time at the Cape. There's no going back.

I was hopeful that I'd just left the book at home, because I couldn't hear any thumping the way you do when you, say, put a cell phone through the wash. I know that sound all too well.

I spent my twenty minutes of reading time with a four-year-old copy of Bon Appetit (I subscribed to Bon Appetit many years ago--a lot more recipes back then) and a back issue of Vanity Fair that included a fashion layout in which all the models had their mouths open and were staring at something off to one side and up. It's hard to believe anyone thought that was attractive.

I unload my two dark loads, which was pretty uneventful. Then it comes time for the megawasher of whites. First off, I find the two knee supports I thought I'd lost because I couldn't find them in my gear bag this morning when I was in the locker room before my taekwondo class. They must have become tangled up in the dobak I wore Tuesday. Huzzah! But then I find this doughy rectangle that was, indeed, my book. Or, we should say, the remains of my book. Except it wasn't my book. It was a book a family member had loaned my a few years back that I was just getting around to reading.

I was worried the book might be out of print, and I'd be unable to replace it. But you will all be relieved to know that that's already taken care of.

The really interesting part of this story--in the event that you haven't been fascinated enough thus far--is that the cover of the book had totally disappeared. It appears to have dissolved.

Makes You Wonder Just What Nonfiction Really Is, Doesn't It?

2010-02-24T19:40:00.004-05:00

Oz and Ends had a nice little discussion going on The Idea That the Story Is True versus, say, it's really being true. It's kind of a mind-boggling concept.

The article J.L. Bell links to includes the following quote: "Mezrich's response to these specifics is to say that everything he describes is accurate, only that it didn't necessarily happen to the people, in the places, or at the times it occurs in the book."

Ah...define "accurate."

Come on, if a writer is going to do this kind of thing, why not just use the material in a piece of really good fiction?

Okay, This Must Mean Something Regarding Twilight's Impact

2010-02-24T10:35:00.002-05:00

I thought this Verizon Twilight Parody was hysterical when I saw it last night. Don't expect to laugh until the last few seconds.

And, of course, you'll probably only get it if you've read the second book or seen the movie.

How Dreadful Am I?

2010-02-23T19:26:00.002-05:00

Yesterday, I managed to foist off Easter dinner on another family member. Easter dinner is traditionally my meal. Why was I so happy, even eager, to see the thing go off to Massachusetts?

Because I don't want to take time off from work to get ready for it!!!

The shopping, the cooking, the cleaning...I most definitely would have had to take Good Friday off to get it all done. It can take me two or three days to get ready for a holiday gathering, easily.

I kind of hate myself, but not all that much.

A Lot To Think About

2010-02-23T19:22:00.001-05:00

I know that a lot of blog writers like to write about books they love. I have to say I'm at least as interested in books like Big Fat Manifesto by Susan Vaught. I can't say I loved it, but there's a lot to think about here, making the book worthy of attention.

I have a lot of trouble reading books about boyfriends and shopping. When a book starts out with the female main character getting together with her girlfriends to go shopping and talk about boyfriends, I have to throw in the towel right away. I know YA is for YAs, and if YA girls, God love them, want to read about boyfriends and shopping, they should most definitely do it. I, however, should most definitely not do it. I have only so many reading years left, and I need to ration them carefully.

Big Fat Manifesto starts out with shopping and a boyfriend, but I got excited about it because there was something more there. Jamie, our female main character, is fat. (Her term, not mine. I definitely prefer obese, which she rejects as too clinicial.) Three hundred plus pounds fat, and she doesn't care who knows it. The shopping trip that begins the book is an undercover operation to research shopping problems for people of weight, research she will use in her column for her high school paper. The column is called Fat Girl, and in it she speaks for all fat girls and fat boys for that matter. Now, as a general rule, devices like letters, journals, newspaper columns, seem sort of forced in books. However, the logic behind this one works. Jamie wants to submit these columns to an agency that awards scholarships.

Jamie/Fat Girl comes across as very strident, one of those people who see weight as a political or social issue. And that was interesting. But I found it sort of odd that this is a book about the hardships faced by the quite seriously obese, but it also maintains some of the boyfriend and shopping stereotypes you find in teen books about...well, boyfriends and shopping. Jamie is part of a three-girlfriend set, which is the mandatory friendship circle in YA, and she is torn between two lovers, which appears so often in books that it must be some kind of fundamental fantasy among human females. I can see why author Vaught wanted to create a set-up in which the so-called fat girl has a normal teenage life. (Yeah, I know. All normal teenage girls have two guys panting after them.) But the basic point of this book is that this girl doesn't have a normal teenage life. She has trouble buying clothes, traveling, even getting her blood pressure taken. I don't think the she's-normal/she's-not-normal thing quite worked.

What's more, I kept wondering why Jamie never tried to lose weight. Toward the end of the book we finally learn that she had tried in the past, but why her attempts all failed was never addressed. I understood why she's heavy. Overeating is part of her family's culture. But I never understood why another character, Burke, was so heavy that he was considered a candidate for bariatric surgery. How did he get into that shape, and why didn't his affluent, highly educated, loving parents try other options for weight loss before allowing him to subject himself to surgery?

The end of the book was a little problematic for me, too. We're told there's a change in Jamie's character, which is always a good thing in a book...dynamic character and all that... But it's hard to see how that character change is going to make any real difference.

I may have been thinking way too much while I was reading this thing, but I wondered if some people would consider Big Fat Manifesto a "problem" novel, one of those how-do-I-deal-with-this-situation books. Did I feel that way about it? If so, are problem books far more readable if you have a dog in the race, so to speak? Because while I have always been within spitting distance of a normal weight, myself, I come from a family that has been marked by obesity and the many, many, many problems that accompany it for four generations. Probably more, but my memory only goes back to the great-aunts and uncle. I will spare you the details, but I could go on at quite some length on the subject.

Thus, while I suspect some readers might find Jamie's Fat Girl columns to be something of a soapbox, I was glued to them. I had to skim the boyfriend sections of the book because, as a general rule, adolescent romance is lost on me. But bring out the fitness discussion, whether I agree with what's said or not, and I am there.

All in all, I'd have to say that for those readers who like their boyfriend and shopping stories to have something a bit more thought provoking going for them, Big Fat Manifesto has quite a bit to offer.

I Actually Have One Of These

2010-02-21T19:59:00.002-05:00

I came to James Hynes' Commonplace-Book by leaping from one blog to another. You know how that happens. His Commonplace-Book is a page on his website on which he "records passages or matters to be especially remembered or referred to, with or without arrangement."

As soon as I saw it, I realized I've had one for years. Mine's a notebook, not a webpage, though, and it's about half full now of quotations on writing, art, and all kinds of painful stuff (sometimes sappy on the subject of pain, too) that I thought meaningful at some point or another. I was inspired to do this a great many years ago when a friend who used to live here in town gave a winter solstice party (She used to do it every year--those were the days!) and presented all the guests with sheets of paper with, essentially "passages or matters to be especially remembered or referred to, with or without arrangement."

I just opened my commonplace book and saw, "Everything you do is screamed at by what you haven't been doing...Grace Paley" Holy Moses. I've been recalling that line over and over again these last few weeks, I just no longer knew where I'd seen it. I still don't know how I came to see it in the first place, but for years it's been in my commonplace book.

Weekend Events

2010-02-20T19:45:00.003-05:00

I made another trip to Simmons College in what is becoming my favorite area of Boston. For now, anyway. While in the city I went to the Museum of Fine Arts. I do not tell you this to bore you with the events of my day. Oh, no. I tell you because I was at the museum to do research for a project I've been thinking about, I believe, for around nine years. I can't be certain because in the past I haven't done a good job dating my writers' workbooks. But the one in which I find the first references to said project appears to be from 2001.

I would write more this evening, but I just had to spend some time watching Johnny Weir's Olympic performances on-line because I missed them during the week. In a world in which there are limited amounts of time, one must make hard choices.