Ancient Diaries

Frozen communion wine, soft rains that caressed the earth and winds that wrought an all-consuming yellow fog are described meticulously by the 17th century Swiss monk in accounts once consigned to dark ecclesiastical archives.

It's a bit sobering to read the words of someone who lived 300 or so years ago describing their thoughts on the weather and how it makes them feel. That something as simple as a quill and paper could endure throughout the years and bring the thoughts of the long dead to us now.

Jan. 11 was so frightfully cold that all of the communion wine froze," says an entry from 1684 by Brother Josef Dietrich, governor and "weatherman" of the once-powerful Einsiedeln Monastery. "Since I've been an ordained priest, the sacrament has never frozen in the chalice."
"But on Jan. 13 it got even worse and one could say it has never been so cold in human memory," he adds.

Drinking Ink

Everyone's nibbled on pen caps or pencil erasers or even chewed the wood on a pencil and some have even been forced to eat their own books but not many have chugged raw ink before. There is that old saying about feeding the writer inside but I think this kid takes it a little too far.

A boy in Southwest China's Chongqing with an alias of Yang Yang has a unique taste - drinking ink, toilet water, shower gel and things of the sort, the Chongqing Evening News reports.

Tips for Writers

I absolutely love Mac OS X's text clipping feature which I shouldn't because it's been broken for years. However, I still clip gobs of text and the little clippings collect like used tissues in a wastebasket when you're battling the latest bird flu or monkey pox.

I've been sorting though some of the detritus that's eating up space on my hard drives and ran across this tid bit of writer's advice. I have no idea where I clipped it from unfortunately:

- write every day, try to get around two or so pages. Just keep writing and worry about the editing later.
- every scene must have conflict. Introduce it, act it out, and then resolve it.
- Every 'hero' must have an equal and opposite 'villain' opposing them.
- empathy for your characters, NOT sympathy.
- the list of things you have already heard goes on and on and on...

Atlanta Nights: A Novel

I've run across this a few times but only recently did I actually remember what it was called. What's Atlanta Nights you ask?

Atlanta Nights is a collaborative novel created by a group of science fiction and fantasy authors, with the express purpose of producing an unpublishably bad piece of work and testing whether publishing firm PublishAmerica would still accept it, which they did.[1]

Why target PublishAmerica?

It has been the subject of controversy because it has been accused of being a vanity press or author mill by some writers and authors' advocates,[1] despite its claims to be a "traditional" advance- and royalty-paying publisher.

If you sniff around enough it's possible to turn up a downloadable copy. I can't make it through the whole manuscript but reading it in chunks can be a laugh out loud experience.