Elevator to the Gallows - Quote

There's a great line in the 1958 film "Elevator to the Gallows".

"You read. It gives you great ideas."

Great Insults

Webster has a list of some great and rarely used insults.


01. Cockalorum
- a boastful and self-important person; a strutting little fellow


02. Lickspittle
- a fawning subordinate; a suck-up


03. Smellfungus
- an excessively faultfinding person


04. Snollygoster (different from Snollygaster, btw)
- an unprincipled but shrewd person


05. Ninnyhammer
- ninny; simpleton, fool


06. Mumpsimus
- a stubborn person who insists on making an error in spite of being shown that it is wrong


07. Milksop
- an unmanly man; a mollycoddle (a pampered or effeminate boy or man)


08. Hobbledehoy
- an awkward, gawky young man


09. Pettifogger
- shyster; a lawyer whose methods are underhanded or disreputable


10. Mooncalf
- a foolish or absentminded person

E M Forster Quote

EM Forster once said, "I'm quite sure I'm not a great novelist. Because I've only got down onto paper really three types of people: The person I think I am, the people who irritate me and the people I'd like to be. When you get to the really great people, like Tolstoy, you find they can get hold of all types."

Repairing Paperbacks

I recently found a copy of a book I've been looking for for years in an old antique shop, however it's cover was falling off and one signature was almost completely separated. I managed to repair it by scraping away some of the old dried and flaking away glue and then applying a thin layer of regular old Elmer's Glue-All to the inner spine of the cover.
Then I pressed it all together, wrapped it up (but not too tight) with some rubber bands and placed another heavier book atop it and let it sit 24 hours.

It's not a perfect repair by any means but it's much much better than it was before.

Auto-Correct

I loathe auto-correct. Not only will it be responsible for some war in the future it's actively contributing to the dumbing down of the planet much like "tweeting" and Facebook. So here's some funny examples of auto-correct gone awry.

Similar: City of Ember vs The City Under Ground

City of Ember published in 2003 by Jeanne DuPrau.

The City Under Ground published in 1963 by Suzanne Martel.

James Frey Writing Factory

This is quite an interesting read if it's new to you. This isn't the first time it's happened in the literary world either.

Frey saw collective writing as a way to get around the conundrum of having umpteen ideas for clever commercial book series but never enough time to write them. He also liked the idea of applying the model of an art studio along the lines of those run by Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons to the book world.

So he came up with the concept of a book-writing factory that would go beyond the basic model of existing companies such as Alloy, which use teams of writers to produce books to order.

Ideas for books, or ideally series of books, would either come from him or an author recruited to the Full Fathom Five stable. Then Frey would hold the writer's hand, providing critical feedback as they wrote.

The finished product would be sold to publishers and/or film studios, and the writer would be given a share in the royalties as incentive to produce their best work.

Again, this is nothing new but I still have major reservations about the methodology.

Nano Update

I've not officially signed onto NanoWrimo this year but I have been working on the "throw away" novel here and there. I've been too busy to really get some major wordcounts but the few who have read it thus far seem to honestly like it. I'm still sticking with my original terms however, no forethought, no revisions and no limits.

A fourth character appeared and one is turning into someone a little more sinister than I had anticipated. Remember, I'm writing this off the cuff so even I have no idea what's going to happen. The one rule is to hit 70,000+ words. I'm getting there.

The Screenplay

Believe it or not this blog isn't dead. It's just been a tumultuous past three or so years.

I'm kicking around an idea for a screenplay (not my favorite form of storytelling) and jotting down some notes in the fairly helpful Celtx, which is free.

It's a science-horror thing that, while similar to a somewhat recent spate of films, lends itself to a more realistic approach (I hope). We'll see how it goes.

Will I continue to post here? I dunno. It's late and I'm bored.

And no, I have't forgotten the infamous nano-novel.

The Evolution of Verbs

Verbs evolve much in the same fashion as DNA.

For decades, scientists have realised that languages evolve in strikingly similar ways to genes and living things. Their words and grammars change and mutate over time, and new versions slowly rise to dominance while other face extinction.


In this evolutionary analogy, old texts like the Canterbury Tales are the English language’s version of the fossil record. They preserve the existence of words that used to be commonplace before they lost a linguistic Darwinian conflict with other, more popular forms.

The rest of this very interesting article is here.

The Writer's Palette

AN*NO*TA*TION blog has a really interesting idea to keep yourself motivated and/or inspired when you're writing. She calls it a "writer's palette" and I think it's a great idea.

Shelfari

Shelfari makes it easy to see what your friends are reading, what others with similar tastes have enjoyed, and even get and give book recommendations.

And it's free.

It's a lot like Librarything.com's method which I use on this blog. I'm not sure which is better than the other, try both and see :)

Andrew Taylor's Plot Advice

Andrew Taylor has some brief words of advice for creating your plot.

Book Signings

Here's a really fun read about what has happened to some authors when they go on book signing tours.

"The whole time I'm doing my spiel, I'm thinking, 'Cookies, cookies ... how long until I get to eat the cookies?'" Slaughter said, laughing. Then the thought struck her: What if they were poisoned? (She writes thrillers.)

Slaughter eyed the author escort who was spending the day driving her to interviews: "He'll be my canary in the coal mine," she decided. She urged him to eat a cookie.

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.

DIfferent People, Different Perceptions

Something interesting happened to me this week after I hit upon what I think is a really interesting idea for a short story. Part adventure, part creep-me-out I ended up staying up very late jotting down notes for it. The next few days I told a handful of close friends the idea and got different reactions from nearly each one:

One friend said it was boring because nothing happens at the end. There's a build up and then nothing.
Another friend went off the rails and put a comedic spin to the whole story.
Yet another said, "Don't tell me things like that. That's just creepy."
A fourth friend didn't really offer an opinion but helped flesh out the details of the events in the story.

To me the very fact that something doesn't happen at the end of the story and we leave it just as we begin, but with a greater awareness of what's going on is what creeps me out. It's a story that won't be difficult to write mechanically speaking but on subtler levels it still pops in and out of my thoughts every day since I came up with the original idea.

It's like the old saying about how you can't please everyone all the time. Different people have different life experiences and interpret the world through different filters. I suppose the trick to being a successful writer, or painter or musician is not the quality of the work you're making but with how many people it resonates with. Maybe it's an inverse proportion quality vs popularity, I hope not.

Jack Kerouac, Scrolls and Ginsberg

This is just kinda neat because it combines to things that I'm fairly passionate about, writing and photography. Jack Kerouac was photographed by fellow writer Allen Ginsberg.

Also interesting is that the original scroll Kerouac used to write On The Road has been published by Viking so if you want you can finally read the original draft of it. Somehow the idea of writing a novel on a scroll is very appealing to me. I can just see myself now carrying around a scroll and handwriting a novel or short stories on it.

Despite several friends and even two strangers giving me copies of the book I've never managed to read the entire thing which is something I plan on correcting this winter.