Echoes in a Hollow Space

2023 books—and life in 2023

2024-01-10T23:58:52Z

I didn't come anywhere near to reading 2023 books. In fact, I finished far fewer than I usually do in a year. My mind was quite restless and there were physical ailments to deal with. And depression. I did quite a bit of picking up and putting down, then picking up again, then putting down again. I read only one romance this year. It was unsatisfying and I just wasn't in the mood for romance. I read a lot of noir: American noir, Scottish (tartan) noir, Swedish noir, Icelandic noir. You get the picture. Oddly enough, my comfort reads. Which means that most of the books I finished were novels. I have always read nonfiction more slowly, in fits and starts. I'm actually quite far along on some of the unfinished books. I just didn't get them across the finish line in 2023. Others I didn't finish because of eye issues: the type was too small or too light. Really need those new glasses! I hope to take care of that soon. And no, Kindle and other digital is not the answer. That brings on it's own form of eye strain, not to mention neck and shoulder strain. Plus, I just don't like reading digitally. There's something so wonderfully sensual about holding a paper book in my hands.

My creativity has also been quite hit and miss. But I did finally manage to write The End on the zero draft of my novel Carmina, which I struggled for a long time to finish. It's a complete mess and will need heavy revision and it's possibly the worst thing I've ever written. (Then again, I think that at the completion of every project.) But none of that matters. The novel will be going into a metaphorical trunk for a while until I can gain some perspective. In the meantime, I will work on something else (hopefully). I haven't decided what yet but the good news is that I have a number of projects to choose from.

One of the books I didn't finish was Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce. I absolutely loved it but about halfway through I had to stop. You see, I was attempting to write my own fairy novel (see above) and Joyce's wonderful book was eating my head. I needed to put it down and concentrate on my own vision of things fairy. I look forward to getting back to Joyce in 2024. This was also somewhat the case with Sylvia Townsend Warner's Kingdoms of Elfin.

The physical ailments remain a challenge but if they ease up a bit—or if I come to a place of acceptance and adaptation—I can still get things done. The creativity certainly helps with my neurosis and depression—one vital reason to keep pursuing it. I want to self-publish at some point (I've totally given up on traditional publishing), but I've had to kick that particular can down the road for a while for various reasons. Still, I live in hope.

And so, on to my unimpressive reading list.

Books Finished in 2023

1. An Echo in the Blood by Diana Gabaldon (reread)
2. Let It Bleed by Ian Rankin
3. Other Birds by Sarah Addison Allen
4. The Wailing Wind by Tony Hillerman
5. Encore In Death by JD Robb
6. The Night Singer by Johanna Mo
7. 21st Century Fairy by Morgan Daimler
8. The Shadow Lily by Johanna Mo
9. Midnight Duet by Jen Comfort
10. The Living Stones by Ithell Colquhoun
11. Palace of the Drowned by Christine Mangan
12. The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison
13. A Tempest At Sea by Sherry Thomas
14. Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone by Diana Gabsldon (reread)
15. Execution Dock by Anne Perry
16. Black and Blue by Ian Rankin
17. The Hanging Garden by Ian Rankin
18. Honeytrap by Astor Glenn Grey
19. The Black Echo by Michael Connelly
20. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
21. Sinister Pig by Tony Hillerman
22. The Diviner's Tale by Bradford Morrow
23. Payback In Death by JD Robb
24. Case Histories by Kate Atkinson
25. The Creak On the Stairs by Ava Bjorg Aegisdottir
26. Dead Souls by Ian Rankin
27. Unlikely Animals by Annie Hartnett
28. Faces Under Water by Tanith Lee (reread)
29. Set in Darkness by Ian Rankin

Books Started or Continued in 2023

1. Spirits of Blood, Spirits of Breath by Barbara Alice Mann

2. The Magician by W. Somerset Maugham (restart) (abandoned) - the story was interesting but I kept boincing off the early 20th century prose so I gave up on it

3. Before the Great Spirit by Julian Rice

4. Committee of Sleep by Deidre Barrett

5. The Humans by Matt Haig

6. Hokuloa Road by Elizabeth Hand (restart)

7. The Drifter by Nick Petrie

8. Half American: The Herioic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad by Matthew F. Delmont

9. Hekate In Ancient Greek Religion by Robert Von Rudolph

10. The Vengeful Djinn by Rosemary Guiley and Philip Imbrogno

11. Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliff (reread)

12. Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce

13. The Eighth Detective by Alex Pavesi

14. The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

15. Mischief Acts by Zoe Gilbert

16. Time Loops by Eric Wargo

17. Magical Folk ed. by Simon Young and Ceri Houlbrook (essays)

18. Darkness Walks by Jason Offutt

19. Forbidden Science #1 by Jacques Vallee

20. Hesiod tr. by Richard Latimore

21. Kingdoms of Elfin by Sylvia Townsend Warner - I read many of these stories years ago when they were published
in The New Yorker and am slowly getting reacquainted with them

22. One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson (finished this last night)

23. The Lost King by Philippa Langley and Michael Jones

24. The Eighth Tower by John A. Keel

25. Devoted to Death by R. Andrew Chesnut

26. The Bookseller of Inverness by S.G. MacLean (finished this a couple of nights ago)

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A list of limitations

2023-02-16T22:17:30Z

I have a Sun in Virgo and Mars in Virgo. I have a Moon in Pisces in almost pinpoint opposition to my Sun. I also have a Pisces Ascendant. The Pisces part of my brain spends a lot of time trying to trick the Virgo part into staying out of its way so it can get on with its creative work. One of the methods it employs is list making.

I am constantly making obsessive lists that keep track of things, from the mundane to the esoteric. Like a catalog of the books I've read or the books I started or the books I've completed. Or the first lines of books I pick up during the course of a year. Or lists of synchronicities. Or quotes--many, many quotes. Or screenshots from Postcards From the Past on Twitter of places I've visited myself. Or... Well, any number of lists that really no one should care about but me (and perhaps even I shouldn't care about).

But that Virgo part of my brain is rather like the legend of the mythological monster who can be tricked into stillness by throwing a bunch of seeds on the ground so that the obsessive creature is forced to stop and count each seed before moving on. Virgo has many fine qualities but its left brain proclivities tend to get in the way sometimes when I just need to go deep and dream my dreams and put those dreams on the page. With militant Mars in Virgo those tendencies can be rather extreme. Hence, the lists.

My mother, who was borderline OCD, may also have been some influence in this regard. There may be a genetic/nurture as well as an astrological component to my obsessive drive towards list making. Lists are a fairly harmless way of curtailing that dragon. Certainly my housekeeping does not benefit from this Virgoan drive. I could wish that it did a bit more as my current environment is suffering greatly from the Pisces tendency towards sloth and distraction and love of chaos.

The housekeeping also suffers greatly from my lack of mobility, of course. With my bad legs I can have a productive day of cleaning up but the next day will most likely be taken up communing with my heating pad. Maybe more than one day. I would like to say I have resolved myself to this but I have not. I was always strong and energetic and could work my way through a lot of crap in a short period of time (after spending a longer time letting things pile up) but those days are gone. I have to find a new way of doing things and I admit that I'm still flailing around trying to find it.

I am trying to be satisfied with my mantra of "do something then rest" but it's hard to accept limitations. Still, I don't have much choice in the matter. Accepting limitations is not accepting defeat and I am trying diligently to teach myself that and to work within my new parameters. It is a work in progress, and like any organic WIP it's making it up as I go, striving to reach the realization of the dream on the page.

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Fire

2022-12-19T23:17:19Z

Random quote of the day:

“As an artist, you need the naysayers and the nonbelievers to add fuel to your creative fire."

―Ice-T, Ice: A Memoir of Gangster Life and Redemption—from South Central to Hollywood

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Bert and Ernie, Celine Dion, or the Band of the Coldstream Guards. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

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Creative

2022-05-23T21:36:36Z

Random quote of the day:

“The creative spirit creates with whatever materials are present. With food, with children, with building blocks, with speech, with thoughts, with pigment, with an umbrella, or a wineglass, or a torch.”

—M. C. Richards, Centering: In Pottery, Poetry, and the Person

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Desus and Mero, Beyoncé, or the Marine Corps Marching Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

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Create

2022-03-11T23:25:14Z

Random quote of the day:

“Ignoring the impulse to create is not an acceptable way to spend however much life remains.”

—Amy Goldman Koss, “Art and Arthritis,” The Los Angeles Times, 7/28/19

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Desus and Mero, Beyoncé, or the Marine Corps Marching Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

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Mistake

2021-06-23T21:44:58Z

Random quote of the day:

“Nothing will stop you being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake.”

—John Cleese, Video Arts speech, January 23, 1991

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Desus and Mero, Beyoncé, or the Marine Corps Marching Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

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Mysteries

2021-03-10T21:56:48Z

Random quote of the day:

“The creative process is a process of surrender, not control. Mystery is at the heart of creativity. That, and surprise.”

—Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Desus and Mero, Beyoncé, or the Marine Corps Marching Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

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Limitations

2020-09-21T21:41:53Z

Random quote of the day:

“I tend to approach characters not based on ethnicity but on some unique individual qualities, and I've set my whole life that way. I don't want any sort of limitations imposed on my work. If you truly want to be a creative person, you can't limit yourself.”

—Billy Dee Williams, The SyFy Wire, January 30, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Key and Peele, Celine Dion, or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

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Box

2020-08-20T20:50:07Z

Random quote of the day:

“There’s this little box that African-American actors have to work in, in the first place, and I was able to rise above that box. I could have done a bunch of movies where I stayed as the Axel Foley or Reggie Hammond persona. But I didn’t want to be doing the same thing all the time. Every now and then, you crash and burn, but that’s part of it.”

—Eddie Murphy, Rolling Stone, November 9, 2011

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Key and Peele, Celine Dion, or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

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Gratitude

2020-08-19T20:14:58Z

Random quote of the day:

“When we wake up in the morning we are inspired to do some certain thing and we do do it. The difficulty lies in the fact that it may turn out well or it may not turn out well. If it turns out well we have a tendency to think that we have successfully followed our inspiration and if it does not turn out well we have a tendency to think that we have lost our inspiration. But that is not true. There is successful work and work that fails but all of it is inspired.”

—Agnes Martin, “On the Perfection Underlying Life,” lecture, Institute of Contemporary Art, February 14, 1973

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Key and Peele, Celine Dion, or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

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Parallels within parallels

2020-01-12T23:23:13Z

I’ve been doing some clean-up work on my blog, trying to eliminate duplications and other messes that happened long ago when I transferred it from LJ to Dreamwidth. It’s never been a high-priority thing, but something I dip into when I’m in the mood to do something fairly mindless (and kidding myself it’s productive). (Or as a time waster instead of writing, but we won’t talk about that.)

I ran across an old post from June of 2011 which was just at the beginning of my caregiving for my mother when she was on peritoneal dialysis and still able to do most things for herself. That changed in September of that year when she had her stroke—but that’s not the point of this post. Apparently, in June I had just finished my last read through/clean up of my second completed novel, Blood Geek. I think maybe I had the idea of self-publishing. That idea was overtaken by my mother’s illness and never came about. It’s just as well, I suppose. It was a decent effort, but not my best work.

But that’s not the point of this post, either. In the above-referenced post I was talking about the strange parallel of writing a novel (almost twenty years prior at that point) about a woman whose early life had been constrained by caring for her sick mother. She was just about to break free and live life for herself. In 2011 I was rather amazed by the “haunting echo, now that I am helping to care for my own mother, that keeps bouncing through the chambers of my heart. It’s a little disturbing. I knew more than I thought I knew back then.” But in June of 2011 I had no idea, really, of what was to come, how consuming caregiving would be, how it would leave no room for anything but working and caring, how it squeezed out all time for anything like creativity.

But again, that’s not the point of this post. This is, this paragraph I came across:

And now I am in a different phase of my life. I have no vision for what comes next. I can’t see that far beyond the day-to-day. I do know that when I get back to writing something new again, I don’t want it to echo that day-to-day in the slightest. Which is not to say I might not use some of these characters again—in fact, I fully intend to. But they will be engaged in some other enterprise, something that blows the doors open to other worlds with no fences.

What blows the doors off my mind on this day, in 2020, is that I am writing new things again, and the new novel I’m writing does involve some of the same characters—in a whole new enterprise, a whole new process of growth and transformation. (And I am going through that transformation with them.) I haven’t really thought about these characters much in the last nine years, although one of them, Carmina, kept popping up now and then to insist she had a story I really needed to tell. I poked at her story over the years, but beyond the first two chapters, nothing gelled. I didn’t start last year thinking she will be the one. I started last year just trying to write something, anything. And then I wrote a completely different novel in a completely different universe. Also one I’d used before, but nothing to do with these characters.

Yet here I am. Happy and more than a little surprised that this fall Carmina’s story finally took off.

And that’s why I say that no story I have ever committed to paper or electrons (or, hell, even the ones that knock around in my head that I haven’t bothered to do that with) is every truly dead—until I am. Or until my brain blows out. Even my first completed novel, which if I have anything to say about it will never see the light of day, has produced nuggets that I have mined and used in later books. Like the clerk in the dead parrot sketch of Monty Python fame keeps insisting, these stories are not dead. Even if I’m not aware of them on a conscious level, they’re still in there. Resting.

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Creativity

2019-12-18T20:46:29Z

Random quote of the day:

“Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.”

—John Cleese, Video Arts speech, 23 January 1991

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Key and Peele, Celine Dion, or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

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Musings

2019-09-14T20:08:30Z

Kamala Harris was right in the Democratic debate to bring everything back to Trump each time. He's the real enemy here. There were Democrats on that stage who I like better than others but any one of them would be a better president than Donald Trump. But I think I've watched my last debate. I'm sure my Twitter timeline will be relieved, as I couldn’t stop live tweeting. I've watched all the debates so far and my opinion hasn't changed much. I have certain people I'd be quite unhappy to vote for but several of the remaining candidates I'd vote for happily. #AnyDem

An interesting side note: I’ve said uncomplimentary things about several of the candidates but the only time trolls have come after me is when I’ve said uncomplimentary things about Tulsi Gabbard. I am not the only one who has had this experience. And I am such small potatoes on Twitter. They must be very well organized. Good thing I don't respond to trolls. It's no fun for them if you don't engage and they stop playing.

Russian bot, Russian bot
Fly away home—
Your pants are on fire
And you're all Putin owned.
*
Yes, there are many tragedies in the world we need to pay attention to, but that doesn't mean we can't take a day to remember the murder of nearly 3000 innocent souls. Politicizing that is pretty reprehensible, no matter which side of the debate it comes from. Especially since 9/11 is an ongoing tragedy. People are still dying as a consequence of what happened that day. In honoring the fallen of 9/11 we are also honoring those who still struggle with illness and death because of it.
*
Every act of artistic creation is also an offering to the Universe.
*
Dear Everybody Who Needs Money From Me: I'd love to donate to your project/cause/campaign but I'm on a fixed income. Doesn't mean I won't donate when I can but if I donate to one thing I probably won't be able to give to another thing that same month. My sincere best wishes to you.
*
Even at my advanced age I can still sing all the lyrics of every Beatles song. You never forget the things you memorized in your youth. Unfortunately, this is also true of every commercial jingle I heard when I was young.
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Whenever I'm doing a piece of art and I say to myself, "I'll just eyeball it," every time I hear Louis Gossett Jr. saying, "Don't be eyeballin' me, boy." Every. Fricking. Time.
*
I was reading about the psychological theory of behaviorism one afternoon, but each time the notifications rang on my phone I picked it up to look. The irony of this was not lost on me.
*
I hit the wall of character motivation on the novel and had a painful slog trying to get through it. I wasn’t believing this character's reason for acting as he does so I couldn’t expect anyone else would. I did a partial re-read and reorganization to see if that would shake anything loose and after some reworking I came unstuck—at least for that particular problem. I'm not sure that part of the novel works, but it works for now, and I'm moving forward.

But not quickly. I pushed through a major hump a few days ago so at least that section of the story is finished. I’m past the 90k mark and closing in on the end of the book, but I still have a ways to go. I’ve never worked well from outlines. They usually kill an idea dead for me. Part of the problem with the current novel is that I know everything that happens until the end rather than making it up as I go along and that’s turned it into a real slog. However, I feel I have to finish this one, not only because I’ve come so far, but for the sake of my own spirit. I need to finish a substantial piece of work. To prove something to myself, I guess. That I’m still a writer?

I look forward to typing The End and putting this one in the trunk for a while and moving on to something else. It’s not my best work. Most writers I know feel that way at the conclusion of a novel, but in this case I may be write. Er, right.

Until I reread it many months hence, of course, and temporarily suffer from the “this is the best thing I’ve ever done” delusion.
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Euphomet, Jim Perry’s high strangeness podcast, has become my very favoritest. There are many fine podcasts out there, but I love Jim's sensibility and his openly inquisitive tone. Check it out here.

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Pedestal

2019-04-10T18:59:29Z

Random quote of the day:

“Never put me on a pedestal. When someone’s on a pedestal, there’s no creativity.”

—Stanley Kubrick, quoted by Nicole Kidman, The Hollywood Reporter, 11/2/12

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Laurel and Hardy, Ariana Grande, or the Salvation Army Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

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Opening up

2018-12-13T18:59:30Z

Random quote of the day:

“Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.”

—Henry Miller, Sexus: The Rosy Crucifixion, Book I

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

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All the time in the world

2018-11-05T22:53:27Z

It’s a funny thing about having all the time in the world: there still aren’t enough hours in the day.

As of October 1, I am no longer a working woman. But after a lifetime of holding down a job it’s been surprisingly difficult to turn off the internal dictator who berates me regularly with what I should be doing with my time. She doesn’t listen when I tell her that I’m allowed to do whatever I want. Her shoulds revolve around both working on the house and creative work and it’s a never-ending cycle of guilt.

As a friend pointed out, it’s only been a month. I need time to depressurize from what was frankly a difficult few years of forcing myself to get up and go to work when I felt lousy. I was so completely drained of energy that my Saturdays were usually a full body collapse and Sundays the only day of the week when I could accomplish anything. Now I have a whole week of weekends. At first, I did the full body collapse and it was difficult to get over the feeling that I was on a prolonged vacation and would have to return to the unbearable slog eventually. I’m just now beginning to get over that feeling, but I’m still not completely there yet.

I’ve utterly reset my body clock to my natural state of being up until the wee small hours and sleeping in late and I’m finally to the point of not needing 11-12 hours of sleep a night. I’m getting by on a mere 9 hours now and hope to get back to a conventional 8. Curiously, the dictator has never berated me about that (well, hardly ever). Even she recognized that I desperately needed the rest.

But as soon as I am out of bed, she starts with the shoulds. Clean this, write that, pick up this, finish that craft project, on and on and on.

What she doesn’t realize, and what I’ve only recently realized on a conscious level myself, was that I needed to completely dismantle the old structure of my life. What worked then is not going to work now. Once that is thoroughly dismantled, I can start building it back up again from the ground floor. Structure and schedules are necessary things for any kind of productivity. But I have to rebuild them to match my new reality.

Oh reality, you’re such a tricky bastard.

Another friend of mine retired July 1 and we’ve had many discussions about this. Like me, when she first retired she berated herself on a regular basis for not using the luxury of time in a better fashion. Like me, she’d been longing for years to get back to a place where she had enough energy to do her creative work. Because she didn’t immediately jump into the fray and start doing, she sent herself many hate messages. I’m happy to report her creative life has come back online—but it took a while of not doing anything, of stripping herself down and rebuilding herself to get that going.

The thing about having all the time in the world is that it takes time to be able to use it well. It’s a process like anything else. Artists are supposed to understand about process, but sometimes we fool ourselves, or forget, or get locked into a way of doing things that no longer works for us. What nobody tells you (because it’s not a conspiracy of silence but something you have to discover on your own) is that every artist who wants to keep doing art will periodically have to reinvent themselves. And it’s not as if I didn’t know this! I’ve had to reinvent my reason for writing and doing art a couple of times in my life, and I had conveniently forgotten that birthing a new process is painful. (One does tend to gloss over the icky bits.)

As my friend said, “There’s most likely growth going on subliminally that will manifest down the road.”

Ah yes, the growth thing. It’s so hard, I whine.

Being is becoming, as many a philosopher has pointed out. We are in a constant state of being until we be no more. That’s what the living do, taking it day by day, trying to build a productive life on the ash heap of illusion and ticking time. I don’t know why I thought having all the time in the world would make that any easier. Because, really, we don’t have all the time in the world. That is the biggest illusion of all. The trick is, I think, not to fear time running out so much that it freezes us in place or makes us set up panicky structures that don’t work for us.

Being is becoming. Becoming is taking the time to find that golden thread that pulls us along our true path.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

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Let down the bucket

2018-07-17T19:01:57Z

Random quote of the day:

“In the creative state a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences, and out of the mixture he makes a work of art.”

—E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Orville and Wilbur, Katy Perry, or the Avengers. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

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Creative mystery

2018-06-20T17:42:58Z

Random quote of the day:

“It has baffled most people who’ve tried to analyze just what takes place in the creative process. Even Freud, who gave up on almost nothing, seemed to have given up on that. It remains mysterious; and it’s probably a good thing that it does. It may be that the mystery is among the things that attract those of us who write.”

—John Hersey, The Paris Review, Summer-Fall 1986, No. 100

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

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Doubts

2017-07-21T16:35:36Z

Random quote of the day:

“A writer must never speak of his doubts regarding his creation. It would be too easy to answer him: “Who is forcing you to create? If it is such constant anguish, why do you endure it?” Doubts are the most intimate thing about us. Never speak of one’s doubts, whatever they may be.”

—Albert Camus, Notebooks 1942-1951, tr. Justin O’Brien

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Lucy and Ethel, Justin Bieber, or the Kardashian Klan. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

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Obstacles

2016-09-08T20:04:28Z

Random quote of the day:

“You cannot govern the creative impulse. About all you can do is eliminate obstacles and smooth the way for it.”

—Kimon Nicolaides, The Natural Way to Draw—A Working Plan for Art Study

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

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Write

2015-06-19T17:15:22Z

Random quote of the day:

“The best thing is to write anything, anything at all that comes into your mind, until gradually there is a calm and creative day.”

—Stephen Spender, as quoted in The Lie That Tells a Truth: A Guide to Writing Fiction by John Defresne

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

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Poisoned reason

2015-01-15T17:30:26Z

Random quote of the day:

“Ideas are poison. The more you reason, the less you create.”

—Raymond Chandler, letter to Charles Morton, 28 October 1947

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

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Creation

2014-07-31T17:22:12Z

Random quote of the day:

“What I cannot create, I do not understand.”

—Richard Feynman, on his blackboard at the time of death in 1988, as quoted in The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

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Crazy for loving neu(trinos)

2012-06-11T16:23:52Z

Random quote of the day:

“We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”

—Niels Bohr to Wolfgang Pauli regarding the Heisenberg-Pauli nonlinear theory of elementary particles, quoted in Symposisum on Basic Research by Dael Lee Wolfle

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

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Playful job

2011-02-18T17:14:18Z

Random quote of the day:

“If you ever want to find out just how uninteresting you really are, get a job where the quality and frequency of your thoughts determine your livelihood. I’ve found that the only way I can keep writing every day, year after year, is to let my mind wander into new territories. To do that, I’ve had to cultivate a kind of mental playfulness.”

—Bill Watterson, “Some Thoughts On the Real World By One Who Glimpsed It and Fled,” Kenyon College Commencement, May 20, 1990

You can read the entire commencement speech here. Highly recommended.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

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