Echoes in a Hollow Space

Random quote of the day:

“Love looks forward, hate looks back, anxiety has eyes all over its head.”

—Mignon McLaughlin, The Complete Neurotic’s Notebook



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.

 

Random quote of the day:

“No one looks you straight in the eye when they’re telling the truth.”

—Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead



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.

Random quote of the day:

“This world and all our powers in it are far more awful and beautiful than even we know until some accident reminds us. If you wish to perceive that limitless felicity, limit yourself if only for a moment. If you wish to realise how fearfully and wonderfully God’s image is made, stand on one leg. If you want to realise the splendid vision of all visible things—wink the other eye.”

—G. K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles

 

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.

Random quote of the day:

“Stare. It’s the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.”

—Walker Evans, afterword, Many Are Called, ed. Jeff L. Rosenheim

 

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.

Random quote of the day:

“Above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.”

—Roald Dahl, The Minpins

 

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.

Random quote of the day:

 

“There are people who criticize my work…and say it is not realistic.  But I feel that merely copying the outward appearance of the world would not result in anything real—that is only copying.  I think that to find what is real one must look very closely at one’s world, to search for those things that contribute to this reality which one feels under the surface.  These are few and one uses them to create.  These are the core around which the world moves, the axis on which it turns….To be an artist means to search for, find, and look at these things; to be an artist means never to avert one’s eyes.”

—Akira Kurosawa, quoted in The Films of Akira Kurosawa by Donald Richie

 

 

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.

Not only fascinating, but fricking fascinating:

( How those brown eyes got blue. )

I went to see Dr. Quacky McQuackenstein last night about my eye. I did have a minor abrasion, but I was able to put my lenses back in this morning and everything's been fine.

The thing is, that chip I thought I saw and felt on the left lens? It turned out to be a really bad case of protein build up, and that's why it looked and felt ridged. He polished them up and, boy howdy, I can see better than I've been able to in months. Heh. Heh heh.

Don't get me wrong: I'm glad that a) it's not chipped; b) I didn't have to buy a new lens; c) my eye wasn't seriously hurt (the same eye I poked earlier in the year to give myself a major abrasion, btw). It's just that I did rather a lot of carping to the receptionist about having two chipped lens in two years... and I didn't, actually. Heh. Heh heh.

Speaking of armpit farting monkeys: As kmkibble75 and I were...But no, maybe I'll put this behind a cut. Some people don't like reading about indecorous behavior, and I do have a reputation as a really classy broad to protect. ;-)

( Sanitized for your protection. )

Yes, it does. Especially in the first draft, but sometimes even in the final draft. I have to accept that and move on. There is no perfect thing on earth. Rather than beat myself up for not attaining perfection, I remind myself (on my good days) that we are all striving for enlightenment, and must not cease striving for it, but nirvana does not exist on earth.

And I also realize that if I don't have a crisis at the front end of writing a novel, I will have one in the middle, or at the end. (Please, God, not all three.) It seems to be part of the process.

Night Warrior/Born to Darkness seems the worst of the four I've written, but I wonder if that's colored by not remembering the sturm und drang of the previous experiences? I think the life stress of the year in which I've written it contributed to that feeling, but there were life stressors going on for all of them. It's probably a function of selective memory that this seems worst. I remind myself it took me twelve years of false starts on this novel before I could get it to go. At least the middle went fairly smooth.

Shivery Bones was also a bear to start, had the predictable saggy middle, but my perception is that once I'd passed that, it went well in the last half. Blood Geek went great at the beginning and end, but that middle was soooooo nasty. Heart of Power, my first completed novel, was a real puzzle piece, trying to figure out how to do this for the first time. When I'd finished, I lived for a time under the illusion that I'd finally figured out how to write novels. It wasn't until I tried the next one that I realized each one basically starts at zero. Each time is a different process and has to be figured out in different ways because, hopefully, I'm writing a different book each time with unique problems of its own.

Not what I wanted to realize at the beginning of a project, but there you are. And having realized that, I didn't have quite as big a crisis of faith when it came to novel number three. There were plenty of other crises of faith for me to get over, but . . . it's not a perfect world.


Quote of the day:

"Everybody owned their memories, no matter who was in them. She had a brief vision of the scattering of selves she'd left behind all over the country, snakeskin [selves] in the heads of this person of that, [selves] she had stepped out of but which still held her shape and character."

—Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Past the Size of Dreaming


Ironically, in light of my post of yesterday, this came out of the random quote file today.

In other news: Dr. Dramaqueen last night told me I was lucky. My eye healed completely without any scarring. He was sure I'd have a scar. I'm glad he was wrong. I now have my contacts back and can see again. Huzzah.