Amanda Oliver

Writer. Editor.

[amandaeoliver]

September 20, 2015 Hip, smart and diverse, the Brooklyn Book Festival is the largest free literary...

Hey all. I’m helping to run the Tumblr for this year’s Brooklyn Book Festival. Go over and give it a follow to learn more about authors, events, organizations, and awesome tote bags coming to the festival.

Also, if you have any part in the festival this year (appearing author? manning a booth? book store who has special events going on? attending and super excited about someone?) send myself or the BKBF Tumblr a message so we can write something up for ya!

xo.

[amandaeoliver]

Who knows how to make love stay? 1. Tell love you are going to Junior's Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if loves stays, it can have half. It will stay. 2. Tell love you want a momento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a moustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay. 3. Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning.”

Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

[waxenneat]

I read several essays about travel and home and all of them make me cry. I am exhausted with constantly bathing myself in nostalgia and rinsing it off with other people’s well-crafted sentences. Cities are beginning to mean less to me. Nostalgia is, too. You can be miserable anywhere. You can be happy, too. I am tired of tallying up my sins and organizing them by zip code.

In Which We Fight For Nothing (at This Recording) - Amanda Oliver  

GIRL. This paragraph. 

(via josianecurtis)

[amandaeoliver]

Decisions, decisions.

[amandaeoliver]

The most important thing a creative per­son can learn professionally is where to draw the red line that separates what you are willing to do, and what you are not. Art suffers the moment other people start paying for it. The more you need the money, the more people will tell you what to do. The less control you will have. The more bullshit you will have to swallow. The less joy it will bring. Know this and plan accordingly.

Hugh MacLeod, Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity

[amandaeoliver]

Here's and There's

It's been a while.

My life has seen a shift from full-time freelance to part-time, from East Coast to West Coast. Today I wrote one personal essay, one newsletter for a real estate agency, two blog posts for eBay, and worked with an editor on a second personal essay. I had two coffees, one shot of espresso, one stupidly delicious double chocolate donut. I watched two episodes of Mad Men season 7 (for sanity's sake), FaceTimed with my boyfriend, FaceTimed with my parents, and had two friend dates. Now I'm onto red wine.

As I write this I realize that this is the life I imagined a year ago when I left the schools. It's good perspective.

Things I recently wrote:

Days Without Earthquakes "Everything is a muted, dusty brown. The trees and ferns that line the roads are covered in layers of it. There is no sign of the island’s many mountains. What I think is lingering mist in the air, I soon realize, is also dust. " Invisible Terrain "You remember why it has gone on so long in this moment, but, for once, it doesn’t change what happened in that chair. Your love is a ticking time bomb now. Your love is something you left in another room." Science Says: Materialism Might Make You a Bad Person (Bible thumpers had a field day with this one!) "Americans have 3 times the space we did 50 years ago…and we’re not any happier. Guess what else we have in excess? 2.2 billion square feet of personal storage." [Infographic] Donating to a Food Pantry? Here’s What to Give

Things I recently read:

How We Write About Love "What do we consider to be a good meeting story? When it involves chance more than effort. You get bonus points if the chance encounter suggests compatibility, like mistakenly wheeling off with each other’s shopping carts at Whole Foods because your items had so much overlap, you got the carts mixed up. The Price I Pay to Write "The best thing that ever happened to my writing life was breaking my ankle."

[amandaeoliver]

I've been on Tumblr for nearly four years and have steadily found great accounts related to writing. Thought I'd share some of my favorites for other writers or aspiring writers.

GENERAL

The Electric Typewriter I am convinced that Dan, the curator of tetw, has found and neatly...

[amandaeoliver]

Hi friends, a few new additions to the list. For now, they're at the ends of each section, denoted by *** and italics. Happy writing and tumblring!

[amandaeoliver]

The worst thing you write is better than the best thing you didn't write.

Unknown

I've been bashing myself over the head with this lately. I think it's important, also, to remember that this doesn't mean you have to publish it somewhere.

[amandaeoliver]

Free Writing and Journalism Courses

I discovered The Poynter Institute and their News University today while searching for online journalism and writing courses. They've got hundreds of interesting courses, and many of them are free or under $25.

I took a self-directed course on AP style, Cleaning Your Copy: Grammar, Style and More, for free earlier today. It's a great refresher course, especially if you're a copywriter and/or copyeditor. I worked on the majority of the course in about an hour, but you're able to jump around the lessons and stop or return at any point.

Other free courses I found and plan to take:

Journalism Fundamentals: Crafts & Values Get me Rewrite: The Craft of Revision

I'd also love to enroll in Write Your Heart Out: The Craft of the Personal Essay with Keith Woods, vice president of diversity in news and operations at NPR, but that course is $449! Anyway, it gives you a good idea of what News University has to offer.

Thought I'd share for anyone else looking for free and quality online writing/journalism courses.

[amandaeoliver]

How to Speed up OS X Yosemite on Older Macs

My Mac is five years old, but still running strong. After updating to Yosemite a few weeks ago I noticed everything running painfully slow, especially with Word and Finder, which I use frequently for my writing. With a little research and some tech trial and error I found two ways to improve it:

1. Disable The Transparent Windows & Effects

Go to the Apple menu and open System Preferences

Go to Accessibility and choose Display

Check the box for Reduce Transparency

This immediately sped things up for me. Super-fancy new macs have the processor power and memory to render transparent windows, titlebars, menus, etc. Older macs have a harder time.

2. Change the Minimize Window Effect

Go to the Apple menu and open System Preferences

Choose Dock 

Next to "Minimize windows using" choose Scale Effect

If, like me, you noticed windows minimizing much slower, this should greatly help. 

I've seen less of what I affectionately call the Rainbow Wheel of Death since making these changes and things are definitely running smoother. Figured I would share for other people going a little nuts with Yosemite!

[amandaeoliver]

I would rather be in Nice.

[amandaeoliver]

Going from crying to laughing fast and hard happens maybe five times in your life and that extreme right turn is the reason why we are alive, and I believe it extends our life by many years.

Amy Poehler, Yes Please

[jessicafurseth]

We seem to reserve a special rage in this world for those whose ability to be unafraid in pursuit of something new extends beyond our own. We begrudge them their strange friends and strange experiences under the guise that we find those things to be dangerous or unclean. But really we resent those people because their courage reminds us of how common and terrified we feel inside. Bravery is a virtue people revere in dead soldiers and then turn to disparage in someone extending her hand to a weirdo. […] This world takes so much from us. It takes our friends and first loves. It takes our parents. It takes our faith. It takes our dignity. It takes our passion. It takes our health. It takes our honesty, and it takes our credulity. To lose so much and still hold onto yourself is perhaps the most complicated task human beings are asked to perform, which is why seeing it done with aplomb is as thrilling as looking at dinosaur bones or seeing a herd of elephants. It’s an honor to exist on Earth with these things.

Cord Jefferson in Medium.  (via jessicafurseth)

[amandaeoliver]

Learning Halloween’s History Helped Me Hate It Less | Ladyclever

PICTURE IT: Halloween 1990. My mother and I had been planning my costume for months. I was going to be Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz — I had the blue-and-white-checked dress, the frilly ankle socks, the picnic basket, the stuffed Toto, and, best of all, handmade ruby red slippers. We had hunted for the perfect heels and spray-painted them red, then my mom spent most of the month of October using the hot glue gun to individually place each red sequin in beautiful rows on my magical shoes. They. were. PERFECT. It was the first year I wasn’t wearing a hand-me-down costume and I couldn’t wait for October 31st.

When Halloween arrived, it snowed.

Not just a little snow — enough snow to require a coat that hid any sign that I was Dorothy, save for my ruby red slippers. And then, sequin by red sequin, the snow took this part of my costume away, too, leaving a trail of Halloween magic behind me.

[amandaeoliver]

Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken / Assateague Island, Maryland

Despite several posted warnings not to touch, feed, or attract the horses, I watched each of the seven cars waiting to pull into the park roll their windows down and allow bold muzzles to say hello. It was hard to imagine them kicking or biting, but four years of horseback riding camp in middle school cautioned me otherwise—any animal we think we can make our pet often works double-time to prove their wildness.

A write-up and some photos over on my website about a Sunday trip to Assateague Island.

[amandaeoliver]

Bits & Pieces | Fall Beginnings Edition

"Each key tells a story. There’s one from the Host Motel, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where Dad found himself during the historic flood of 1972. There’s another from the scary Rodeway Inn in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he knew to put a chair under the doorknob at night. (“But they had great ribs,” he insisted.)"

- Unlocking the Past with a Vintage Souvenir Collection

"Water is of course the most important raw material we have today in the world. It’s a question of whether we should privatise the normal water supply for the population. And there are two different opinions on the matter. The one opinion, which I think is extreme, is represented by the NGOs, who bang on about declaring water a public right. That means as a human being you should have a right to water. That’s an extreme solution. And the other view says water is a foodstuff like any other. and like any other foodstuff it should have a market better. Personally I think it’s better to give foodstuff a market value ... "

- Nestle CEO says You Shouldn't Have the Right to Water

"Please let us not interfere with the others’ work or play, nor let the world see our private joys or disagreements. In this connection I may have to keep some place where I can go to be myself, now and then, for I cannot guarantee to endure at all times the confinements of even an attractive cage. 

I must exact a cruel promise and that is you will let me go in a year if we find no happiness together."

- Amelia Earhart on Marriage

"In terms of reasons that a customer might not come out of the changing room, one possibility is that they’ve actually finished changing, but the clothes are hopelessly unsuitable. It’s happened to me, too: there are some clothes in the world that, the moment you put them on, make you feel so miserable you just want to smash the mirror in front of you as your reflection looks on in surprise. The kind of clothes that make you think You’ve got to be kidding and wonder if perhaps you’ve always looked like a clown, while your knees quiver as you find out that your entire life up until that point has been an embarrassing mistake."

- Why I Can No Longer Look at a Picnic Blanket Without Laughing

photo by Nicholas Kupiak

An ongoing series of what I'm reading.

[bookporn]

Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.

Virginia Woolf (via bookporn)