dragswolf

a journal

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Not So Timeless After All: Pooh, Winnie the.

Winnie the Pooh's obituary. Funeral services to be held Friday.

Lifelong connoisseur of hunny, Winnie-the-Pooh was known to friends and family alike as a creature of habit, and his death came as no surprise to his husband, Piglet, who commented tearfully that “his diabetes just got out of control. I told him and told him to eat more healthfully, but he wouldn’t.”

Though known in his younger days as a failed robber, especially famous for his attempt at burgling Mayor Rabbit’s underground bunker, Bear is nevertheless remembered fondly by many.

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“Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.”

C.S. Lewis

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“If, every time you put down a sentence, you go over it unhurriedly, you’ll learn to pick up on any ambiguities or confusion. To fix them, just shuffle and reshuffle the elements of the sentence, as if you were putting together a bouquet of flowers.”

Ben Yagoda. “How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoid Them.” Riverhead.

What a great illustration for editing.

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“I think most Native American literature is unreadable by the vast majority of Native Americans,” Sherman Alexie said in a 2001 interview with the Iowa Review. “If it’s not accessible to Indians, then how can it be Native American literature?”

Literature about American Indians is not the same as literature by American Indians.

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The tactile experience of a book aids this process, from the thickness of the pages in your hands as you progress through the story to the placement of a word on the page. Mangen hypothesizes that the difference for Kindle readers "might have something to do with the fact that the fixity of a text on paper, and this very gradual unfolding of paper as you progress through a story is some kind of sensory offload, supporting the visual sense of progress when you're reading."

Lately, I've enjoyed reading physical books more than ebooks. I like the feel of them and knowing where I am in the book by sight. Basically, everything this article says. The one thing ebooks do better than physical is highlighting and notes. I can see a list of all my annotations easily with an ebook rather than having to thumb through a book and then type out my highlights. Book reviews are much easier with an ebook.

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“Small trees had attacked my parents’ house at the foundation.”

What an emotional first few chapters! The first line of the book–quoted above–foreshadows some trouble to come. The first chapter held me in suspense to figure out just what was happening. Did it do so for you as well, or were you able to quickly figure out what happened? I didn’t pick up just what happened until the kid did.

An amazing book I'm working through over at ADUIDE.

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Building a body of work (or a life) is all about the slow accumulation of a day’s worth of effort over time. Writing a page each day doesn’t seem like much, but do it for 365 days and you have enough to fill a novel.

I get overwhelmed easily. Remembering to keep things simple and light on a daily basis allows for the work to get done in a less-stressed manner. A lot of work broken up into smaller tasks is smart work.

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Rob and Kristen Bell's book on marriage–The Zimzum of Love–looks and sounds really interesting, but I was more interested in the aesthetics of their office than what they were saying.

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LUMINOUS began its life in an extra large Moleskine notebook, born page by page at the Barnes & Noble cafe near my office. For a few hours each morning, I sat in an uncomfortable chair–no doubt designed to turn one’s ass numb as motivation to eat his scone and get the hell out–and built my little world one pen stroke at a time. I thought I knew what I was getting into. I wrote about the joys of going analog and how computers made things too easy. Some of that still holds water. Other parts are a steaming pile of horsepuckey. Allow me to explain.

I have romantic feelings about writing a novel in a notebook. Is that weird? The act is reminiscent of legendary authors who wrote their books in notebooks at a café in Paris. Writer’s are sentimental creatures, so why not have a high view of the notebook? Or the typewriter, as that seems to be coming back as well.

I understand where the writer is coming from as he states his reasons for writing his novel by hand:

Because a notebook is lighter than a laptop, or even an iPad. Because I don’t have to worry about battery life, or booting up, or waking from sleep. Because I’m not distracted by the mere idea of Twitter, Wikipedia rabbit holes, or cat videos. Because no backup solution is flawless, but paper is a whole lot more resilient than iCloud/Dropbox/a hard drive. And because I have a new baby and a typewriter makes too much noise.

I see the allure in all this, but when it comes time to write I always revert back to a computer. Why? Because I’m a perfectionist and I like the delete button. I like the ability to get rid of terrible writing when I need to. I like that when I’m finished with a page I have a clearly organized view of my writing instead of a scribbled-on and heavily annotated page of prose. I like that I can type almost as fast as my mind moves. I cannot write that fast and feel I lose ideas in the process.

Even though I have these feelings about writing a book in a notebook, I’ll probably never end up doing it. Notebooks are romantic, but computers are practical.

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To Lucy Barfield My Dear Lucy, I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand, a word you say, but I shall still be your affectionate Godfather, C. S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

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Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining "It's not fair" before you can say Jack Robinson.

Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

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Am I Getting Old?

“In fact, when I first got into texting with my twenty-two-year-old daughter, Maria, I was ending sentences with periods, as is my wont. She told me to use either exclamation points or nothing: the periods made it seem that I was being ironic or pointedly unenthusiastic”

Excerpt From: Yagoda, Ben. “How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoid Them”

Is this true about punctuation marks and texting? Is not knowing this a sign I’m getting old?

I always attempt to use proper grammar in everything. I can spend 20 minutes reading and re-reading an email to make sure there are no mistakes. Then I read the email after I sent it and fret over the errors I missed. I may have a problem.

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Review: The Pursuit of Perfection And How It Harms Writers

“But we’re working on our careers, which are a major part of our lives. We’re not working on our novel. We’re working on a novel. And that’s the biggest difference of all.”

Excerpt From: Kristine Kathryn Rusch. The Pursuit of Perfection: A WMG Writer’s Guide.

I recently told Megan that I wanted to take part in this year’s NaNoWriMo so I can start building confidence in writing fiction. To that she said: “Well, you can’t sell what you don’t write.” That is, of course, true.

I find I procrastinate in my writing because I need everything I do to be perfect. I self-edit everything I write, from texts to emails, and I find that this method makes writing exhausting. So, instead of writing, I think about writing. Instead of taking the time to write rough draft after rough draft, I read books on grammar to better my writing. This is not a good way to become a better writer.

I bought several indie books from StoryBundle for NaNoWriMo and tonight read The Pursuit of Perfection And How It Harms Writers: A WMG Writer’s Guide by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. A short book that is based on three blog posts by Rusch, The Pursuit of Perfection is a book for artists who struggle with self-doubt brought on by their mentors or critique groups.

The main point of the book is that writers fail because they focus on perfection rather than a writing career. Writers are too fixated on creating the perfect novel that they don’t take the necessary jumps to release their work and learn as they go. This method has stiffled writers for many years because writers look at their writing solely as craft and not as a business.

Rusch goes on to explain that the reason writers become successful is because they release their work and they improve as they go. Stephen King has numerous works to his name and he improves in his craft with each novel he writes.

He doesn’t sit around and read books about writing. He writes.

Artists are sentimental and sensitive creatures, so releasing a work becomes difficult. Too much time is taken on one work and other potential efforts are lost. When an artist focuses on perfection over their career, they become stagnant.

Rusch makes great points throughout her book and proves to be an innovative thinker when it comes to cultivating an artistic career. Rusch’s focus is on writers, but any artist would benefit from the principles she shares.

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“An emotionally unintelligent father bade his emotionally neglected sons an emotionally inadequate farewell.”

 C.S. Lewis, A Life by Alister McGrath.