March 2012
25 posts
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“Revision is not defined by how many times you go through your paper. Revision is...”
– Today in Profound Statements from Remedial Textbooks (I’m editing a reading comprehension book for struggling high school students). But this is why I never participate in NaNoEdMo and why I’m a fast writer but slow reviser; I can churn out a first draft in a few weeks, but it takes time...
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“Why at this late date are we still reinforcing the idea that women are modest...”
– Molly Oswaks in The Atlantic
Stuff like this always makes me think of this xkcd.
Oswaks also says, “you’ll never be pleased by anybody if you don’t know how to please yourself.” Can I get an amen?
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I may regret posting this, but it seems to me that there’s a difference between writing a derivative work of a novel in the public domain (while publicly acknowledging that this is what you are doing) and writing fanfic for profit publication. Calling Wide Sargasso Sea or A Thousand Acres (or Clueless, for that matter) fanfic is not accurate, at least I don’t think so.I guess you could...
“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t...”
– Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum (via bookmania)
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the new smutty novel →
So 50 Shades. I find the whole phenomenon of the book’s success to be fascinating. I don’t think there’s anything new about what I’m about to say, but here are my thoughts, FWIW. I haven’t read the book. The media coverage of it is nauseating. This Slate article is better than most—it at least acknowledges the book’s origins as Twilight fanfic—but it suffers...
The Handmaid's Tale
laurendane:
So I’m going to be giving away three copies of Margaret Atwood’s magnificent and sadly prophetic THE HANDMAID’S TALE AT MY BLOG today. This had been something I was considering until I read the comments to the reviews at Amazon. Those comments about women wasting their breeding potential with careers and “hordes” of others “outbreeding us” convinced me to go ahead and give away not...
More Reasons Why Some Manuscripts Get Rejected
amy-wilkins:
This is a follow-up to a post I did back in August 2011, Why Some Manuscripts Get Rejected. Since then, I’ve received more editorial reports with some new insights about why some books didn’t make the cut:
Book is way, WAY off the writing guidelines. There was a contemporary romance submitted to a historical romance line, for example.
Poor and unrealistic dialogue.
Historical...
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William Shatner on risktaking and meerkats
William Shatner: It's easy to say no, I'm not going to do that. I'm not leaving the house. I don't - I'm happy with what I've got. No, I'm not going there. No, I don't want a new idea. The old idea is fine. No. And you're safe. You're right in your little hole. You haven't moved, and what you did before is what you're doing now, and that's safe. That's comforting. You're going to die that way. Yes requires you to move out of that hole. Yes is like those little animals that pop their head out...you know, that look around, what, what's going on? I'm back in my hole. But some of them don't go. Some of them, what is that wonderful series where these little animals...
David Bianculli: The meerkats?
William Shatner: Yeah. There you go. It's a meerkat. You want to be a meerkat. We can be a meerkat. Taking risk is the way we should leave our lives.
Violins strung with spider silk sound absolutely...
iheartchaos:
Ever since the invention of the violin, people have been making subtle changes to the shape, the materials and the overal engineering to get the absolute best sound from the instrument. Thanks to modern science, it appears that the best sound one can from violin strings are ones made from woven spider silk.
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My high school had a couple of loaner violins that somehow...
daily affirmation
From the comments in this post:
Self-love isn’t arrogant — it’s the opposite of arrogant. It’s accepting that you are just as human and flawed and wonderful as the people you love, and that you are not so supremely important that your flaws, alone in the universe, are unforgivable.
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