My friend Carolyn always supplies me with great quotes, and this one has been taped above my computer for quite a while now:
If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. [...]
I got home from Oregon late, late last night, and what should I find waiting for me? A huge box of chocolates, just like the kind I’ll send you if you win my Monthly Free Chocolate Drawing.
I decided to send it to myself to make sure it’s of the quality I think you deserve. [...]
Loved this post from writer Diana Peterfreund:
But more importantly, what I’m really looking for in a critque is not just to fix the bad stuff, but to make the good stuff better. I’ve been thinking a lot about that old critiquing maxim, “Don’t just say everything’s good.” I used to think that meant pointing out [...]
The Oregon novel workshop wrapped up tonight around 11:00. We’re all overtired and oversugared, and also supremely motivated.
Here are our take-away quotes to paste above our computers.
From Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way: Evict that which does not serve the goal of excellence.
That means getting enough sleep to write well [...]
So I’m up here in Oregon now, in a little town on the coast (where they have cards in the hotel rooms saying, “What to do in case of a tsunami”–excuse me? I live in the desert. We don’t know from tsunamis). I came all this way for the last novel workshop [...]
Garrison Keillor may seem like a sweet, cuddly guy when you hear him on the radio doing A Prairie Home Companion, but I just came across this column by him, and the man has BITE.
A lot of people, including some writers, have a few strange and melodramatic ideas about what it means to be a [...]
As some of you may know, the big plagiarism scandal involving Kaavya Viswanathan (the Opal Mehta book) has now expanded, as more authors’ work has been discovered copied within her pages.
Meg Cabot is one of those authors. And yesterday her blog had one of the classiest responses to plagiarism you’ll ever read. Check [...]
Yesterday we were confessing our guilty tv pleasures, today it’s paperback books.
We’re heading into summer. And in keeping with our books vs. gas discussion, we’ll keep the vacation reading cheap. So here’s the question: what book can we buy right now in paperback that will take us away from life as we [...]
Okay, I just finished watching the tape of last night’s Lost (since I had to watch Texas Ranch House last night instead–all these desperate choices), and here’s the question of the moment:
As my friend and Lost expert Suzi pointed out to me in a phone call not five seconds ago, the whole show is filled [...]
I both admire and am appalled by people who don’t own a TV. You may have noticed in the comments to my post “The 50-novel challenge” that my web designer, BJ, is one of those people. Here I am, touting the thrill and challenge of reading 50 novels in a year, and BJ [...]