Listen, See

Charles and Heff -- thanks for the laughs today! Yes, I am incorporating horror elements into the novel and God knows, there was nothing scarier than those MC Hammer pants. I don't know why those became popular -- nothing worse, nothing worse!

I think the worst advice I ever got about writing was that you can spend too much time and "ruin" it. You can take bad advice, certainly, you can lose interest and lose heart, but no one should fear going deeper into the work. I think most of my writing life I suffered from advice that was too vague for me -- things like, Plot is desire. Really? I desire a Dr. Pepper. This is not a plot. Or it could be, but I need more exact advice. And I'm working on it. My plot, like Snoopy's, is thickening. Tomorrow, I'm going to list some books to help people who are struggling like me with the whole "telling a structured story" thing.

The best thing I do when I write is actually see. I get away from the deadening mundane horror of the every day, the ways in which I go through one rote task to another. It requires two things that we sometimes forget to do: listening and seeing. Oh we listen if listening means waiting for our turn to speak. We seldom see what we don't already know. But alas, the world, lustrous and new, awaits our attention.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"By swallowing evil words unsaid, no one has ever harmed his stomach." Winston Churchill

Cocktail Hour
Looking forward to the new Woody Allen -- You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Wednesday!