A promise came out of my lips
It came straight from my heart
While my mind is blank before them
You left in a flash
Leaving a hole in our reality
I felt your departure
A wide see away
I still felt it
Even many miles away
I sensed the missing warmth
Infront of you
I cried, I prayed, I promised
And my mind is still blank
It hurts to tell your story though
Failure is easier
Guilt is easier
Your absence can never be replaced
I can never get over it
I can never get over you
Never…
Never.
Some of my #books are on the open, while the rest is still in a suitcase. And yes, that is a plastic shoe organizer :D
Great meal. It’s been too long. I miss asian food. – View on Path.
Great song, especially the live version. – Preview it on Path.
Literary Birthday - 8 February
Happy Birthday, Jules Verne, born 8 February 1828, died 24 March 1905
Five Quotes
- We are of opinion that instead of letting books grow mouldy behind an iron grating, far from the vulgar gaze, it is better to let them wear out by being read.
- Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real.
- I believe cats to be spirits come to earth. A cat, I am sure, could walk on a cloud without coming through.
- Science, my boy, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.
- Well, I feel that we should always put a little art into what we do. It’s better that way.
Verne is referred to as the ‘father of science fiction’. He wrote his first novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon, at 35. He became the second most translated author on earth, writing books about innovations and technological advancements years before they were realities. His best known novels are Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and Around the World in Eighty Days.
by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write
typewriter love. (by beth retro)
Indeed.
“When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.” - Ray Bradbury, 1920 - 2012.
First of all, it’s a daydream, a kind of rumination about a person, a situation, something that occurs only in the mind. Then I start to take notes, summaries of narrative sequences: somebody enters the scene here, leaves there, does this or that. When I start working on the novel itself, I draw up a general outline of the plot—which I never hold to, changing it completely as I go along, but which allows me to get started. Then I start putting it together, without the slightest preoccupation with style, writing and rewriting the same scenes, making up completely contradictory situations …
The raw material helps me, reassures me. But it’s the part of writing I have the hardest time with. When I’m at that stage, I proceed very warily, always unsure of the result. The first version is written in a real state of anxiety. Then once I’ve finished that draft—which can sometimes take a long time; for The War of the End of the World, the first stage lasted almost two years—everything changes. I know then that the story is there, buried in what I call my magma. It’s absolute chaos but the novel is in there, lost in a mass of dead elements, superfluous scenes that will disappear or scenes that are repeated several times from different perspectives, with different characters. It’s very chaotic and makes sense only to me. But the story is born under there. You have to separate it from the rest, clean it up, and that’s the most pleasant part of the work. From then on I am able to work much longer hours without the anxiety and tension that accompanies the writing of that first draft. I think what I love is not the writing itself, but the rewriting, the editing, the correcting … I think it’s the most creative part of writing. I never know when I’m going to finish a story. A piece I thought would only take a few months has sometimes taken me several years to finish. A novel seems finished to me when I start feeling that if I don’t end it soon, it will get the better of me. When I’ve reached saturation, when I’ve had enough, when I just can’t take it anymore, then the story is finished.
First, I write by hand. I always work in the morning, and in the early hours of the day, I always write by hand. Those are the most creative hours. I never work more than two hours like this—my hand gets cramped. Then I start typing what I’ve written, making changes as I go along; this is perhaps the first stage of rewriting. But I always leave a few lines untyped so that the next day, I can start by typing the end of what I’d written the day before. Starting up the typewriter creates a certain dynamic—it’s like a warm-up exercise.
In the morning, making contact again, the anxiety of it … But if you have something mechanical to do, the work has already begun. The machine starts to work. Anyway, I have a very rigorous work schedule. Every morning until two in the afternoon, I stay in my office. These hours are sacred to me. That doesn’t mean I’m always writing; sometimes I’m revising or taking notes. But I remain systematically at work. There are, of course, the good days for creation and the bad ones. But I work every day because even if I don’t have any new ideas, I can spend the time making corrections, revising, taking notes, etcetera … Sometimes I decide to rewrite a finished piece, if only to change the punctuation.
Monday through Saturday, I work on the novel in progress, and I devote Sunday mornings to journalistic work—articles and essays. I try to keep this kind of work within the allotted time of Sunday so that it doesn’t infringe on the creative work of the rest of the week. Sometimes I listen to classical music when I take notes, as long as there’s no singing.
The Paris Review, 1990
Umberto Eco
INTERVIEWER
When in the day do you write?
ECO
There is no rule. For me it would be impossible to have a schedule. It can happen that I start writing at seven o’clock in the morning and I finish at three o’clock at night, stopping only to eat a sandwich. Sometimes I don’t feel the need to write at all.
INTERVIEWER
When you do write, how much do you write every day? Is there no rule for that as well?
ECO
None. Listen, writing doesn’t mean necessarily putting words on a sheet of paper. You can write a chapter while walking or eating.
INTERVIEWER
So every day is different for you?
ECO
If I am in my countryside home, at the top of the hills of Montefeltro, then I have a certain routine. I turn on my computer, I look at my e-mails, I start reading something, and then I write until the afternoon. Later I go to the village, where I have a glass at the bar and read the newspaper. I come back home and I watch TV or a DVD in the evening until eleven, and then I work a little more until one or two o’clock in the morning. There I have a certain routine because I am not interrupted. When I am in Milan or at the university, I am not master of my own time—there is always somebody else deciding what I should do.
INTERVIEWER
What kinds of anxieties do you have when you sit down to write?
ECO
I have no anxieties.
INTERVIEWER
You have no anxieties. So you’re just very excited?
ECO
Before I sit down to write, I am deeply happy.
The Paris Review, 2008
Maya Angelou
I have kept a hotel room in every town I’ve ever lived in. I rent a hotel room for a few months, leave my home at six, and try to be at work by six-thirty. To write, I lie across the bed, so that this elbow is absolutely encrusted at the end, just so rough with callouses. I never allow the hotel people to change the bed, because I never sleep there.
I stay until twelve-thirty or one-thirty in the afternoon, and then I go home and try to breathe; I look at the work around five; I have an orderly dinner—proper, quiet, lovely dinner; and then I go back to work the next morning. Sometimes in hotels I’ll go into the room and there’ll be a note on the floor which says, Dear Miss Angelou, let us change the sheets. We think they are moldy. But I only allow them to come in and empty wastebaskets. I insist that all things are taken off the walls. I don’t want anything in there. I go into the room and I feel as if all my beliefs are suspended. Nothing holds me to anything. No milkmaids, no flowers, nothing. I just want to feel and then when I start to work I’ll remember.
I’ll read something, maybe the Psalms, maybe, again, something from Mr. Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson. And I’ll remember how beautiful, how pliable the language is, how it will lend itself. If you pull it, it says, OK.” I remember that and I start to write. Nathaniel Hawthorne says, “Easy reading is damn hard writing.” I try to pull the language in to such a sharpness that it jumps off the page. It must look easy, but it takes me forever to get it to look so easy.
Of course, there are those critics—New York critics as a rule—who say, Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer. Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language. On an evening like this, looking out at the auditorium, if I had to write this evening from my point of view, I’d see the rust-red used worn velvet seats and the lightness where people’s backs have rubbed against the back of the seat so that it’s a light orange, then the beautiful colors of the people’s faces, the white, pink-white, beige-white, light beige and brown and tan—I would have to look at all that, at all those faces and the way they sit on top of their necks. When I would end up writing after four hours or five hours in my room, it might sound like, It was a rat that sat on a mat. That’s that. Not a cat. But I would continue to play with it and pull at it and say, I love you. Come to me. I love you. It might take me two or three weeks just to describe what I’m seeing now.
The Paris Review, 1990
1
We pray
and the resurrection happens.
Here are the young
again,
sniping and giggling,
tingly as ringing phones.
2
All we ask
is that our thinking
sustain momentum,
identify targets.
The pressure
in my lower back
rising to be recognized
as pain.
The blue triangles
on the rug
repeating.
Coming up,
a discussion
on the uses
of torture.
The fear
that all this
will end.
The fear
that it won’t.
Exploring the magical world of books. Writing, reading and everything in between.
I love most modernists. I worship James Joyce, I think I probably love each bit of his writing for...
Literary Birthday - 8 February
Happy Birthday, Jules Verne, born 8 February 1828, died 24 March...
art
