Category: writing
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Learning about my language use from a word cloud
I happened to notice the picture below on the desktop of my MacBook: Glancing over the image, there are some obvious things that can be noted. The two biggest words are the name of my protagonist and his antagonist’s title. There’s an assortment of other character names and descriptive terms that all feel appropriate for…
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Beautiful sentences
If you truly love Los Angeles, you want to be buried in Forest Lawn. Ann Patchett, The Magician’s Assistant.
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Residency day 8
Our day began with Jason Ockert teaching about writing the Short Short Story. Notably, I thought I got something actually usable out of a writing prompt. Then morning workshop. In the afternoon, we had synthesis. A diagram that we drew to draw connections between seminars and common reading was well-received by the synthesis group. I…
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Residency day 6
It’s beginning to feel like the time is coming to an end. We began today with Tibor Fischer who talked primarily about the pre-Richardson/Fielding novel, with some examples from The Satyricon, Callirhoe, The Unfortunate Traveller and Amadis of Gaul which is apparently a bit of a pre-occupation for him. We had workshop in the morning and then…
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Beautiful sentences
But it also turned out that no amount of labor and no amount of foresight can save you, no one and nothing can save you except luck. Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby.
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Beautiful sentences
The night Phan died, Sabine had thought the tragedy was knowing that Parsifal would die, too, that there was only a limited amount of time. But now Sabine knew the tragedy was living, that there would be years and years to be alone. Ann Patchett, The Magician’s Assistant.
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Beautiful sentences
They’d have a few trial runs, and if the kids from those didn’t measure up they’d recycle them for the parts, until at last they got something that fit all their specs—perfect in every way, not only a math whiz but beautiful as the dawn. Then they’d load this hypothetical wonder kid up with their…
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Beautiful sentences
As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug’s game. T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry & The Use of Criticism.
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Beautiful sentences
Men can imagine their own deaths, they can see them coming, and the mere thought of impending death acts like an aphrodisiac. A dog or a rabbit doesn’t behave like that. Take birds—in a lean season they cut down on the eggs, or they won’t mate at all. They put their energy into staying alive…