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My drug of choice is writing––writing, art, reading, inspiration, books, creativity, process, craft, blogging, grammar, linguistics, and did I mention writing?

Saturday, June 2, 2012

Potpourri (and Cathamel Writes The State of the Blog)

State of the Blog-  Cathamel here.  Chris has been gone two days, so I'm going to write this thing.  Sorry that I'm piss poor at writing.  I'm a muse not a writer.  No one told me I'd have to actually work.

Okay....so, I know Chris was all excited about reaching four thousand views.  Yay.  Pretend I wrote like fifteen paragraphs about that because that's what Chris would do.  

Plus I know he wanted to point out on the first State of the Blog every other month or so that he has a PayPal button if you're so inclined.  He's not asking or begging, but he wants you to know it's there.  You'd be surprised how easy my job can become when money is involved.

And imagine I put another six pages or something about planning on changing stuff and "moving forward" or some shit like that.  That's what Chris would write.

Also.....CHRIS IS STILL MISSING!!!!!!  I miss my writer!  I'm a muse without a writer .  If you see him, will you please tell him that Cathamel misses him and inspiring the cats to caterwaul is not really doing it for me.  But....actually, if you do see him, could say it like, "Cathamel is going to kick your ass and burn you in the face if you don't get back like five minutes ago!" I'd appreciate it.


Potpourri

Publisher's Weekly "fixes" the Top 100 Novels List.  I think the problem isn't the dead white males the lit snobs like or the speculative fiction that others like.  It's that you just bloody well need to read more than 100 novels.

I mentioned Martin this week, so I figured a quote from him wouldn't be amiss.

Yes, this is a real warning.


Successful people actually do certain things differently than most people.  Here are nine of them.

Here is a page called Something About Writing Killer Short Stories which should probably be more properly titled Eight Things You Ought To Already Know.  It's amazing to me sometimes that I write every day here and still have so much I haven't even touched yet, but the various lengths of writing tend to incorporate very different conventions.  However, I also think this page suffers from a serious case of over-generalization, and any one of these "rules" could be ignored if you earn it.









Here is a pair of articles about the recent study that found modern writers tend to write differently from many of the classics.  One suggests it's because writers aren't reading them.  I highly doubt this is the case though.  Great social upheaval and great linguistic, artistic, stylistic upheaval go hand in hand.  It's kind of how culture works.  We can't pioneer a new culture that rejects so many assumptions of the past without pioneering a new culture too.  I'm much happier with how Salon approaches the topic.





















Here are 25 words we don't have in English, but probably need.  Although I'm hearing Schadenfreude starting to be used more and more (and spell checker recognized it just now), so we might have Avenue Q to thank for the fact that this should really be a list of 24.



Sort of a classic Ted talk about creativity.  Ken Robbins is crazy funny if you haven't seen this one before, but his basic message is about how our current school system is destroying creativity.

If you've got a half an hour, this is spectacular.  It's a series called Art Through Time.  This particular episode is about writing.  It talks about the relationship between sound and meaning and how different cultures have viewed the artistic expression of writing.  Total nerdgasm.  (It's not a Youtube video, so I can't embed it.)


[Do you want to be featured in potpourri along with a few words from me about how awesome you are?  Do you know a great writing link that I should share? Please send it to me at chris.brecheen@gmail.com, and I will post it along with a shout out singing your praises (unless, of course, you don't want one).  There are four caveats to this.  Please read them before you send me stuff.  If I've posted anything that you feel is "yours" (or "your client's" --eeep!) please just tell me what you would like me to do.  Most everything here that doesn't have an embedding code within its source is some kind of meme, so it would be quite difficult for me to do proper attribution.]

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