Potpourri Superb Owl Edition

Every year my friends fill my FB with running commentary on the play by play reactions to the Superbowl, and I in turn fill there feeds with potpourris of wonderful memes and macros. But the last two years, I've had to settle for the same four or five potpourris because it's been so long since I made a new one. So here, for the first time in ages, is a brand new potpourri to help me spam my friends with delicious writerly updates.  Enjoy.

This one I know: sinfest.com

This is clearly a copyright image of House MD.
But my friend turned it into a personalized macro
after reading this post. It always makes me laugh
and I hope Universal doesn't make me take it down for a while.

Woefully esoteric?

Because you never know when a unicorn rainbow GIF with "The More You Know"
will come in handy. And now you know where to find one.
The more you know....

[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 ask and I will take it down if you wish or preferably give you credit and a link back to its source. Most everything here is some kind of meme or viral macro on social media, so it would be quite difficult for me to do proper attribution.]

One Fantabulous Potpourri of images.

And mom said 8am was too early to drink!

This jazz hands potpourri episode has been brought to you by my working on some fiction (next part of Demon's Rubicon), continuing aggravation in trying to deal with the new schedule and the baby (Wednesday I'll be telling you all about how "first blood" has been spilt in "The Scheduling Wars"), and the fact that I've been handed a baby grenade.

I wish "baby grenade" was a cute euphemism for how The Contrarian "burst" into tears after Mom handed him to me, but unfortunately the truth of the matter is that a mere five seconds after the pass off, the little guy went off in what I can only assume is the next generation of military grade weaponry. An ear piercing sonic blast shattered my ear drums as I was caught in the wake of a double ended projectile bioweapons "event" that eviscerated my will to live via the nasal passages.

For those of you who know the horrors of a blowout, think triple layer compromised. Baby's clothes. My clothes. Even the carrier is in the washing machine. For those who don't know what a blowout is, think of this scene from Frozen and enjoy the sweet innocence of your ignorance.

Ima Lister promises that the conclusion of his article about how to be (and stay) miserable will be posted next week.

Obviously Disney copyright. (Will remove upon request.)
Frozen 2013

Little fuckers can move!

I could stand to hear a little more.

Wink wink. Nudge nudge.

The irony is, I've been able to tell people were falling in love before they knew.
I've known from across the room someone was interested in a friend. And at least once that they weren't.
I'm GOOD at reading people and noticing little things............as long as it's not me.
When it comes to me, I have had people sitting in my lap, and not realized they were interested
So...yeah, this would actually probably be useful...and possibly necessary.

                                                               Worth the 20 minutes if you have 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 ask and I will take it down if you wish or preferably give you credit and a link back to its source. Most everything here is some kind of meme, so it would be quite difficult for me to do proper attribution.]

Potpourri: The Best of Facebook Feed

That's what SHE said.

On my totally awesome Facebook page that you should totally check out and "Like" I get a little fast and loose with the images I post.  Star Wars Puns, Ryan Gosling "Hey Girl" memes, old comics that are ubiquitous online; they're all fair game.  I'll leave a comic or image alone if it has clear "Keep Away" messages on the page where I find it (or if it's right there on the image). However the way these things get bounced around on Tumblr, Facebook, Pinterest, G+ and more, it's basically impossible not to step on someone's toes, and you mostly just have to be ready to take something down if someone tells you it's theres.  

Here I'm more cautious.  This is a commercial blog.  I make money.  And even if I didn't think it were totally an ass move to make money off of the hard work of someone else (which I do), I wouldn't want to open myself up to a lawsuit.  So I can't share with you a potpourri of every image I find on Facebook, but the ones with no clear origin, no clearly copyrighted characters, and no obvious watermark, I am willing to put here.  And of those, these are the best.

Please understand that these are viral memes of indeterminate origin.  If I have inadvertently posted your image, please just message me at chris.brecheen@gmail.com with some kind of proof (original URL, picture of you holding the original, or even just impassioned plea) and I will try to fix the problem however you want--give you credit, link the image to your website, take it down, write a post about how cool you are, whatever.

To be fair, I understand Myers has prehensile toes.

This last offering is an hour long interview with Stephen King talking to a group of English majors about how he gets inspired.  I say it's an hour because I want you to know what you're getting into, but it is very very worth the watch.

I can't seem to embed it (maybe because of the length), but it's really awesome:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AtJssWJp3c

[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 ask and I will take it down if you wish or preferably give you credit and a link back to its source. Most everything here is some kind of meme, so it would be quite difficult for me to do proper attribution.]

A Potpourri to Inspire You

Shakespeare would have written over 50 plays if it weren't for Facebook.
Yes, of course they didn't have Facebook back then.
I just wasn't sure you'd even know what Friendster was.

There are, of course, some truly miserable writers out there, and some of them are (or were) absolutely incredible writers.  I like this quote not because it has a happy dog, happily happifying the happy landscape.  But the actual text seems more inclined towards seizing life by its soft parts and not letting go.  Writers might not all be happy, but most of them do know how to drive like a guided missile towards opportunity.  So if someone leaves a metaphorical gate open around you....well, you know what to do!

Kindles aren't going anywhere.  People mistake the medium for the message.  The "smell of books" crowd have ignored the figures that Kindle book sales are up to 15% of the market while simultaneously wondering why their sales are down 15%.  However....all that said, books aren't going away in our lifetimes.  And they do smell kind of good.

Book Snippets.  A simply charming collection of short excerpts from books the Snippets author is reading (or read) that she posts each day. What a capital idea--useful to any writer who wants to be able to go back and take a look at the sentences that take their breath away. No author uses anything but the same 26 letters and 14 pieces of punctuation, and taking a look at how to combine them into something magical is always worth a moment or two. http://booksnippets.tumblr.com/   I always find the careful attention to a single breathtaking sentence to be particularly inspiring.

There is a question, especially in America, about the "utility" of art. A long recession, as long recessions tend to do, has many "more pragmatic" people wondering about anything that has no "practical value." Don't you listen to it for a second.  Art changes the world. It has done so before. It will do so again. It is doing so now. Don't ever forget this when you're wondering why you're turning yourself inside out for something that probably won't ever make you enough money to live on. Art is its own reward.

Conquer the shit out of yourselves, writer peeps!  Conquer the absolute fucking shit out of yourselves.













Meet a fellow blogging peep (who has nothing to do with this Michelangelo quote). That Blond Mom is the blog of one of my old high school friends who has been a journalist for years. It's mostly a personal journal, but there is some intersection with her career as a working writer that I find very insightful. Though journalism is a shrinking field and a changing field, a writer could do worse than to cut their teeth on the regimented discipline of daily deadlines, the sense of official but not overly formal that makes print media generally an agreeable read, and the ability to do revision practically on the fly. Plus there's something to be said for those writing careers that offer a steady paycheck. Nothing cuts down on the romance of being an artist like having to sell your plasma. http://thatblondmom.com/

Let's let Ray Bradbury take us out by talking about writing persistently.

[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 your creative effort in any way that you are not okay with, please just ask and I will take it down if you wish or preferably give you credit and a link back to its source.]

Potpourri: Teh Bestest of Elsenet

Potpourri 2.0!  In which I am more careful about copyright and try not to post boring shit that no one will click anyway.  

I need a distraction.
I think I'll write about my lunch using 140 characters or less.

The only rules you need!

Except for these other, more-different rules!

Anita M King's Writing Window Holy fuck!  What a gloriously majestic metric assload of totally fucking free free-writing prompts!  I've seldom seen anything so fucking awesome as this.  Fuck!  You would easily pay a shit ton of money for quality fucking prompts like these if they were at some shitty fucking bookstore.  Well fuck that shit.  Here you don't pay a fucking thing.  Fuck, that's awesome!  Plus, as if that wasn't fucking reason enough to visit, there's a blog and shit too that talks about totally fucking awesome writing shit.  This puts the FUCK in fucking awesome, my friends.  Someone could free write for like two fucking days straight and never finish!  Fucking sweet!

Also, there's a friend who now owes me a dollar.  Over twenty in a single paragraph!

 Sappy as hell, but still kind of nice.

I've seen this everywhere.  Please contact me if it's a copyrighted image.

This was 80% of the conversations I had with my fellow Creative Writing program students at SFSU.  I wish I were kidding.  I really, really do.

Oglaf.com
Bigger image.  More comics that are just as funny (or funnier).  Check it out!
(No seriously, check it out or I'll be asked to remove the image.  Totally NSFW though.)

I'm into Ted videos in a way that probably is a little unhealthy, but this one is especially good for writers.  Amy Tan wrote The Joy Luck Club and Saving Fish from Drowning (which is totally speculative fiction by the way as it is narrated by a ghost).  And apparently there actually is a literal answer to the question of where creativity hides and it's "quietly within my duffle-bag for twenty minutes without making a sound."  You'll have to watch to understand.

[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 ask and I will take it down if you wish or preferably give you credit and a link back to its source. Most everything here is some kind of meme, so it would be quite difficult for me to do proper attribution.]

In Lieu of Content--Funny Videos!

Writing About Writing is currently enjoying a week off as we clean up an epic mess left in the wake of a horrific battle.  We will return to our regularly scheduled operation on the 23rd.  In the meantime, enjoy some hilarious and relevant writing movies.

Facebook Image Meme Potpourri

[Every image in this entry is something I pulled off of Facebook over the last couple of months, so they are viral and they are virtually impossible to attribute.  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.]

I spent a week in a cornfield before I realized this was some of that poetic bullshit.

So today I'm going to be digging around in the cogs and gears of Writing About Writing to try and clean up some of the links and make sure there's some internal pointy stuff.  Plus I have to keep moving and hiding from the army of ninjas sent by Nanowrimo fans because of Monday's Post.  Thus, laying low in old entries is probably safest for me.  (Nobody will want to go there to look for me.)  No matter how many times I say that the goal is to keep writing after Dec 1st, revise, and improve as a writer, and that I worry about the damage Nano can do to newly starting writers, some Nanobots will always get the take away message that I don't think they should bother.

Grammarly.com (or like them on FB--funny stuff!)

Sadly, I know people who simply would not be told that jumping up and running a marathon is foolish and they have chronic injuries now (seriously, I know someone like this--their knee won't bend right even four years later), and I know a COUPLE OF DOZEN people who tried to just do Nano on a lark and they now hate creative writing or think they aren't cut out to be writers or are simply miserable (see below for how to be a miserable artist).  So if I'm snarky, think of it more as Dr. House snarky and not random asshole bully who doesn't know what he's talking about snarky.  I just don't want to see writers get hurt, taken advantage of, or make fools of themselves.  If Chris Brecheen is telling to be careful about being pretentious, the shit just got real, lemmie tell ya!



And yes, dissing Nano in the slightest is the fastest way short of culture war political posts on Facebook or actively committing genocide to get scratched off some Christmas lists, so if you've been holding back that comment about how you like my plucky style for just the right moment, it would be like sweet aloe vera on some of these burns I've gotten in the last couple of days.  Unlike Dr. House, I'm a big baby when it comes to those meanies on Reddit downvoting me in my face.

In the meantime, enjoy some images I've been stockpiling off of Facebook...

 

See.  THIS is why I act like I'm twelve!

I hope I get a page a lot like this one day.

Like.

This is why no one enjoys the lack of realism in speculative fiction.

Notice #10.  THAT IS ALL I'M SAYING YOU NINJA-LOVING CULTISTS!!!

Yeah....nothing I possibly wrote here could add to this.

More for visual artists, but I can't think of one that can't apply to writers with a little tweaking.

Kindles change this story into one of self replicating cyber programs cluttering up the drive, but the themes are the same.

End on your best point.

But not from people who just don't want you to hurt yourself, right Mark?
Right?

[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.  Don't worry, they're pretty basic, and they won't bite.]