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.]

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.]

Misunderstood Shark is Misunderstood

Today's post is a poignant and powerful look at tropes, stereotypes and expectations, and the strong effect that comes from playing with those expectations.  Any time your readers expects something to happen because they are familiar with the conventions of the context, you have an opportunity to delight them by altering or fully reversing those expectations. 

It's also possible that I really just get the giggles at the Misunderstood Shark meme, and I'm really grasping for a rationalization to put a bunch of them here on my blog.  

Phil Watson has a lot of great shark cartoons at shaaark.com
It was hard to pick which one to put here, and there are lots more at his site.
You really should check him out.

Of course, it can be doubly delightful
when the reversal turns out to misdirection.
Some stereotypes are true for a reason.

Low voice: "All images for humorous purposes only.  Writing About Writing will not be held liable for any injury resulting from any attempt to understand or empathize with sharks. Does not include state and federal tax or licensing.  Void where prohibited.  All shark handlers are trained professionals.  Please don't hug sharks.  Even if they look really sad and like they could use one."

Please remember that sharks are not actually that dangerous, people are much more dangerous to sharks, like two people die a year and you're going to be fine if you don't duct tape a bunch of seals to yourself before you go swimming. Also misunderstood Hippopotamuses are definitely a bigger problem. Don't be fooled.

All images (unless otherwise mentioned) are viral memes pulled from places like Facebook or G+ and lack legible copyright information (or any copyright information at all).  If I have used an image I know the source of, I link the source and encourage traffic to see other images, but if this is not acceptable, please contact me (below) and I will remove the image.   I sometimes find images in creative commons or on Google's listing for "free for commercial reuse."  These are occasionally mislabeled.  I may also have inadvertently shared an image from a third party that was less discriminating about where they got it or even did something skeevy like cropped out the copyright information. I honestly do try in good faith not to make money off the creative efforts of others.  If I have used your image in an unacceptable way, contact me at chris.brecheen@gmail.com and let me know what you'd like me to do: remove the image, attribute it, give you a shout out with a linkback, anything.  (Do please provide a URL to the original site--some people pretend to be artists just to mess with me or take credit for something THEY stole.)  If I can't comply, I will simply remove the image immediately.

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.]