deconstructing_class | Member Posts

Quote of the Day:

"One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you’re maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones."

— Stephen King

Quoted in The Truth About Writing (2018)

Today's Writing:

About 370 words, mostly random free-writing.

Tally

( Days 1-17 )

Day 18:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

goddess47,

luzula,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

trobadora,

yasaman

Day 19:

china_shop,

yasaman

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

carenejeans

Quote of the Day:

(Another from Hemingway, doing it old-school.)

"Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good day’s work."

-- Ernest Hemingway, in The Paris Review, (1954).

Today's Writing:

Er, too much reading & research & notes. Now, on to bullet points! ;-)

Tally

( Days 1-16 )

Day 17:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

chanter1944,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

goddess47,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

trobadora,

yasaman,

ysilme

Day 18:

china_shop

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

carenejeans

Quote of the Day:

"Writing is painful as a life. I feel that even after decades. Doesn't get any easier, which surprised me. The yearning and failing parts don't get easier. And then there are the miraculous times when fluency is effortless. Or even the times of just being absorbed deeply. Can't think of anything better. I regret being unable to occupy that state constantly but to be there at all seems a marvel beyond all others."

— Louise Gluck, to GennaRose Nethercott (11/2/2017), shared on (then)Twitter. Quote taken from Mason Currey's Subtle Maneuvers newsletter.

Today's Writing:

I wrote 352 more words on old SF fanzines. 8-)

Tally

( Days 1-15 )

Day 16:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

goddess47,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

trobadora,

yasaman,

ysilme

Day 16:

china_shop

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

carenejeans

Quote of the Day:

I was thirteen when I really realized I wanted to write. One of the magical things that happened to me was I discovered my mother’s old typewriter in the garage, and I hauled it out and got all the dirt and dust out of it and found out it still worked. It seemed like such magic to me, that you could type stuff; it looked so neat and clean.

— Luis Alberto Urrea

Interview in Spilling the Beans in Chicanolandia (Anthology, 2010)

Today's Writing:

801 words on something very silly I'm writing about reading SF Fanzines of the 1930s-40s. It will probably be shorter when I'm done…

Tally

( Days 1-14 )

Day 15:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

goddess47,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

trobadora,

yasaman,

ysilme

Day 16:

china_shop

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

carenejeans

Sorry this is so late! Got caught up in chores & stuff. I'm behind on replies to comments, too. 8-(

Quote of the Day:

"I once left a publisher for the sole reason that he tried to change my semicolons to periods."

--Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel (1988)

Today's Writing:

I wrote about 650 words, working through something…

Tally

( Days 1-13 )

Day 14:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

cornerofmadness,

goddess47,

luzula,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

ysilme

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

carenejeans

Quote of the Day:

(Another quote by William Trevor — I don't know where this one came from…)

"I get melancholy if I don’t write. I need the company of people who don’t exist."

— William Trevor

Today's Writing:

I managed a little over 430 words, written before I fell asleep! \o/

Tally

( Days 1-12 )

Day 13:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

ysilme

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

carenejeans

Quote of the Day:

"Are my stacks of books clutter? To some people, yes. Do they block the antique radio? Yes, they do indeed. Do they sometimes fall over, and are they hard to dust? Yes. But I find it a supreme pleasure to be surrounded by books that I may read today or tomorrow or soon or not for the rest of my life. Because they hold ideas in their crisp or crumpled pages, and because they are beautiful objects, and because they are mine and I know when I bought them and why. I like to look over my stacks and think about what to read. I see ideas to be contemplated, stories to take in with a bourbon in my hand and my dog by my side. I see torn covers, and spines faded by the sun, and underlined lines, and phrases jotted in the margins that years later I no longer understand. And when I see these things, I see myself, and the world I inhabit, more clearly."

— Susan Harlan, "In Praise of the Book Tower" on Lit Hub (2015)

Today's Writing:

A little over 600 words, the first third COMPLAINING, after that some that are actually usable. 8-)

Tally

( Days 1-11 )

Day 12:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

goddess47,

luzula,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

trobadora,

ysilme

Day 13:

china_shop

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

carenejeans

Quote of the Day:

"Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose."

--Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942)

Today's Writing:

Uh, I left writing until too late and, uh, fell asleep. With my laptop open. *facepalm* So, just a few sentences, written before I fell asleep. Also, I'm behind on replies to comments. Sorry! Sheesh.

Tally

( Days 1-10 )

Day 11:

badly_knitted,

carenejeans,

cornerofmadness,

goddess47,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

trobadora

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

carenejeans

Quote of the Day:

I'm always alive to the possibility -- anytime there's a good poem there, I leave everything else and write the poem. Sometimes it comes thicker and faster than others, but there's never been a period in my life when I haven't had my antennae out ready to receive a poem.

—Thomas Disch, interview in Strange Horizons (2001)

Today's Writing:

Not as many words as yesterday — not quite 250 — but good ones! \o/

Tally

( Days 1-9 )

Day 10:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

cornerofmadness,

goddess47,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

trobadora,

yasaman,

ysilme

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

carenejeans

Quote of the Day:

Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks; he claimed he knocked it off in his spare time from a twelve-hour-a-day job performing manual labor. There are other examples from other continents and centuries, just as albinos, assassins, saints, big people and little people show up from time to time in large populations. Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a serious book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagra Falls in barrels, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms.

— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (1989)

Today's Writing:

I wrote 714 words, using yesterday's method, with equally good results!

Tally

( Days 1-8 )

Day 9:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

cornerofmadness,

goddess47,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

trobadora

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

carenejeans

Quote of the Day:

"Before you become a writer you must first become a reader. Every hour spent reading is an hour spent learning to write."

— Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks (2015)

Today's Writing:

I sat down and wrote 431 words, free-writing, mostly complaining, expecting nothing much. But it actually produced something useful. ~~Maybe I should just complain more.~~ Writing is so weird.

Tally

( Days 1-7 )

Day 8:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

goddess47,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

trobadora,

yasaman,

ysilme

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

carenejeans

Quote of the Day:

"Notes aren’t a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process."

--Richard Feynman, from an anecdote in Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, by James Gleick (1992)

Today's Writing:

A lot of staring a the screen, and an alibi sentence. 8-/

Tally

( Days 1-6 )

Day 7:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

goddess47,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

trobadora,

yasaman,

ysilme

Day 8:

china_shop

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

carenejeans

Quote of the Day:

"I have pulled out one thread from the tangle or tapestry of that particular time, and nothing in my account is untrue, except perhaps the coherence of a story, when really there were many stories, or the heap of events and details and imperfect memories from which stories are spun."

— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby (2013).

Today's Writing:

I did a bit more file clean-up (eeerrrgh) and 317 words not totally relevant to the essay I'm working on NOW, but will be useful later.

Tally

( Days 1-5 )

Day 6:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

cornerofmadness,

goddess47,

luzula,

sylvanwitch,

trobadora,

ysilme

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

naraht

I had a visitor this week: a very earnest German Shakespeare scholar and teacher who I met last year on a writing retreat. She was swinging through Oxford to attend a conference and stayed in my guest room for a few nights.

When she came into my sitting room she first admired my bookcases, as one does, and then did a double take: "Oh! You have a really big television! What do you watch?"

"Cycling, mainly," I said, but this didn't help. Didn't compute. I could practically see steam rising off the top of her head as the gears clashed. And actually she's the second friend of mine who's been visibly perplexed by my TV.

No doubt they had assumed I'd be the sort of elitist literary snob who wouldn't allow such a thing into the flat. Whereas in fact I am such a massive elitist literary snob that I don't feel any lurking status threat from the presence of a 55" flatscreen. (Plus my favorite cycling commentator is a devoted fan of Fitzcarraldo Editions, so.)

Very minor anecdote but I've never seen anyone so obviously realizing in mid-stream that they'd gotten their assumptions about my preferences and habits all wrong. Do you ever find that you surprise people by liking something that you "shouldn't" like?

carenejeans

Quote of the Day:

"I am serious about the images I make. That is a given. I never waver from my ambition – indeed, my compulsion – to do something significant. Yet I cannot just walk into my studio and "do something significant." I have had to develop a way of getting down to work that is probably best thought of as a way of playing."

— Miriam Schapiro, "Notes from a Conversation on Art, Feminism and Work," in Working it Out, edited by Sara Ruddick and Pamela Daniels (1977)

Today's Writing:

I had a frustrating writing day! I gave up, called what I had done an alibi sentence, and spent the rest of the time reading and moving files around so I could FIND them later. Erg.

Tally

( Days 1-4 )

Day 5:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

chanter1944,

cornerofmadness,

goddess47,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

trobadora,

ysilme

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!