words of others

this is a muffin.  it has nothing to do with this blog post, but gee whiz it was tasty.

yesterday was #MSWL on twitter and i'm really on a roll with my draft right now. (mswl means "manuscript wishlist," by the way.  it is a twitter mass hashtag-fest where literary agents describe what they would like to see in their query inbox... writer geek stuff etc).

as a result i'm going to be letting other people do the talking today.  apologies in advance for this quiet blogging week (there's a good chance i won't be posting friday as we'll be driving to virginia for feasting and partying of epic wedding proportions... how can you not be insanely stoked to see two people who have already spent a decade together get married?  personally i think everyone should have an emily and colin in their life.  it's a freaking testament to the modern concept of soul mates, public shout out, you crazy kids).

"people love to be thoughtful at the very end of a tragedy because that’s the precise moment when nothing more is required of them." - gladstone

"What I see is a good man, m’lady. And they’re not like buses: there won’t be another one along in ten minutes." - anna [downton abbey]

"Deviation from social conformity is increasingly seen to be something in need of a pill." - giles fraser

"i chose a half-measure when i should have gone all the way.  i'll never make that mistake again." - mike [breaking bad]

"The vanity of existence is revealed in the whole form existence assumes: in the infiniteness of time and space contrasted with the finiteness of the individual in both; in the fleeting present as the sole form in which actuality exists; in the contingency and relativity of all things; in continual becoming without being; in continual desire without satisfaction; in the continual frustration of striving of which life consists." - arthur schopenhauer
word count: 27,239

bits and pieces

i couldn't really sleep last night, which made me expect today to be dreadful.  quite the opposite, i'm rather punch drunk and giddy for the following reasons:

due to packing, i have tons of clean laundry right now.

steve comes home tonight!

the guy who wolf whistled me this morning definitely appeared to live inside of a building (ok giddy might be a bit much to say about this one, but it's a step up from getting accosted by homeless men).

and.....

i have successfully surpassed the 10,000 word milestone with my draft!

that one, for me, is really big.  if you need a little perspective that's 39 word doc pages with 1" margins double spaced times new roman size 12.

of course, this also means i'm only about 1/5 of the way there, but it's pretty exciting when you have the opportunity to surprise yourself.  given my track record of false starts i honestly expected to peter out somewhere around nine pages.  i cannot express how glad i am that i decided to keep myself honest by posting my word count to this blog (thank you everyone who encouraged me to do this).

the thing i've learned about creativity so far is that, even though the work is more fun, it's still work.  inspiration isn't all it's chalked up to be.  creativity is a skill, but a creative project is a task and it requires the same mundane, frustrating, laborious crap that i see everyday in the workplace.  realizing this, makes the task at hand seem a lot more manageable.  if i can plug away at databasing building stats, i can definitely plug away at a novel.

"Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated." - david foster wallace

"No kid can do whatever they want to do. It's a total lie, but they have the right to try to do whatever they want to do. That's their right, to aim to do whatever they want to do. And you know what? Life might kick you in the face, life might not let you do what you want to do, but [my grandparents] always taught me that, you know, 'Go for it! Yeah, you wanna do that? Go for it, son, you've gotta do it.'" - james mcavoy

happy giddy tuesday, folks!

word count: 11,329

words of others

pro-tip: watch exit through the gift shop.

wonderful things other people have said:

"Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else." - leonardo da vinci

"when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible." - harry burns

"trouble? no way.  you're only in trouble if you get caught." - aladdin

"being nice to people you aren't a fan of isn't being fake.  it's called growing up." - brotip #87

"Absolute solitude is, on this showing, the ineluctable destiny of the soul. Only our bodies can meet." - gilbert ryle

"I spent the following two weeks telling people that I could not leave the house due to agoraphobia, an illness usually self-diagnosed by the unemployed as an excuse to stay home and masturbate or play Wii" - david thorne

have a lovely week!

new week: words of others

i've always loved inspirational quotations, but my internal hipster has always preferred something quirkier than your average "dance like nobody's watching" insta-pic.  to kick off the week, here are a few words i've read over the years that have stuck with me, made me think, and reminded me i'm not alone.  hope everybody has an amazing week!

"any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out." - anton chekhov

"time is not even.  space is not empty." - tite of eiko and koma performance art

"it enlarges the heart. something bigger than the self." - david foster wallace, infinite jest

"you can't regret the life you didn't lead." - junot diaz, the brief wonderous life of oscar wao

"my heart was a hysterical, unreliable organ." - vladimir nabokov, lolita

"does she like a lot of teal?" - my brother, on determining whether or not a woman has taste.

oh and hey PS...

i got a new car!