I do not know Rags Daniels personally, but through Cate, he has entered my heart. Read on about how you help Rags as he recovers from a stroke.
Author: Marie A Bailey
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A few interesting facts about one of my most favorite authors, Edgar Allen Poe. Read on …
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) was a pioneer of what we’d now call the ambiguous horror story, where the supernatural elements of the tale may actually be explained (or explained away) with a psychological explanation. He was also an accomplished poet and a pioneer of science fiction. His 1848 prose-poem Eureka even predicts the Big Bang theory by some eighty years. Poe considered this book his masterpiece, though it is among his least-read prose works today.
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Here is the 29th installment of Ten Top Lists of What Not to Do by Marie Ann Bailey of 1WriteWay at http://1writeway.com and John W. Howell of Fiction Favorites at http://johnwhowell.com. These lists are simu-published on our blogs each Monday. We hope you enjoy.
10. If you go into a car dealer, make sure you really want to buy a car. If you don’t, at best you may walk away from a car that you fell in love with but can’t afford. At worst you might end up paying for that car the rest of your life.
9. If you go into a car dealer, do not say anything regarding your like or dislike of a car. If you do, at best you will tip your hand. At worst, you may end up with the one you dislike since it is priced so well.
8. If you go into a car dealer, do not drink a big gulp prior to arriving. If you do, at best you may need to interrupt your negotiations at a bad time. At worst, the sales rep may detect your uneasiness, interpret it as a sign of weakness, and hammer the negotiations until you agree to everything just so you can make a break for the bathroom.
7. If you go into a car dealer, do not wear any clothing with designer labels. If you do, at best you will impress all the people in the show room. At worst, you may pay thousands more for a car than the people at JCP.
6. If you go into a car dealer, do not bring the children. If you do, at best they will get hyped up on the sugary donuts the salespeople will feed them. At worst, the kids will want to sit in your lap just as you try to negotiate a good deal and tell the salesperson that you are just kidding.
5. If you go into a car dealer, do not park your car where it can be seen. If you do, at best the condition will tip off the salesperson as to your trade-in before the deal. At worst, the sales person will get a heads-up as to how badly you need transportation.
4. If you go into a car dealer, do not accept anything to eat or drink if offered. If you do, at best you’ll take on extra calories you don’t need. At worst, you may feel you owe the dealership something and you don’t want to get talked into a thousand-dollar cup of coffee.
3. If you go into a car dealer, do not sign anything before you read it. If you do, at best you may have some expensive surprises when the car is delivered. At worst you may have sold your home for a dollar.
2. If you go into a car dealer, do not demand to see the manager if you’re unhappy with the deal the sales person is offering. If you do, at best you may be embarrassed to learn that the sales person is the manager. At worst, the employees will use the video tape of you ranting at the company party as the main entertainment.
1. If you go into a car dealer, do not even think of special ordering a car. If you do, at best you may pay too much. At worst, you may be riding around in something that lost fifty percent of its value the minute you drove it off the lot since Habanero Orange is not everyone’s favorite color.
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An interesting post from one of my most favorite blogs, Interesting Literature. This one offers five fascinating facts about Virginia Woolf’s life of a dog, Flush.
By Viola van de Sandt
Most people know that Flush is the title of Virginia Woolf’s biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel. Here are five things, however, you might not have known about this delightful book.
1. Woolf starting writing Flush after finishing her long novel The Years. In a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, she writes: ‘I was so tired after the Waves, that I lay in the garden and read the Browning love letters, and the figure of their dog made me laugh so I couldn’t resist making him a Life’.
2. Academics have interpreted Flush in many different ways. Perhaps most surprisingly it has on one occasion even been compared to the Jack the Ripper murders. Susan Squier argues that Flush’s ‘kidnapping and imprisonment, with its horrible motif of the threatened package of his head and paws, implicitly recalls the murders of Jack the Ripper’.*3…
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Here’s the first Papi Talk of 2014, from the Literary Syndicate: an interview with the ever-amazing Charles Yallowitz, author of the Legends of Windemere series, among (many) other things. Enjoy :)
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Thanks to Cate over at CommuniCATE, I found a creed that just might give me the boost I need to commit to working on my novel(s) this year.
The Rebel Writer’s Creed was developed by Sheri A. Larsen, in collaboration with followers of her blog. If you want to “pledge,” all you need to do is sign up on her blog by clicking here. And if you are feeling really ambitious (which I was at the moment), you can agree to one or two other commitments:
- Copy the CREED Badge and paste it on your site, encouraging others to join.
- Write one post a month somehow related to your journey in following the CREED. Choose a day and time to your liking. Just include the badge in your post, linking back to the original post so others can join in. Share your post via Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr or however!
What I love about these additional but optional commitments is: (a) #1 was particularly easy to do; and (b) #2 will help me track my progress without demanding that I spend more time posting to my blog than actually working on my novel(s).
So, what about you? Care to join up? Do you have creed of your own that you’re following for 2014?
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Some interesting quotes from writers about writing. My favorite (and one that I may have to paint on my walls): “Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.”
Here are ten of our favourite quotes about writing, from those who should probably know the most about it – writers themselves. Some of them are witty quotes, others profound, some a mixture. We hope you enjoy them.
‘Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.’
– Neil Gaiman
‘God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good.’
– W. H. Auden
‘A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.’
– Thomas Mann
‘Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.’
– Cyril Connolly
‘The dubious privilege of a freelance writer is that he’s given the…
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Here is the 28th installment of Ten Top Lists of What Not to Do by Marie Ann Bailey of 1WriteWay at http://1writeway.com and John W. Howell of Fiction Favorites at http://johnwhowell.com. These lists are simu-published on our blogs each Monday. We hope you enjoy.
10. When returning to work after a long holiday hiatus, do not expect your coworkers who did not take any time off to appreciate hearing how wonderful your vacation was. At best they will smile absently as you regale them with stories of all the reading you got done. At worst, they will regale you with stories of all the work that’s piled up on your desk, waiting for you and the fact you would be fired if it were not for them.
9. When returning to work after a long holiday hiatus, do not try to incur sympathy by complaining that you had to spend most of it with your in-laws. At best your coworkers will simply try to one-up your story of how your mother-in-law found fault with how you decorated your Christmas tree as usual. At worst, your complaints will be passed to your spouse at the next opportunity.
8. When returning to work after a long holiday hiatus, do not pretend to have been gone so long that you forgot your boss’s name. At best, your boss will play along and pretend to forget your name and your salary grade. At worst, your boss, who got called into work on Christmas Eve for an emergency that came up in your area, will purposely forget who you are and have security escort you from the building.
7. When returning to work after a long holiday hiatus, do not expect to find your office or cubicle in the same condition as you last saw it. At best, it might be cleaner since the cleaning crew actually had a chance to clean it while you were gone since most surfaces were uncovered. At worst, you will find things missing (like your favorite Lord of the Rings post-up notes) because your coworkers took advantage of your absence and treated your office like a come-help-yourself supply depot.
6. When returning to work after a long holiday hiatus, don’t expect you can spend most of your first day back getting “reacquainted” with your job. At best, your boss will grudgingly give you permission to spend the day reviewing stuff rather than doing stuff, but in the end it will cost you. At worst, your boss will offer you the opportunity to get “acquainted” with the new unemployment policies if you don’t step up.
5. When returning to work after a long holiday hiatus, do not try to make it sound like your break was more fun than it was. At best, you’ll only be competing with your cubicle-mate who, like you, basically stayed home and read all day. At worst, you’ll find yourself making up stories about scuba diving off the Florida Keys just because your supervisor hung out at a nude beach in Pensacola.
4. When returning to work after a long holiday hiatus, be sure to leave your house at least a half-hour earlier than usual. At best, you’ll get to work earlier and have some “quiet time” before the reality of being back hits you. At worst, you’ll need that extra half-hour because you’ve forgotten where you work and you get lost along the way. (You did drop crumbs didn’t you?)
3. When returning to work after a long holiday hiatus, do not bring with you all the cookies and cakes left over from your holiday parties. At best, your coworkers will just give you the evil eye since they had resolved to stop eating sweets after the holidays. At worst, the three week old sweets that you left out for everyone else will mysteriously wind up on your office chair, in the shape of a horse’s head.
2. When returning to work after a long holiday hiatus, do not be surprised if the work you thought your coworker would do on your behalf didn’t get done. At best, you’ll find a neat stack of reports that need to be reviewed by close of business the day you return and the coworker who had offered to review the reports out on sick leave. At worst, you’ll find piles of documents strewn across your desk with no clue when they are due or who left them for you, and your boss standing outside impatiently tapping a foot waiting for your report.
1. When returning to work after a long holiday hiatus, do not expect everyone, including you, to be in a cheery, ready-to-get-to-work mood. At best, you all will just be experiencing temporary post-holiday depression that will lift after a few days. At worst, the reality that there are no more holidays until May will hit you like a sledgehammer and you’ll have a four-month long headache to show for it.
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I love spreading the word about new opportunities for authors to connect with each other and to find readers :) Read Shannon’s post for more info!
It’s a new year and so much has changed already. My publisher – AEC Stellar Publishing, Inc. – has cranked its gears and remodeled itself for the future. Instead of being a simple publisher, we are now an open and growing community of writers, cover artists, and editors supporting one another. You don’t have to be published by AEC or spend money to participate. The website is designed for everyone to connect in one place. This website is for you, and hopefully, by the end of this piece, you’ll want to check out The Author Extension Community and/or join it. It’s a great place for authors to support one another as well as readers to come and meet them. We simply need people to help us spread the word, and I’ll give you three, great reasons to do it:
1. The website has many places where you and your work…
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Well, well, here’s some interesting facts about The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.
1. The idea for The Hunger Games came to author Suzanne Collins while channel-hopping between coverage of the invasion of Iraq and a reality TV show. The idea began to form in her mind of a narrative which concerned a televised fight to the death. The theme of the series has led critics to draw comparisons with similar works, principally Battle Royale, a 1999 novel by Japanese author Koushun Takami, but the idea of a dystopian future world in which people fight each other as part of a television programme is found in a novel by Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman), The Running Man (1982).
2. The author of The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins, was one of the writers on the 1990s teen TV show Clarissa Explains It All. Collins worked in television for many years during the 1990s; her other television writing credits included Clifford’s Puppy…
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Marie at 1 Write Way 