WHY THANKSGIVING?

I think Angelina Jolie is beautiful, you all know that. Her humanitarian efforts on behalf of the world's children touches my Lakota spirit.

Then, I discovered Angelina Jolie hates Thanksgiving

and wants no part in rewriting history like so many other Americans.

A friend of hers says, “To celebrate what the white settlers did to the native Indians, the domination of one culture over another, just isn’t her style.

She definitely doesn’t want to teach her multi-cultural family how to celebrate a story of murder.”

According to some sources, Angelina Jolie is so disgusted by "Thanksgiving", she takes her kids out of the country so they are not around the madness that is embodied in the holiday.

And sadly, the records prove her right about the genocide of those Indians by the pilgrims AFTER Thanksgiving: the first true Black Friday.

Does Angelina Jolie have a point, or has she completely missed the point of having a holiday just to remind ourselves to be grateful for the blessings in our lives? What do you think?

For me, Thanksgiving is a more healing holiday than what Christmas has degenerated into today:

Thanksgiving is a holiday that is all about counting our blessings and sharing a meal with loved ones. It is not about presents and shopping and commercialism.

(That's for the day AFTER Thanksgiving!)

In our plugged in, high-tech world, Thanksgiving is a time when we can focus on the truly important things in life:

spending time with those we love and taking stock of all we have to be grateful for.

It is a time to embrace traditions, both old and new, and to celebrate our families, both the ones we are born into and the ones we choose.

Many families choose to use Thanksgiving as a time to bless others who are less fortunate, by sharing their own bounty.

While living our busy day-to-day lives and dealing with the problems that are too common in our society, a poor economy, unemployment, or health issues, it's easy forget about the good things in our lives:

our families, our friends, our pets and our homes.

There are precious few days in a year when we can simply spend time with those we love.

Thanksgiving offers the perfect moment to pause and reflect on all that's happened through the spring and summer and to enjoy the warmth of those who will see us through the coming year.

For what are you thankful?

INSIDE THE MIND OF WRITER SUSAN SONTAG

 

"The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader’s heart

The story must strike a nerve — in me. My heart should start pounding when I hear the first line in my head. I start trembling at the risk."
- Susan Sontag.(6/27/73)

It was through her essays that Sontag gained early fame and notoriety.

Sontag wrote frequently about the intersection of high and low art and expanded the dichotomy concept of form and art in every media.

She elevated Camp to the status of recognition with her widely-read 1964 essay Notes on 'Camp', thus expanding Art to include common, absurd, and burlesque themes.

It expounded the "so bad it's good" concept of popular culture for the first time.

Here are a few of her thoughts on writing:

"In ‘life,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my work. In ‘work,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my life.
My work is too austere
My life is a brutal anecdote."

"The solution to a problem — a story that you are unable to finish — is the problem.

It isn’t as if the problem is one thing and the solution something else.

The problem, properly understood = the solution. Instead of trying to hide or efface what limits the story, capitalize on that very limitation. State it, rail against it."

"There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work."

"
Making lists of words, to thicken my active vocabulary. To have puny, not just little, hoax, not just trick, mortifying, not just embarrassing, bogus, not just fake.
I could make a story out of puny, hoax, mortifying, bogus. They are a story."
**
Elliot Grace:
http://elliot-grace.blogspot.com/2012/11/perfect-tunes.html

wrote of finding the perfect tune for his current novel.

As it turned out, the tune also gave me the title to a chapter in THREE SPIRIT KNIGHT but worked its way into the prose, too.  Thank you, Elliot.

(See if you can spot Johnny Depp in this video)

SNOOPY'S 6 RULES FOR WRITING A GREAT NOVEL

First ...

these past 3 days, I've had a busy work schedule and an average of 3 hours sleep a night.  That after working 7 days straight.  Whew!

So, to all my friends who've missed me  ... I hope you can forgive me.

That, and Victor insists I get him out of the latest no-hope fix I put him into in the latest chapter of THREE SPIRIT KNIGHT! 

(SHE WHO BREEDS is about to give birth to the Nameless Ones, and Victor "don't know nothing about birthing no monsters!"  A take on a line from GONE WITH THE WIND.)

Now, back to our regularly scheduled post ...

Snoopy insists Barnaby Conrad, co-author of SNOOPY'S GUIDE TO THE WRITING LIFE, took the six rules to great novel writing from him.

 (Don't miss Mr. Conrad's great book for under $2, LEARNING TO WRITE FICTION FROM THE MASTERS):

  http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Fiction-Masters-Barnaby-Conrad/dp/0452276578/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1353346429&sr=1-1-fkmr0&keywords=advice+from+the+masters+barnaby+conrad

  But as for Snoopy's claim about those six rules, Woodstock is his witness so ....

You choose who came up with these interesting SIX RULES TO A GOOD NOVEL:

1. Try to pick the most intriguing place in your piece to begin.
2. Try to create attention-grabbing images of a setting if that’s where you want to begin.
3. Raise the reader’s curiosity about what is happening or is going to happen in an action scene.
4. Describe a character so compellingly that we want to learn more about what happens to him or her.
5. Present a situation so vital to our protagonist that we must read on.
6. And most important, no matter what method you choose, start with something happening! (And not with ruminations. A character sitting in a cave or in jail or in a kitchen or in a car ruminating about the meaning of life and how he got to this point does not constitute something happening.)

Hone your opening words, for just as stories aren’t written but rewritten, so should beginnings be written and rewritten.

Look at your opening and ask yourself, ‘If I were reading this, would I be intrigued enough to go on?’
And remember:

Always aim for the heart!

Charles Schulz classic 1997 comic strip from SNOOPY'S GUIDE TO THE WRITING LIFE, a steal at $1.25 used:
http://www.amazon.com/Snoopys-Guide-Writing-Barnaby-Conrad/dp/1582971943

SNOOPY'S GUIDE TO NEVER GIVING UP

 

http://www.amazon.com/Snoopy%C3%A2%C2%80%C2%99s-Guide-Writing-Barnaby-Conrad/dp/1582973237/ref=dp_ob_title_bk

Ray Bradbury wrote in this fun book:
“The blizzard doesn’t last forever; it just seems so.”

You can buy a hardcover copy for only $1.25!!

My favorite contribution comes from the always-insightful Ray Bradbury:

"The amazing Blackstone came to town when I was seven, and I saw how he came alive onstage and thought, God, I want to grow up to be like that!  

And I ran up to help him vanish an elephant. To this day I don’t know where the elephant went. One moment it was there, the next — abracadabra — with a wave of the wand it was gone!

In 1929 Buck Rogers came into the world, and on that day in October a single panel of Buck Rogers comic strip hurled me into the future. I never came back.

It was only natural when I was twelve that I decided to become a writer and laid out a huge roll of butcher paper to begin scribbling an endless tale that scrolled right on up to Now, never guessing that the butcher paper would run forever.

Snoopy has written me on many occasions from his miniature typewriter, asking me to explain what happened to me in the great blizzard of rejection slips of 1935. Then there was the snowstorm of rejection slips in ’37 and ’38 and an even worse winter snowstorm of rejections when I was twenty-one and twenty-two.  

That almost tells it, doesn’t it, that starting when I was fifteen I began to send short stories to magazines like Esquire, and they, very promptly, sent them back two days before they got them!  

I have several walls in several rooms of my house covered with the snowstorm of rejections, but they didn’t realize what a strong person I was; I persevered and wrote a thousand more dreadful short stories, which were rejected in turn.  

Then, during the late forties, I actually began to sell short stories and accomplished some sort of deliverance from snowstorms in my fourth decade.  

But even today, my latest books of short stories contain at least seven stories that were rejected by every magazine in the United States and also in Sweden! So, dear Snoopy, take heart from this. The blizzard doesn’t last forever; it just seems so."

DO YOU HAVE WHAT IT TAKES TO BE A WRITER?

 

“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses.

That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own.”

- Henry Miller

Henry Valentine Miller (December 26, 1891 – June 7, 1980)

was an American writer and painter.

He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of "novel" that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism,

one that is distinctly always about and expressive of the real-life Henry Miller and yet is also fictional.

His most characteristic works of this kind are Tropic of Cancer (1934), Black Spring (1936), and Tropic of Capricorn (1939).

In 1932-1933, while working on what would become his first published novel, Tropic of Cancer, Miller devised and adhered to a stringent daily routine to propel his writing.

Under a part titled Daily Program, his routine also featured the following wonderful blueprint for productivity, inspiration, and mental health:

MORNINGS:
If groggy, type notes and allocate, as stimulus.
If in fine fettle, write.

AFTERNOONS:
Work of section in hand, following plan of section scrupulously. No intrusions, no diversions. Write to finish one section at a time, for good and all  

EVENINGS:
See friends. Read in cafés.
Explore unfamiliar sections — on foot if wet, on bicycle if dry.

Write, if in mood, but only on Minor program.
Paint if empty or tired.

Make Notes. Make Charts, Plans. Make corrections of MS.

Note: Allow sufficient time during daylight to make an occasional visit to museums or an occasional sketch or an occasional bike ride. Sketch in cafés and trains and streets. Cut the movies! Library for references once a week.

COMMANDMENTS

1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to ‘Black Spring.’
3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
5. When you can’t create, you can work.
6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
9. Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

THE MAGIC OF WRITING WELL_ 6 tips from JOHN STEINBECK

 

“Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself.

The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book.

The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.”
― Marcel Proust

John Steinbeck:

"If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is,

no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.

The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader.

If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it.

You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that makes a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story.”

John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. (February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968) was an American writer.

He is widely known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

and East of Eden (1952) and the novella Of Mice and Men (1937).

Now, for John Steinbeck's 8 tips to make your writing great:

1.) Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.


2.) Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.


3.) Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.


4.) If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.


5.)Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.


6.) If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.

WE HAVE NO ABSENT FRIENDS_Oh, how I miss you Blogfest

 

Today is the OH, HOW I MISS YOU blogfest:

http://strangepegs.blogspot.com/ - Andrew

http://theqqqe.blogspot.com/ - Matthew

http://alexjcavanaugh.blogspot.com/ - Alex

 

The bloggers we really miss…

and the ones we would really miss!

"Absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends."  - Ambrose Bierce.

"Friendship is a sheltering tree." - Coleridge

"Friends are the only true wealth we have in this world and the only treasure we can hope to find in the next." - Victor Standish.

I agree with Ambrose: we have no absent friends.  But not the reason why.

We have no absent friends because their spirit stays with us, enriching us at the oddest moments when a stray thought or word re-awakens a memory of them.

 

V. R. BARKOWSKI

 

She was the first blogger to follow me.

V.R. was my role model on how to be a good blogger:

 

Friendly, wise, warm, insightful, helpful.

 

She set the bar high.  I do not match it.

 

But I try.

 

She grew weary of the grind of trying to get an agent, trying to be seen on her blog by those influencial in publishing.

 

I see where just recently that she has a short story being accepted by a Maine magazine.

 

I miss her.

 

 

 

 

WENDY TYLER RYAN

 

I do not even know her true last name.

Her last two names are the first names of her two sons.

 

That is all right.  I am much like the cowboys of the Old West:

I do not pry.

Need a friend?

I'm there.

 

Need privacy?

I tip my Stetson and give it.

 

Without Wendy, my books would not look as good.

 

Her book trailers for me are works of art.

 

Her friendship has never wavered.

 

That is rare.

 

Her last post was 5 weeks ago.

 

She is in the midst of publishing her anthology.

 

Wish her luck, everyone!

 

Speaking of anthologies:

 

I am in hers.

 

I am also in OPEN DOORS II

 

Their blog currently has a guest post by yours truly!

 

Give it a look!

http://www.waymanpublishing.blogspot.com/2012/11/myth-in-bear-with-two-shadows-by-roland.html