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12:09 pm
shanna_s
![[User Picture]](http://p-userpic.livejournal.com/72540221/4332894) [Link] |
The Rear View
I dreamed last night that I was posting on this topic today, so I might as well go with it.
Have you started to feel shunned when you go to a bookstore? I'm not talking about the staff, but rather the book covers. It seems the current trend is covers with people's backs turned to you. Cover trends are nothing new -- there were the cartoony romantic comedy covers in the late 90s, the chick lit covers with shoe-clad feet or martini glasses, etc. -- but they tend to stay within genres. Now, though, the back view covers seem to be really crossing the genre lines.
Because my books have been showing up on the urban fantasy bestseller list at Amazon (all four were there this morning!), I've found myself looking at those covers, and the back view is really popular there. A large percentage of the urban fantasy covers involve a woman with her back turned, often wearing leather, or sometimes wearing nothing but tattoos. In some cases, her face is turned slightly to the front, but it's still obscured by shadows or hair.
But then if you look at the more "literary" women's fiction covers, we have even more backs, only this time the women tend to be wearing retro sundresses, or maybe coats as they walk away from the viewer. Sometimes it's just the backs of their heads.
Oddly enough, these all seem to be women's backs we're seeing. The exception in urban fantasy is that sometimes the Harry Dresden figure on Jim Butcher's books has his back turned, but the way they put Harry on the covers is always a little shadowy. B&N.com has my latest book classified as paranormal romance, and looking at that bestseller list (I'm on the top 100!), it seems like, again, if the figure on the cover is female, we see her back, but the men we usually get a pretty good look at.
I suppose it could have something to do with the idea that readers want to picture the characters for themselves, so showing the characters with their backs turned gives a glimpse without putting a definite face on them. Or it could be designed to appeal to men and women in different ways -- women reading urban fantasy might want to picture themselves as the heroine, so they don't want to see a face, while men are drawn to the body rather than the face, anyway. I don't know why all the book club bait books use women's backs.
And I suppose it's possible I'm being overly paranoid about feeling shunned when I go to a bookstore and all those backs are turned to me. You could look at it as the characters looking inward into the content of the books and encouraging readers to follow them inside.
Now I need to decipher some cryptic notes I left for myself when I had a stroke of thought for the book I'm revising. I scribbled something random on a piece of paper, and I think it has something to do with the book, but I'm not only a little unsure what it means, I'm not entirely sure what it says. The really sad thing is that I was sitting at my desk when I wrote it. It's not something I scribbled in the middle of the night to remind myself of something I dreamed (since I dreamed about blogging about book covers with people's backs and not about the book).
Hmmm, is that word "feud" or "fend"? That could totally change the meaning of a scene.
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12:34 pm
deannahoak
![[User Picture]](http://p-userpic.livejournal.com/32138455/974515) [Link] |
Website trouble
Hey, guys. My main website was infected with rogue links. :P I actually am not terribly savvy about WP but really want to learn these things for myself, and I'm stubbornly hacking away at it. :-)
(I thought I'd screwed it up completely, but it seems...not too bad so far!)
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10:13 am
jacardie
![[User Picture]](http://p-userpic.livejournal.com/17365080/1329098) [Link] |
Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head
Originally published at Hollywoodland. Please leave any comments there.
Yep. It’s raining. Again.  Rumor has it it’s supposed to be sunny tomorrow and Saturday. I’ll believe it when I see it.
Not a lot on tonight. We bid a fond (???) farewell to Warrick on CSI (at least I assume it’s his last episode given the previews), Without a Trace (which I’ve actually stopped watching but it keeps showing up in my personalized TV listings *g*) and part one of the season finale of Lost (next week is the two-hour season ender).
I only wrote a few sentences last night. I feel like I’m just going through the motions. I really need to work on getting all this handwritten stuff keyed in.
Reading: I finished up the one library book I was reading, but I just couldn’t force myself to read the last one, so now I’m reading Withering Heights by Dorothy Cannell. This is the eleventh book in the Ellie Haskell series.
Tags: books & authors, rambling, tv/movies, writing
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09:00 pm
jandersoncoats
![[User Picture]](http://p-userpic.livejournal.com/52913778/1946397) [Link] | I recently learned there's a French immersion summer camp not an hour away from my house.
They have a session called "Les Chevaliers" in which you get to use a trebuchet and learn to fence.
I would have chewed off my right arm to be sent to this camp when I was ten.
Can I interest my child in this?
Hells no.
*sigh*
I would have such a good parent for little J. And the Boy is definitely nothing like I was when I was a kid.
Maybe it's true that we raise our kids the way we wish we'd been raised.
Maybe that's why there's only one of him.
Current Mood: pensive
Current Music: I am not dead, I do not sleep
Tags: no one wants to read about my kid
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10:03 pm
shalanna
![[User Picture]](http://p-userpic.livejournal.com/73081707/1010469) [Link] |
Patience, fortitude, and the Ferris wheel
I sent requested partials to that agent from the RWA convention (by e-mail) back on April 7th. Only a little over a month. Has it been enough time that I should e-mail to ask whether she received them? Might they just be sitting in some forgotten corner of the in-box or the "read sometime" box? Or maybe she was just being nice at the convention and really never had any intention of reading them in the first place. Either way, I don't want to make contact if the result is likely to be bad. (If she feels pushed, or if it irritates her, or if she just rejects to get it off her desk because I made waves.)
# # #
Victoria Roberts, _New Yorker_ cartoonist: "When folks ask me where I get my ideas, I say they’re a big gift that I am busy unwrapping. And whenever I find something new, it invariably contains something of the past."
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11:59 pm
miladyinsanity
[Link] |
14/05/2008
In my defense, I've an exam tomorrow, and have hardly been at my computer all day.
Tags: daily count, eva
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03:21 pm
fashionista_35
![[User Picture]](http://p-userpic.livejournal.com/59682186/4127843) [Link] |
Life goes on
Had a long-standing hair appointment this morning. Didn't really feel like going, but what was sitting around the house and dwelling going to do?
Not a damned thing.
Maybe it even gave me a bit of a live for the moment 'tude too because I went in and did something on impulse.
Before:
After:
 
What the hell, right?
Current Mood:  contemplative
Current Music: Duffy- Delayed Devotion
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01:41 pm
shanna_s
![[User Picture]](http://p-userpic.livejournal.com/36881365/4332894) [Link] |
World's Biggest Wimp
I'm making progress on this round of revisions. Yesterday, I figured out how to rework a scene in a way that now makes it matter instead of just sitting there. The trick was to delete one of those "darlings" -- a bit of dialogue I really loved that the scene built to, but that really didn't need to be there, and its presence kept the scene from going in a better direction. Maybe I can fit it in elsewhere, but for now, it's out of there.
While I'm analyzing my weaknesses, I've discovered through my reading what may be my biggest challenge as a writer: I may be the world's biggest wimp. This occurred to me when I found myself struggling to read a children's book because it was too scary. Well, not so much scary as promising that bad things would happen. On a whim, I'd checked an omnibus edition of the first three Lemony Snicket books out of the library, since I'd heard a lot about them. I read the first one in one sitting, but then found that I almost couldn't bear to face the second one. When the narrator suggested that readers might want to put the book down now and tell themselves that things would work out okay because things were about to get really, really bad, I found myself actually putting the book down. It took me three days to read this children's book because I dreaded so much seeing what would happen next. I couldn't take seeing these characters suffer.
Which is weird, given that I'm a big fan of Joss Whedon, president and poster boy of the "put your characters in a tree and throw rocks at them" school of writing. I love the way he takes characters to the brink, really testing their mettle, or else comes up with perfectly understandable motivations for doing the unforgivable, so that characters we love can do horrible things and we still love them. And I love the sense that no one is safe, that you can't count on all the characters surviving unscathed, which really raises the sense of tension. Maybe in the Lemony Snicket books my issue is that it involves children, or it's possible that I get frustrated by the fact that most of their problems stem from adults not listening to them rather than really being upset about the bad things happening.
(Though I have since discovered, after forcing myself the rest of the way through that second Lemony Snicket book and then reading the third in one sitting that part of the joke is that the reality of what happens in those books isn't nearly as dire as what is promised. And the bit about the adults not listening is really what it feels like to be a kid, so that's probably a big part of what makes the books so popular.)
While I was in the midst of struggling to get through a children's book that was freaking me out too much, I was also re-reading parts of The Writer's Journey by Christopher Vogler, the book that takes the Joseph Campbell universal myth theories and applies them for modern storytelling. Vogler mentions that he saw the original Star Wars film at an advance screening, and the part that told him this was going to be a hit was the scene in the garbage masher, which maps to the "Inmost Cave/Ordeal" section of the universal myth plot -- the midpoint of the story. In that scene, Luke, our hero, gets dragged under water by the creature, there's some struggle, and then it goes silent. The moment is held just long enough to make the audience wonder if maybe Luke really is dead. You don't think they'll kill off the hero, but then you start to wonder if maybe there was a bit of misdirection, and one of these other characters is really the hero. And then just when you're really getting worried, he pops up again, re-born. Then almost immediately the walls start to converge, and all the characters are in jeopardy again, then there's the tease where you hear from C-3PO's point of view all the screaming, and he thinks they're dying instead of rejoicing. In a fairly short sequence, first the hero and then all the main characters are brought close enough to the brink of death that we can't help but wonder if they might actually die. That creates an incredible roller coaster of emotions and heightens the emotional involvement of the audience in the story.
And that's where my own wimpiness can hurt me because I may joke about torturing my characters (like with the end of book three), but I haven't really been willing to take them to that brink. Granted, what I write is generally classified as comedy, and you have different expectations there, but where I seem to be heading in my writing is in stuff that might be called fantasy with a lot of humor, and there I need to be a little bolder about being mean to my characters.
So I guess to toughen myself up, I need to read more children's books.
In other news, my blog touring continues. You can get a glimpse of my work environment at Jennifer Echols's blog.
Tags: writing
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11:26 am
jacardie
[Link] |
Let’s win!
Originally published at Hollywoodland. Please leave any comments there.
Do you enter contests? I’ve been on a contest/sweepstakes kick this morning. Books, cars, TVs, DVDs, CDs, you name it! I want to win stuff! Lots of stuff! I’m greedy. 
Last night’s Dancing With the Stars went pretty much how I expected.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: books & authors, rambling, tv/movies, writing
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08:02 am
dragonhearth
![[User Picture]](http://p-userpic.livejournal.com/30490214/1145875) [Link] |
gacked from kageneko
Current Mood:  infuriated
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11:59 pm
alleypat
![[User Picture]](http://p-userpic.livejournal.com/6551082/39113) [Link] |
carrots and marks
And don't worry about the special characters decorating the words. Apparently it literally got lost in translation. I'll be cleaning it up in the next few days.
ahhhh home sweet skunk smelling home :)
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11:56 pm
alleypat
[Link] |
Eureka! It works!
After having thought I'd lost my pathauldren.com website I had just begin, finally there it is. The server peeps moved servers and somehow I got lost in the shuffle off to Buffalo. Now, Dallas has a virtual connection to my own website, pathauldren.com Needs mega updating, but whew, thot I'd lost it for good!
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08:28 pm
fashionista_35
[Link] |
One of those moments that pushes you closer to becoming an adult
I just heard from an old friend today. My old housemate, actually. Someone I've known for over twenty years, which in and of itself, seems impossible. It can't possibly have been that long since we shared a house and took road trips to St. George's Island and tried to make ten bucks buy a week's worth of groceries. There was a larger group of us—all band kids, of course—and to a greater or lesser degree, we've stayed in touch. Lesser on my part, a bit because of my introvert nature and a bit because I didn't stay in Florida after we all eventually left college. But still—when something big happens, we all find our way back to each other.
That happened tonight.
One of the many couples from those days, a couple who were quietly devoted to each other and to their family, who had made a lovely, stable life for themselves and their two children, suffered every parent's worst nightmare today when they lost their beautiful little girl. A little girl who had defied odds by surviving a premature birth and turning into a lovely, healthy child. But one of those evil specters from that early fight for survival returned to haunt her and just like that, in a matter of two days, she was gone.
It's at moments like these that I wish I had the beautiful, graceful eloquence of Barbara Samuel. She'd know just the right thing to say and would craft it in lovely, fitting language, while all I can do is sit here, stunned, angry, and utterly unable to comprehend how my old friends must be feeling. Wishing that there was something—anything—I could do, because even though I haven't spoken with them in probably four years, they're still part of the tapestry of those days that so clearly defined my life and who I ultimately became, and as such, remain in some way, a part of me, even today.
I haven't locked them in some time capsule. We've all had lives that are hopefully, every bit as rich and vibrant as that part of the tapestry that was our late adolescence/early adulthood, but it's because of that evolution we've all gone through that we still have a touchstone with which to connect.
So tonight, I think of them not as my old friends from university, or the young newlyweds we were within a couple of years of each other. Tonight, they're simply my friends who are also parents and who are dealing with the worst possible thing they can deal with. And while I'm not a religious woman, I am, hopefully, a spiritual one and tonight, I'll be thinking of them and their daughter and their young son and lighting a candle.
Holding them close.
Current Mood: devastated
Current Music: Josh Groban- February Song
Tags: friends
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07:31 pm
barneygrizzley
![[User Picture]](http://p-userpic.livejournal.com/50221184/1301335) [Link] |
The good, the bad and the ugly
Just got back from a one day jaunt to lovely Batesville, Indianna, home of the Hill-Rom company...hospital beds and stuff. They flew us up on a little jet...not quite as much fun as I imagined. Spent the night at their farm kinda place, ate well, drank a bit and arrived safely home through two storms. Back to work tomorrow and hopefully will have some time to catch up on stuff. Waved towards WV as we flew by to say hi to Paula and Phil...did you feel it?!
While I was gone last night I was elected president of our FFA Backers group. I knew I would be nominated, it had been discussed previously, but for some reason I feel let down. This is the first time in 3 years that I've missed a meeting and a lot went on. Hoping that I can have a positive impact in the next year, but worried that I won't.
There is a major teen shit storm going on right now with Banana and another girl in her group. This slut, oops, young girl has been a thorn in Banana's side for the last 6 months, after being good friends for quite some time. It's a long story, and to date we have relied on Banana to work it out. Well turns out the mom of other girl has been calling the advisors and complaining that B is causing problems. This is the last straw. I'm about to become the squeeky wheel mom real fast. I'm tired of the advisors telling the girls to work it out, when obviously it's not being worked out. I want a sit down meeting with the whole damn bunch. This slut girl has been on the same CDE team as B this year and has gone out of her way to exclude B from things, to ridicule her to the others and generally work her evil. B has never, ever, had a problem with anyone. She has always gotten along, or not, with people without any drama. I happen to know that this girl is smoking, drinking and having sex with her boyfriend on a regular basis, while her folks think she's the little angel. I would love to say something to them about this. Love. To. Say. Something. But I don't want to dip down to their level. Damn I hate that about myself. I'm probably going to hell, but I hope this slut girl gets knocked up. Her boyfriend used to be a nice kid, we've always like him. But the power of the pussy has got him doing things that just disgust me.
Okay, I've gone on about the ugly for too long. I need to figure out how I'm going to address this with the advisors and the mom of the slut girl. Time to call my mom for some advice on the way to pick-up Bug from Girl Scouts.
Aloha!
Current Location: home
Current Mood:  pissed off
Current Music: USA softball on the tube
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10:38 pm
miladyinsanity
[Link] |
13/05/2008
Day 19.
Not too bad. Will be at 25% in a couple of days, but I've a feeling that it's going to be much longer than 80k. It's probably going to be a WIP that never ends because I don't know what the ending is.
Must learn from ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) m_stiefvater, except that what works for her doesn't necessarily work for me.
Oh I wrote a few words for bitch club, specifically in miss k's POV. I'm changing the setting, though I keep forgetting that when I play with it. Hmmm...
Off to the computer cluster again.
Tags: bitch club, daily count, eva, miss k
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01:26 pm
shanna_s
![[User Picture]](http://p-userpic.livejournal.com/74220696/4332894) [Link] |
The Myth of the Hot Firefighter
Following up on yesterday's post, since I got some e-mails asking the question, and it's quicker and easier to respond all at once here, The Book That Would Not Die is a new project unrelated to my series, which is why I'm trying to get it absolutely perfect. It's the one I dashed off a first draft of in a few weeks back in August, and then have completely rewritten a couple of times. I don't really want to talk about what it is or what it's about because it hasn't sold yet, and I like to keep unsold projects under wraps (I don't want to potentially undermine my agent's efforts in talking to editors about it). Meanwhile, yesterday I dealt with the issue of getting more emotion in my work in a properly cerebral, analytical way: I checked a couple of psychology books about emotions out of the library. I may be a hopeless case.
This morning, I went out to run a couple of errands before it started raining (and I almost made it, too -- it started raining as I was walking from my garage to my house when I got home). The local fire department was doing one of their charity "fill the boot" drives at the main intersection, and I finally got my fantasy firefighter.
I have learned that there's a sad reality about firefighters in that very few of them actually look like those men in firefighter calendars or on the covers of romance novels. A lot of the guys I went to high school with are now firefighters, and let's just say they aren't exactly the calendar guy types. Then there was my one big encounter with my neighborhood fire station that completely shattered all my illusions and ideals.
This was back when I had a regular job and had to get up early in the morning to get to work, so it must have been around 6:30. I hadn't even put the kettle on to make tea, when suddenly my security system went nuts. I'd already disarmed it to bring in the newspaper, so it wasn't an intruder, and when I checked the keypad, it said it was a fire. There was no fire. There was no smoke, no flames, absolutely nothing. The system had just gone nuts, and I couldn't get it to turn off. And then I heard sirens approaching. As I said, it was 6:30 in the morning, and I'd just got out of bed, so I was still in my nightgown. A nightgown from Victoria's Secret with a lacy bodice and a slit all the way up my thigh (yeah, I live alone and sleep alone and haven't had a boyfriend in forever, but I love pretty nightgowns). The part of my brain that had managed to wake up said that maybe those sirens were coming to my house, so I grabbed a bathrobe. And then the doorbell rang, and I had the fire department, in full gear, on my front porch.
Sounds like the set-up for a romantic comedy meet-cute, right? (Or I guess a porn movie, but that's not the way my brain works.) We've got the flustered heroine in her sexy nightie and the handsome firefighter who needs to make sure it really is a false alarm, even if he is distracted by what the nightie reveals. But the firemen were so disappointing. I'm sure they were totally competent at the firefighting stuff, but they were much older and grizzled (which I guess that job might make you). Definitely not calendar material. I clutched my bathrobe tighter around me as I explained that I was pretty sure my security system had freaked out, since you could see the smoke detectors and fire sensors from the front door, and it was clear that there was neither smoke nor fire anywhere near them. They said they'd had a number of this kind of call that morning, and apparently the security company's computer had freaked out, but they still had to respond to the calls. While they were still there, the security company called to check on the alarm. It was reassuring to know that the fire department can get to my house in less than five minutes, but it was a waste of a sexy nightgown.
But today, though, I finally got my cute fireman for the fill-the-boot drive. At my lane, the guy was built kind of like a fireplug, short and stout, and clearly much older, but one lane over, the guy was tall, cute, well-built and red-haired. He reminded me of Carrot in the Discworld books. I was just about to whimper to myself that it wasn't fair that I didn't get the cute one, but then the one in my lane moved to the next lane over, and the cute one headed right to me. He even called me "sweetheart" when I put my money in his boot. Alas, he was wearing a wedding ring (so there's no point in committing arson in order to lure him to me). But still, I got the cute one! And my faith in the ideal of the hot firefighter has been restored. There is at least one out there! In my neighborhood!
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12:03 pm
jacardie
[Link] |
Dance off
Originally published at Hollywoodland. Please leave any comments there.
Fairly quiet night tonight on TV. NCIS, the Dancing With the Stars results show (and we’ll have more kids dancing), and Womens Murder Club.
And now here’s the Dancing With the Stars report!
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: books & authors, tv/movies, writing
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02:02 pm
deannahoak
[Link] |
When and how much to explain
Originally published at Deanna Hoak. Please leave any comments there. I was reminded of the movie I Am Legend today, which I’d seen a while back and mostly enjoyed despite what I considered a pretty big plot issue. (Does anyone know if they have the equivalent of copyeditors for movies? They really should.)
It seemed to me that if rats can get the disease (and they can–the protagonist is doing experiments on diseased rats), it would be impossible for there to still be human survivors. :-/ And that brings up an interesting point for viewers and readers: I don’t think most people want to have to come up with excuses for a serious story in order to take charge of suspending their own disbelief. (I’m not talking about having to explain something that’s clearly fantasy–I mean issues like this for which there is perhaps a logical explanation, but the viewers never see it.) So yes, we can assume that even though dogs in I Am Legend can get the disease, maybe it has to be somehow induced in rats. Or maybe there’s some other reason they haven’t taken over. Whatever it is, though, I have to come up with it myself in the course of the movie in order to suspend my own disbelief. I actually would have enjoyed the movie more with a nod toward whatever it was, though maybe that’s just me.
As a reader or viewer, what kind of issues do you want explained? As a writer, how much do you feel it’s fair to leave up to the reader to figure out? Some explanations will always exist only in the writer’s mind, but which should those be?
Tags: blog
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11:21 am
rclementmoore
![[User Picture]](http://p-userpic.livejournal.com/72748429/5241558) [Link] |
Prezzies
I got a very unexpected anniversary present this year. I'm really not the easiest person to buy personal presents for, because I have very particular tastes and they're subject to change on a whim. Mr. RCM has what I consider an irrational antipathy for gift certificates/cards because he considers them impersonal, but I LOVE them, because I can get exactly what I want. And I still always remember who gave it to me.
Anyway. In the interest of actually getting something I will use and enjoy, I've become very specific about what I want for a gift. All I wanted for my anniversary this year was a trifle bowl, because every time I make trifle, it tastes great, but isn't nearly as pretty as it should/could be if I had the right thing to put it in.
Well, I did get a trifle bowl. But I also got one of these. This was not entirely out of the blue, because I *did* say I wanted one, and specifically a pink one. But I sort of said I wanted one in the context of 'oh, I want a convertible for my next car,' or 'someday it would be nice to have a flat screen tv.' Not in an "I expect someone to unexpectedly buy me one" sort of way. Of course, I did get Mr. RCM a Wii for his birthday, but seriously, I knew I'd play it as much as he would (or more) so it was really only HALF a Wii.
ANyway. While a kitchen appliance may not strike some people as a romantic gift, I'll point out that (a) I LOVE to bake and (b) he actually got it for me in PINK, despite having previously expressed scorn for the color.
So far I've made three loaves of bread, a pizza, two cakes and a couple dozen cookies.
Now ask me how my diet is going. :-(
Current Music: Let It Be (American Idol Studio Version) -- Brooke White
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03:42 am
shalanna
![[User Picture]](http://p-userpic.livejournal.com/41755216/1010469) [Link] |
We are mostly invisible and no one knows it
A bit of 3 AM philosophy.
Most of me is invisible. Most of you is invisible.
I'm not talking about your internal organs or what's covered by clothing. I mean that the essence of a person is someting that can be sensed but never seen. Our thoughts, feelings, knowledge base, intentions, and dreams form an invisible self in which we live, and that's what defines us--far more than our physical presences in the experiential world. You can talk about someone's aura, the personality, the soul, the energy presence, and so forth, and you're talking about the invisible person. This is reality--not that consensus reality that we move through every day as if it were a virtual projection. Can we trust the input of our senses? Are we ignoring a couple of important senses?
People who have forgotten how to have any imagination and who deny themselves a creative outlet ("I've never been creative") still have invisible selves, but they're smaller. They can't see or sense the invisible world. They've never believed in magic, or perhaps over time they've come to accept the Rational Knowledge of the parents that there is no magic, there is nothing but what can be seen and measured . . . or at least nothing IMPORTANT. They may project all their hopes onto someone else who has come to represent perfection or whom they think will fulfill their dreams, and pin everything on what this person does or promises to do (this explains the mass hysteria over a rock star, famous writer, or political candidate--but it's also a form of the child's worship of the all-powerful parent.) They lose sight of the essential reliance we must have on ourselves and on whatever guides us spiritually (internally) (a moral compass, if you like).
In this society, everything's measured by material things and popular success (indicated by how many toys you have, how much "designer" stuff you have, how high you are on the rockstar ladder or the business bodypile, and so forth.) Little notice is taken of spiritual depth or artistic fullness . . . well, perhaps an isolated flash here and there, but mostly what you see talked about on the news and around the water cooler is the concrete stuff. Who won "American Graven Image," who's ahead in the polls, who's gonna get a Slammy award, who's the most popular girl in the class, who's the richest person in the world, which oil company has the most derricks. That kind of rot. Certainly the creature comforts have their appeal, but they have nothing at all to do with what's really important.
What is your passion? What are your true talents? Are you hiding them under a bushel? Are you letting them shine and getting mocked and kicked to the curb because of it? (If you draw cartoons and everyone else thinks they're terrible, that doesn't mean they ARE terrible.) Does it matter? Do you matter? Everyone is necessary. Everyone is important.
Everyone has a mission in life. You will not leave this world without accomplishing your mission in life (this is an important message that is found in a book by the same person who wrote _What Color Is Your Parachute?_, and can be a reassuring one or a confusing one.)
Magic and art deal directly with the invisible world. Art can work a type of magic. Magic is afoot for any artist--a writer, a musician, a cartoonist.
Take off the blindfold. See. Hear. Feel the essence of the invisible. Learn to understand the secret, hidden language of the insects, the birds, your own subconscious mind. Access the collective subconscious and understand the world through its archetypes. Pull back the curtain on the theater of the inner world. Don't throw yourself away chasing the things of this world only. Be small. Be large. Store up your treasures where it really counts. Make your way through the unmapped territories. Don't be so immersed in the here-and-now that you miss the small moments that actually constitute living.
What's it like being you and experiencing this very moment through your own filters? Write about it. (It's why people read, for vicarious experience as well as for information, guidance, and inspiration.) Put us into your mind through your prose. You have many hidden facets. You are more than a cog in a larger wheel. You are a pilgrim.
John Wayne: "What is it now, pilgrim... your conscience?"
"Well, don't fret about that, pilgrim."
"Whoa, take'er easy there, pilgrim."
(all quotations from "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance")
Pilgrimage: your sojourn through earthly life as distinguished from the life hereafter.
Pilgrim: one who travels; especially one who heads towards a holy place or shrine as a devotee. One who has a quest, an objective, a holy and significant thing to accomplish (such as self-expression or illumination of some aspect of the eternal human condition through art or crafts)
Pilgrim sign: a symbol or badge a pilgrim carries, such as the palm leaf, Catherine wheel, Canterbury bell; generally indicates the shrine sought. Thought to preserve a pilgrim against interference. A badge of honor. Wear it proudly.
What is your pilgrim sign? What is your pilgrimage about?
It doesn't matter what it is, as long as you know what it is--and you do have one. Find your purpose and fulfill your higher destiny.
And leave behind a written record to illuminate the path for those who follow.
[TANGENTIALLY RELATED TOPIC EDIT: "Consumerism" is a more accurate term than "materialism" for what I meant. An interesting thread for those interested in materialism as a philosophy as opposed to idealism.]
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12:46 am
miladyinsanity
[Link] | I can't whine at my other blog because mizkit's taken over temporarily and Twitter doesn't have enough space for the eloquence of my whining.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!
I'm in a computer cluster in a mechanical engineering building (I think, it's an engineering building of some sort, at any rate).
I think taxes are evil. No, I'm no extreme free trade neo-classicist but I've been stuck reading a chapter on taxation for days now.
Tags: my regular life takes overy my writing
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03:35 pm
dragonhearth
![[User Picture]](http://p-userpic.livejournal.com/72663557/1145875) [Link] |
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Penny and Lucky
Today I went to visit my friend Michele, aka willowwolfe who owns the sister to my Chihuahua puppy, Lucky. Her puppy's name is Penny. Penny and Lucky had a lovely playdate. I had been to Petco to get some pet food for a client's dog and saw clothes on sale. So they have matching raincoats. A copper one for the boy and a silver one for the girl doggie. They chased each other and chased each other. Lucky slept all the way home and is on my lap now sleeping some more. He's exhausted.
I bought them matching raincoats. Lucky's got his collar up. |
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11:19 pm
miladyinsanity
[Link] |
12/05/2008
Something like 1500 words.
Day 18.
And it's chapterified itself again. Actually, I've just stopped at the end of the third chapter.
Also critted cearabrede's WIP over the weekend. Good book. I miss critting a lot.
Tags: chapterify!, critterina, daily count, eva
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02:36 pm
dragonhearth
![[User Picture]](http://p-userpic.livejournal.com/23300932/1145875) [Link] |
Talking about myself, I guess
I put together a bio for a position I was asked to volunteer for. And after I did it I thought, hey, I should post this somewhere. So here it is:
( Lisa's bio is pretty good if she does say so herself )
Current Mood:  happy
Tags: activism, asatru, wicca
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03:52 pm
candyhavens
[Link] |
Hey
Come by and see me at http://witchychicks.blogspot.com/
-Candy
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