“Writing is not an occupation, profession or job; It is…” | The Art of Quotation

“Writing is not an occupation, profession or job; It is…” | The Art of Quotation.

“Writing is not an occupation, profession or job; It is not a way of life: It is a comprehensive response to life.” – Gregory McDonald, author of “Fletch”

A Tale of Romeo & Juliet ……

AnAdventureInBosnia

Emina by Alex Šantić

Many centuries ago, it was a tradition for men to go for a turkish bath from time to time. This was where men would gather in a relaxed ambience to exhange small talk. This area was called Hamam.

Then, one young man who was returning from the Hamam, passed by the garden of the city imam (Muslim Pastor), saw the daughter of the imam. Struck by her beauty, he wrote a poem which later made him a famous poet.

Here is my humble translation of the poem, hope you like it.

At dusk, while returning from the warmth of the Hamam,

I passed by the garden of the old city Imam.

There in the garden, Under the shade of the jasmine tree,

A pitcher in her hand stood beautiful Emina.

 

What Beauty! I could swear by Imam!

That even the sultan would not be…

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Roald Dahl on How Illness Emboldens Creativity: A Moving Letter to His Bedridden Mentor | Brain Pickings

“I doubt I would have written a line … unless some minor tragedy had sort of twisted my mind out of the normal rut.”

My daily rhythms of reading and writing were recently derailed by a temporary but acute illness that stopped, unceremoniously and without apology, the music to which mind and matter are entwined in their intimate tango. For the second time in my adult life — the first being a food poisoning episode — I was made palpably aware of how body and brain conspire in the thing we call being. The extreme physical weakness somehow short-circuited the “associative trails” upon which fruitful thinking is based and my card to the library of my own mind was mercilessly revoked, and yet I was granted access to a whole new terra incognita of the mind, a Wonderland of fragmentary ideas and sidewise gleams at Truth. Then, as recovery airlifted me out of the mental haze, returning to my mere baseline of cognitive function felt nothing short of miraculous — as soon as I resumed reading, everything sparked fireworks of connections and illuminated associative trails in all directions. It was as though the illness had catapulted me to a higher plane of what Oscar Wilde called the “temperament of receptivity.”

This, of course, is not an uncommon experience — both the tendency to treat illness as an abstraction until it befalls the concreteness of our body-minds, and the sense of not merely renewed but elevated mental and creative faculties coming out on the other end of a physically and mentally draining stretch. But no one has articulated this odd tradeoff more masterfully than…

View original: Roald Dahl on How Illness Emboldens Creativity: A Moving Letter to His Bedridden Mentor | Brain Pickings.

Phenomenal Woman by Maya Angelou

We miss you, Maya.

WRITER'S BLOG

Phenomenal Woman by Maya Angelou

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I’m telling lies.
I say,
It’s in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It’s the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing in my waist,
And the joy in my feet.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can’t…

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First Night Design | A Word in Your Shell-Like about Punctuation

‘Shell-like’ refers to a person’s ear. It has been in use since the late 19th century when the shape of an ear was deemed to be like a sea shell.

“We’re not perfect any of us. We make mistakes, we screw up. But then we forgive and we move forward.” (The Last Song)

— Movie Quotes (@filmedwords) September 20, 2014

When we are tired, under pressure or emotional, it is all too easy to make glaring mistakes in our writing. I’m as guilty as anyone and have appalled myself on occasion with errors that must have prompted my mother, an ardent member of the ‘grammar police’, to spin in her grave!

Having said that, there is little excuse on a computer when there are multifarious tools for proof-reading, whether it’s spelling or grammar. True, these tools are not infallible — I say this as WP  has just accepted ‘iff’ on another post I’m writing — but it is the least we owe our readers. Some bloggers, I’ve noticed, have added spelling and grammar disclaimers; this beggars belief.

While the mistakes listed in the above image are commonplace and infuriating, incorrect plurals seem to have taken over the globe! I’ve just seen a Twitter profile that reads ‘Manages only the best producer’s, artist’s, designer’s and model’s of today’s talent.’ Are they kidding me?

Of all the plural gaffes, there is one in particular that has become all-pervasive and makes me grit my teeth, I confess, with fury. I see it myriad times a day, every day. I’ve even seen it in a captioned prologue to a film. It’s an error that has me wondering if somebody changed the rules and forgot to tell me!

I’m talking about how to use an apostrophe when it comes to years and decades. Confused? Let me show you some examples, all of which I’ve taken from the web. The correct way to express each phrase is on the right.

1960’s Decade Overview • 1960s Decade Overview

Visiting dress, late 1860’s • Visiting dress, late 1860s

Explorers from the 1600’s • Explorers from the 1600s

She was a college student in the early 1990’s • She was a college student in the early 1990s

Where does the 1990’s rank as a decade? • Where do the 1990s rank as a decade? (also note the ‘does’ error in this question taken from the CNN website)

This applies equally when decades are shortened i.e. the ’20s (note the apostrophe before the number to show the elision). The only time you would apply an apostrophe before the ‘s’ is if you were writing about that particular turn-of-the-decade year i.e. 1960’s music charts, meaning the charts of 1960, not the whole decade. If you wanted to refer to the charts of the decade in this context, it would be ‘the 1960s’ music charts’ where the apostrophe after the ‘s’ is possessive in nature.

Incidentally, ages follow the same pattern: you should write ‘I’m in my 30s’ rather than ‘I’m in my 30’s’.

I do know that many are dismissive of grammatical rules and say it really doesn’t matter. But this, as Pippa of The Last Post said, is like declaring that an artist doesn’t need to be able to draw to be a painter, or that a mathematician doesn’t need to know how to add up to create ground-breaking formulae. The more the structure of language is debased, the more incomprehensible it becomes and the less we understand each other, a dangerous path to take, as history shows us all too often.

Here is Lynne Truss on the subject in Eats, Shoots and Leaves, an invaluable and highly entertaining guide to punctuation that has no right not being on every wordsmith’s shelf.

‘The reason it’s worth standing up for punctuation is not that it’s an arbitrary system of notation known only to an over-sensitive élite who have attacks of the vapours when they see it misapplied. The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.’

‘On the page, punctuation performs its grammatical function, but in the mind of the reader it does more than that. It tells the reader how to hum the tune.’

‘We have a language that is full of ambiguities; we have a way of expressing ourselves that is often complex and elusive, poetic and modulated; all our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places. Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking. If it goes, the degree of intellectual impoverishment we face is unimaginable.’

‘[…] I apologise if you all know this, but the point is many, many people do not. Why else would they open a large play area for children, hang up a sign saying “Giant Kid’s Playground”, and then wonder why everyone stays away from it? (Answer: everyone is scared of the Giant Kid.)’

All quotes taken from GoodReads.

I could quote from this book forever and a day. Short of that, I urge you to get a copy.

It is also worth looking out for punctuation posts from some of the lovely blogs I follow including but not limited to Nicholas C Rossis and Have We Had Help.

Related

• Deadly Typos

Take care and keep laughing!

Incomplete

A musically delightful way to end the day, courtesy of belsbror.

belsbror

Before I sign off for the day, I think you are all entitled for an explanation why I intentionally posted only videos today. It’s rather simple actually: my mind was out there somewhere, obviously far away from writing. 😀

I will leave you with a famous short story, the narrative expertly sung.

Be well!

Goodnight guys and gals! 🙂

BLOGGING   LIFE/STYLES   MY STORIES   WHISPER   ZONE

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A Birth in Gaza

Following on from my earlier re-blog about war from Order of Truth, I offer this piece by Peter Wells of Counting Ducks, which provides a powerful statement about the horrors of war and the mental scars that follow trauma.

countingducks

To those unknowing of my childhood my enigmatic and disconnected behaviour must have seemed odd and possibly uncivilised. In youth I could not see beyond getting by and surviving day by day; ‘learning’ was another country where less damaged people lived. I was busy trying to fly that alien craft I was to discover was myself. Sometime after youth I became aware I was a bruise, and every touch hurt me: intimacy, my most desired wish remained my deepest fear. In time, looking around me I saw that everyone has their bruises to some degree and felt, and understood, like me, that to a greater or lesser extent our limping and imperfect journey to a fog-bound destination was marked by the need for self-protection. Those marks, invisible to the naked eye, were our unspoken history, not recorded in those smiling photographs taken on the beach, sitting beside the man who abused you when…

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FEEDBACK | Jo Unwin

JoUnwin

 

I love getting post.  I love getting signed contracts, proof copies, invitations to parties… and I love receiving unsolicited submissions, because there is always the possibility that one of them is going to change the course of my career (and the author’s, obviously!)

I don’t think I’m alone amongst Literary Agents when I say that the working day starts the moment I wake up and check my phone for overnight emails from abroad, or early risers, or night owls – and there are always several.  I’m certainly not alone when I say that the working day ends when I turn off my bedside light.  

If you follow this blog, you’ll know that I absolutely love my job, but there is never enough time.  I would love to be able to hold down a full time job, and read four or more novels a night, but sadly that is not possible.  I have a…

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Hollywood types…intrigue, secrets…murder! Click on the picture!

BEGUILING HOLLYWOOD

5.0 out of 5 starsIt’s In His Kiss is a brilliant present day Hollywood noir murder mystery which should appeal immensely to Fans of Chandler and Cain…, July 7, 2014

By

Ben Vendetta (Cleveland, OH) – See all my reviews

Verified Purchase(What’s this?)

This review is from: It’s In His Kiss (Kindle Edition)

Featuring sleazy Hollywood actors, a mysterious Palm Spring sex club, and the evil clutches of Scientology (I mean Clientology!), It’s In His Kiss is a brilliant present day Hollywood noir murder mystery which should appeal immensely to fans of Chandler and Cain. Like those authors, Lester doesn’t waste her words. She doesn’t tell us, she shows us. I read this over the course of a weekend and want to read it again! Highly recommended.

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My Letter to an Unknown Soldier has now been published!

Update: I should point out that it’s not as grand as it sounds since they are publishing everyone’s contributions as it is a special UK project to commemorate the First World War.

‘Five foot ten of a beautiful young Englishman under French soil. Never a joke, never a look, never a word more to add to my store of memories. The book is shut up forever and as the years pass I shall remember less and less, till he becomes a vague personality; a stereotyped photograph.’

Captain Noman Austin Taylor © Sarah Vernon

My imagined letter to an unknown soldier has now been published on the 14-18-NOW website! Click here.

Take care and keep laughing!