Welcome to everyone coming over here from the Whip-up post about making felt ornaments! If you tried clicking on the link to download the pattern earlier and got a message that traffic had killed it - that's been fixed now. Feel free to click away - and sorry about the delay.
I don't post much at this blog anymore, but you're welcome to join us at my Shiny Happy World for lots of sewing, embroidery and quilting patterns and tutorials. :-)
Everyone is playing himself or herself, in spite of he or she is conscious it or not. People cannot stop the play because their ideas are strongly affected by international information that is brought by TV and Newspapers, and they are conscious themselves by social bonds, although they may believe that they are making decisions by themselves first, then they take actions, but these are strongly affected.
The daily life that does not have any changes is passing with unexpected fine balances.
Everything that people is feeling by their five senses is in their inside. They cannot show them to other people as they are.
The imperfection is becoming a motivation to cope with social environment. However suppose people could love others only to the level that they can compromise. You should take more interested in yourself. What really am I?
Heard about this James Frey business, where he offers writers next-to-nothing amounts of money to authors to write YA books anonymously for him (or worse, let him claim, legally, that he wrote the books himself) and not earn a dime of royalties? All for the opportunity of being published and reaching a larger audience?
Maureen Johnson has a great piece on her blog about all this. She talks about what a horrible, horrible thing this is for one writer to do to another, but also about what a horrible thing it is that people actually say yes to bad deals like this. A reader says, "What's the big deal? Nobody has to say yes to deals like this." True. And yet most of the students Frey spoke to in the Colmubia MFA program admitted they submitted something to him!
Why? Maureen Johnson takes MFA programs to task for teaching people how to write, but not teaching them how to make a living at writing. I agree. This is something I've been saying during Q&As for years, usually right after a student asks me how much money I make. I always tell them--I'm happy to talk about how much I make and the realities of the writing life, mostly because nobody told me the same thing when I was in school, and it would have been really useful!
I'll be up front here too and say that I don't have an MFA, so I can't honestly scold MFA programs the way Marueen (who has a Columbia MFA herself) can. But I did take lots of graduate-level writing courses in school, both as an undergraduate (with special permission) and as a graduate student studying English education. Every one of those classes focused on the craft of writing, but not one ever discussed the realities of making a living as a writer.
Why? Well, I will make what is certain to be an unpopular argument among college writing professors: most of them have never made a living at writing themselves, so they can't tell their students how to do it. When I was in graduate school, I took a novel-writing class with a professor who had a number of books out, but they were all literary tomes with small university presses, which I'm sure paid very small advances and had very limited print runs. These are not the kind of book deals that earn you a living wage. They are the kind of book deals that fulfill the publishing requirements that come with being an MFA professor. They are books that keep you teaching.
There's nothing wrong with writing books for small university presses, books that are going to have very limited, literary audiences. Aspiring writers just have to remember that's not the only kind of publishing there is. But to take a graduate writing course, you'd think that's all there is. Rarely, if ever, do you find a graduate writing course that discusses or--heaven forfend--actually encourages the writing of genre fiction. Or fiction for young readers. Graduate programs are designed, on the whole, to turn out National Book Award winners. And that's great for the one percent of writers in those classes with the chops to do that.
But what about the rest of us? And what about all those other books on the shelves--the ones in the mystery and detective fiction section, or the science fiction and fantasy section, or the romance section? You know, the books that actually sell? You've got to take specialized courses for "lesser" stuff like that. Go to Vermont College to learn to write children's fiction, or Clarion to learn how to write science fiction. But don't look for topics like those in most graduate writing programs. Genre fiction is too proletarian.
This disdain for genre fiction is like the ancient Japanese samurai who were taught to live well but at the same time to disdain money and business affairs. We're teaching people how to write, but then we're telling them it's barbaric to make money off of it. Pfui.
I was lucky as an undergraduate to have a professor who had published genre fiction. Who had actually made a living off his writing, not just the teaching of writing. Looking back at it now, I realize one of the reasons why: he was older. He didn't have this modern prejudice against genre fiction, this prejudice against talking about proletarian things like selling our fiction for money. His attitude toward earning a living as a working writer has been a model for me all of my professional life. Graduate programs would do their students a great service to provide similar models--if for no other reason than to keep them from jumping at bad deals like the one James Frey offers because they don't know any better.
(And here's another great post on this by SF writer John Scalzi.)
On the way back to barracks, Eberhardt said he expected the jump would be no different from usual. The others taunted him, saying that he would be too scared to remember his name. Eberhardt retorted, "All right, dammit! I tell you jokers what I'm gonna do! To prove to you that I'm not scared out of my wits when I jump, I'm gonna yell Geronimo loud as hell when I go out that door tomorrow!" Eberhardt kept his promise and the cry was gradually adopted by the other members of his platoon.
By then the coverage of the paratroopers exploits during the war had made the cry "Geronimo" known to the wider public, and its use spread outside the military and air force.Read more...
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
He coined the phrases "the great unwashed", "pursuit of the almighty dollar", "the pen is mightier than the sword", and the famous opening line "It was a dark and stormy night".
Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton PC (25 May 1803 – 18 January 1873), was an English politician, poet, playwright, and prolific novelist. He was immensely popular with the reading public and wrote a stream of bestselling novels which earned him a considerable fortune.
Bulwer-Lytton reached the height of his popularity with the publication of Godolphin (1833). This was followed by The Pilgrims of the Rhine (1834), The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), Rienzi, Last of the Roman Tribunes (1835), and Harold, the Last of the Saxons (1848). The Last Days of Pompeii was inspired by Karl Briullov's painting, The Last Day of Pompeii, which Bulwer-Lytton saw in Milan.
He also wrote the horror story The Haunted and the Haunters or The House and the Brain (1859).
Bulwer-Lytton penned many other works, including The Coming Race or Vril: The Power of the Coming Race (1871), which drew heavily on his interest in the occult and contributed to the birth of the science fiction genre. Its story of a subterranean race waiting to reclaim the surface of the Earth is an early science fiction theme. The book popularised the Hollow Earth theory and may have inspired Nazi mysticism. His term "vril" lent its name to Bovril meat extract.
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