ByGD
A fritillary caught me by surprise, and tossed me from where I stood in my front yard on an overcast spring day to a garden in Scotland where I stood on an overcast spring day fifteen years ago. It was the first time I ever saw the curvaceous little flowers with the grid-pattern petals. That’s not quite true. I had seen them in pictures a few days earlier when I toured the Charles Rennie Mackintosh house inside the Hunterian Art Gallery. Read More
ByGD
I haven’t run a reblog post here in a while. Usually when I do, it’s when someone writes something that I’ve been thinking myself but haven’t figured out how to say yet. This time I did write about it, and after I hit “publish” I read something that made me think, “That’s what I meant to say!”
On Friday I wrote about signs. I got it partially right. I got that the crows in Seattle are more than just urban opportunists (they made their way into a post I wrote for Dave’s Garden last week, too…), and that it had something to do with developing as a writer. But author S.P. Sipal, whose new novel Southern Fried Wiccan (she had me at the title) has just been released, explained it so much better and more beautifully in a post on Adventures in YA Publishing. That blog is on a different platform, so I can’t embed it here, but I hope you will click through and read it – HERE.
And if you don’t know what we’re talking about with the crows, the story is HERE.
I just remembered that crows (specifically, Seattle-based crows) featured in the short stories read at the Reykjavik Writing Jam I attended last fall. I wish I could include one of those stories here, especially Karen Finneyfrock’s, in which the crows were significant, but I couldn’t find them online. I think they were only printed zine-style for attendees of the jam. Maybe that’s what got crows percolating in my brain. Or maybe it’s because they screech outside my window all day as I work (like right now). Or maybe the appearance of crows in tandem with creativity popping up everywhere in my universe lately is some kind of sign.
I would like to include a picture of a crow here, but technology hates me this week and I’m just not going to put myself through that stress today. Instead, here is a picture of the stories I mentioned that include crows.
ByGD
And the sign says…
No, I don’t mean that kind of sign. I’m thinking more like this kind of sign. Read More
ByGD
So I’m reading Lipstick Traces and it’s slow going because these beautiful sentences go on and on until your realize that they might not mean anything at all and you have to go back and read it all again very very carefully to see if there is anything there. And I’m reading about dada and I’m not sure why, but the picture of Alben Barkley (it’s disturbing, and I’ve included it below the fold) at the concentration camp makes me think about Big Hero 6. Read More
ByGD
Have you heard about the writer whose goal was to collect 100 rejections in a year?
Have you heard about the writer who is trying to wallpaper his studio with rejection letters?
Good luck trying to find the origins of these stories – not because they aren’t real but because they are so common. My friend and neighbor, Marisa Vitiello, wrote a post recently about her experience on both sides of the rejection equation. As a working artist, she has been rejected and been responsible for rejecting the work of others.
I think most of us intellectually know the truth in her observations, but we secretly hope that each idea we send out in the world will be met with open arms. So we need constant reminders of the truth about rejection:
On Rejecting and Being Rejected