C.B. Potts's Blog, page 37

For Mr. Robinson

Why Do My Cheerios Taste So Much Like Pee?

Okay, that's not the title of the piece, BUT IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN.

Rise and Shine, Rise and Shine, Rise and Shine

Hello, Friday. Where have you been?

Today should be a good day; after a week of upheaval and disruption, I'll be able to sit and write for many hours whilst the girls are at school and Tim has errands to run. Harmony has a really neat after school activity, and I'm pretty sure there's something neat in store for Nadia too today.

It looks like it is fixing to rain, and it's supposed to rain all the weekend. Yesterday while we were out and about as a result of the disruption, I came across a Nor...

Wednesday Morning

It is early. I was woken by the smell of a skunk, sharp and dank and foul. It's foggy out, and the scent - it lingers, laying close to the ground, a reminder that even spring has its moments.

Yesterday Nadia and Tim brought me a lovely pot of chrysanthemums, white and yellow and looking like daisies, and Twister Pink verbena. I can't wait to plant; it's still too soon, by half, I think, but in a week or two, who knows?

I have already the word of the day; adumbration, which means foreshadowing,...

Relevant for the Artists on my Flist

(And, of course, those of you who have large enough budgets to be art collectors!)

http://artmediumus.com/

May Day

A starting point may not be the starting point, singular and official, but in application, this appears to be irrelevant.

Yesterday made me very mindful of the importance of beginnings. I want to talk about one of the fundamental things I discuss with my clients, and would share with anyone who is in the process of writing a non-fiction book. It's called the Faulty Base Line Assumption.

Let's begin with the working premise that a non-fiction book is a conversation between the author and the re...

Monday Morning: Here We Go

"I'm a philosopher by trade," said a man on BookTV. Nice work if you can get it, I suppose. I did not fail to notice, nodding at his side, sleek pony tail and smiling, the most likely patron of that philosophy. She had the face you'll see behind a million coffee bars, shelving books at a politically-incorrect but always-hiring Wal-Mart, checked out at Old Navy: it's all worth it, you see, because He will do Great Things, if only someone will give him a chance. If only he can be heard.

You have...

Sunday Noontime

I am happy, for I've written a good and meaty chapter and sent it off to the client; now, I think, I am going to sit out and sketch out anew the structure of this book, for it has morphed and grown out of its initial designated vision, and I want to get a handle on it again.  Later, perhaps, I shall write more on this book, and I've a chapter draft of the other big book I'm working on to complete. Taking a break is good - it gives me a chance to clean the bedroom and get some...

Every Now And Then Remember

It is okay to be angry.
Life really is not fair.
It is okay to second-guess yourself and be resentful and rage against the fact
that history can not be rewritten
with a simple wish
or earnest, painful labor.

Anger is Love on a bad day, ranting at you through hangover head, trashing her way through your psyche because nothing there is good enough, nothing is acceptable, nothing is as pure and brilliant and shining as it needs to be, nothing is worthy of you

Who you are
Who you could be

When she sobers...

Friday Morning

If I have learnt anything, it is that life forms no logical patterns. It is haphazard and full of beauties which I try to catch as they fly by, for who knows whether any of them will ever return?

Margot Fonteyn said those words, and they're good words, on this snowy Friday morning when I'm pondering quite the opposite: it seems to me sometimes that clearly there is a grand, complex, and ultimately unknowable pattern built into the universe. We are far too close to it to see it, I think...

Onward

I woke up this morning well aware of the terrible weight of previous. There's no escaping it, really: as much as we'd like to start a fresh canvas or despoil a new notebook and claim it as a line in the sand, the truth is that everything that is now is, in ways identifiable and otherwise, inevitably a function of what came before.

Yet it seems to me this morning important not to drive with mine eyes fixed upon the rear-view mirror. Life has a direction built into it, and that direction...