Dermott Hayes's Blog: Postcard from a Pigeon, page 58
August 1, 2016
I’m Sorry
https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/apology/
50 word story
He woke up, aggrieved. There’s no other word for it. Well, outraged might fit or discombobulated, now that might be better. Especially since, he found no cause for grievance, or anger, either. Pride, then, was the cause, and all he had to do was say, I’m sorry.
why i stayed a virgin in campus
Remarkable story by a young journalism student from Kenya, first published November 2015
It sound pretty insane and unbelievable piece. Yeah, I understand. I have maintained campus ‘virginity’ for my four year course. My colleagues never agreed with me every time I declare the state.
I enrolled in campus some years back, to be precise,2012. With indispensable dreams of hitting high at the academic parameters. An innocent boy well anchored with good village morals.
In campus, the first weeks were just amazing. The mingling experience was inevitable. Though as time rolled up, rumors called in that there was a list of infected lads, with incurable disease. The astonishment numbed me.
Perhaps for those who don’t understand the campus game. It is only in campus that freedom is freedom. You choose whatever makes you feel at ease. There are no restrictions, though answerable to your fee-payers.
Back to my list. One lady claimed to have infected more than a hundred male students within three…
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Writing and Reading
Read and write, write and read. These are the only words of advice I would ever offer anyone who wants to write. Read, so you learn how other writers go about telling stories.
Not a day goes by without encountering at least half a dozen blogs offering advice or links to books that will tell you, how to write. These frustrate me so much. Every writer is wracked by self doubt. Believe me, everything written could be written another way because, well, every written thing can be written in a different way.
Start small, learn the basic skill of writing and telling a story. It’s called communicating. Don’t just describe something to a reader, tell it so they can feel it. That’s writing.
The right way is often measured in dollars, pounds, euros, yen, roubles or whatever currency you can imagine. It is measured in readers, too. So people who self publish in digital books, promote their book’s publication to generate pre-orders, they give away pre-publication copies, free, to garner appropriate online reviews. All this creates demand and boosts sales figures that they hope will create more demand, until, like a descending snowball, their book sales become an avalanche.
That’s the nitty gritty of self publication; as the publisher, you take on the role of promoter and marketeer and, if there’s a way to do it, then it will be done.
There was a time when publication was largely predicated on the value of quality of the writing. That doesn’t apply so much, anymore. Publishing is a tricky business and there is enormous risk involved with regards to the cost of bringing a book to market. Publishing companies take these risks, relying on a good return on their investment.
Publishing houses used to rely on their own judgement and depth of experience and market to choose those writers and books they felt worth that risk. They had in house editing staff who were capable of judging a book’s merits. Nowadays, that role has been usurped by agents, who, while representing the writer in securing as good a deal as they can manage from a publisher, will also make the decision on the writers they will represent, on the earning potential of their writing. It’s a harsh world.
The unfortunate reaction is the rash of ‘how to write a best seller’ tomes, as though writing, like a mathematical formula, has an inevitable outcome.
I came across a blog in my ‘reader’ this morning. It was by someone who wants to write but was unsure how to start, what to read or maybe, what to write. I wrote this comment.
Read and write, write and read. These are the only words of advice I would ever offer anyone who wants to write. Read, so you learn how other writers go about telling stories. The more you read, the more you will differentiate styles. Then write. Write everything that comes into your head. If you have a story in mind, write it down. Sit in your local coffee shop and watch people. write about the people you see: give them a life, an ailment, good or bad news, let them wait for someone, plan a deed, give them a heart attack or trip them up. Maybe they have children or a pet? Then read what you’ve written. Keep doing these things. Reading books about how to write doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
The only thing that makes sense in writing. And Reading. Then reading and writing.
Fellow blogger and tireless short story writer, Mathew Tonks adds,
14 minutes Twisted Modes Of Transportation
Write and then read, and write some more, read stuff you normally wouldn’t, examine and grow, lose yourself, lose the idea you had, lose what you forced out and start again, this time let the characters take over, and in the end they will know better than you.
July 31, 2016
Dramatic
https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/dramatic/
Nothing small happens in her life. It has always been so, since as long as she can remember. She checks her makeup, wondering, too much, too little? Lipstick, she decides and chooses a scarlet shade, Estée Nectarine. Hair? Perfect. Outfit? A tailored black dress, neat, purposeful. Here’s the bus.
Work in Progress
A young writer with a whole lot to say and a great ability to say it
Your cramped, sweaty loft is your home away from home; your most frequented place being Bullseye Coffee, the only coffee shop you are habitually devoted to, out of the eighty-four other coffee shops grounded in Springfield, Missouri. Also found at Bullseye Coffee includes: skinny dudes with skateboards covered in stickers that say things like, SK8 OR DIE, Death Wish, Vans, Nirvana, Blow Me; girls dressed in all black with eyeliner that doesn’t seem to have a point of resolution, but mysteriously appears trendy and elegant, a style you’ve attempted and decided failed when you looked like you were auditioning for a role of angsty goth girl number five even despite your often colorful clothing; vagrants who need a glass of water, a couple dollars, or conversation with the baristas, who were welcoming despite slurred speech and poor conversational skills; the kind of people who clue a whole room in on…
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July 30, 2016
Embarrassed Millionaires
Quote of the Day“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” -John Steinbeck
Politics, america, author, books, quote, john steinbeck
https://taylorerowlandblog.wordpress.com/2016/05/11/quote-of-the-day/
The Writer
I could go on but I’d prefer, if after liking these posts about Steinbeck, you go back and read my own post, In Dubious Battle, a beacon beckoning and comment
“The creative principle is a lonely and an individual matter.”
even more thoughts on John Steinbeck
“The creative principle is a lonely and an individual matter.”
John Steinbeck, writer
More – Quotation from “About Ed Ricketts” from
“The Log from the Sea of Cortez”
Both Steinbeck and Ricketts had achieved some measure of security and recognition in their professions by 1939: Steinbeck had capitalized on his first successful novel, Tortilla Flat, with the publication of The Grapes of Wrath, and Ricketts had published Between Pacific Tides, which became the definitive handbook for the study of the intertidal fauna of the Pacific Coast of the coterminous United States. Steinbeck was exhausted and looking for a new start; Ricketts was looking for a new challenge. The two men had long thought of producing a book together and, in a change of pace for both of them, they began work on a handbook of the common intertidal species of the San Francisco Bay Area. The book…
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Thoughts on Steinbeck and writing
Lately I keep stumbling over a John Steinbeck quote. The first time I saw it, I liked it. He said: Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them and pretty soon you have a dozen. It’s taken from the opening of an interview he did with Robert van Gelder for Cosmopolitan in 1947, which was reproduced along […]
via Steinbeck and ‘the craft of writing’. — Cath Humphris
Postcard from a Pigeon
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