WP Addicts Anonymous

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Oh did I miss pizza?

I guess I will have to order a chinese delivery then.

^ I saved you some, Tem.

Would you like yours with or sans anchovies?

"Feels like 2.6 degrees"

I wonder how they work out the "feels like" temperature?

^ sometimes I forget there is such a thing as Google.

I've got nine-ten boxes full of books, and I'll probably need a couple more.

^ we'll catch up again.

I've spent most of the day sleeping.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHBHHHHHHHHH

Yesterday would have been Ray Bradbury's 98th birthday.

Here are my eight favourite bits of writing advice from him that I found:

"Quantity creates quality:
The best hygiene for beginning writers or intermediate writers is to write a hell of a lot of short stories. If you can write one short story a week—it doesn’t matter what the quality is to start, but at least you’re practicing, and at the end of the year you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones. Can’t be done. At the end of 30 weeks or 40 weeks or at the end of the year, all of a sudden a story will come that’s just wonderful."

"Don’t think too hard:
The intellect is a great danger to creativity...because you begin to rationalize and make up reasons for things, instead of staying with your own basic truth—who you are, what you are, what you want to be. I’ve had a sign over my typewriter for over 25 years now, which reads “Don’t think!” You must never think at the typewriter—you must feel. Your intellect is always buried in that feeling anyway."

"Writers’ block is just a warning that you’re doing the wrong thing:
What if you have a blockage and you don’t know what to do about it? Well, it’s obvious you’re doing the wrong thing, aren’t you?...You’re being warned, aren’t you? Your subconscious is saying I don’t like you anymore...If you have writers’ block you can cure it this evening by stopping what you’re doing and writing something else. You picked the wrong subject."

"Write what you love:
Fall in love and stay in love. Do what you love, don’t do anything else. Don’t write for money. Write because you love to do something. If you write for money, you won’t write anything worth reading...I want your loves to be multiple. I don’t want you to be a snob about anything. Anything you love, you do it. It’s got to be with a great sense of fun. Writing is not a serious business. It’s a joy and a celebration. You should be having fun at it."

"You don’t become a writer by taking writing classes:
I took a writing course in summer school in 1939, when I was in high school. But it didn’t work. The secret of writing was, to go and live in the library two or four days a week for ten years. I graduated from the library having read every single book in it. And along the way I wrote every day of every week of every month, for every year. And in ten years, I became a writer...You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices...The library, on the other hand, has no biases. The information is all there for you to interpret. You don’t have someone telling you what to think. You discover it for yourself."

"Take off the safety harness:
You’ve got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down."

"Indulge in your own personal madness:
If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world."

"Write only for yourself:
You can’t write for other people. You can’t write for the left or the right, this religion or that religion, or this belief or that belief. You have to write the way you see things. I tell people, Make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them."

Bradbury was the greatest. I need to just read all the way through his stuff; I'm working on LeGuin for now but I'm distracted by The Expanse.

_________________
"Standing on a well-chilled cinder, we see the fading of the suns, and try to recall the vanished brilliance of the origin of the worlds."
-Georges Lemaitre
"I fly through hyperspace, in my green computer interface"
-Gem Tos

Great quotes, and great advice, from Ray Bradbury.

I need to start writing again.