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Tag: authors

  • December 31st, 2012 9:15pm

    My New Year’s Wish

    neil-gaiman:

    It’s a New Year and with it comes a fresh opportunity to shape our world. 
    So this is my wish, a wish for me as much as it is a wish for you: in the world to come, let us be brave – let us walk into the dark without fear, and step into the unknown with smiles on our faces, even if we’re faking them. 
    And whatever happens to us, whatever we make, whatever we learn, let us take joy in it. We can find joy in the world if if it’s joy we’re looking for, we can take joy in the act of creation. 
    So that is my wish for you, and for me. Bravery and joy.

  • December 25th, 2012 9:12pm

    It could have been a lot of things,“ I said. "Maybe the police were called because somebody was sick. Maybe the two men in the plain car were doctors. Maybe our neighbor thought he saw a prowler. I guess if we really wanted to find out the thing to do would be to ask him.”

    The next evening I got in the car and drove down the road to do just that.

    “It’s because I’m a burglar,” our neighbor answered me amiably.
    I stood there and blinked, twice. I’d introduced myself when he’d answered the door, and he’d introduced himself as Jack Hogan and invited me inside and offered me a drink. After a few minutes’ exploratory conversation with the tanned and handsome man, I’d gotten around to asking him about the commotion at his house we’d witnessed last night, offering our help if anything was wrong.

    “The police were just here to harass me,” Jack Hogan went on. “Lieutenant Faber and his friends. I humor the lieutenant because I understand he acts only out of frustration.”

    “But if you’re innocent -” I said in a rather dumbfounded way.
    “But I’m not innocent,” Hogan said freely, his gray eyes as sincere as his voice. “Though if you tell anyone I said so I’ll deny it. Lieutenant Faber knows I’m guilty, but he can’t do anything about it because I’m too smart for him. That’s the fun of it.”

    — So Young, So Fair, So Dead by John Lutz

  • December 25th, 2012 1:41am

    twocatsandatrombone:

    Greg Rucka, Why I Write Strong Female Characters

    But there is one question that I, personally, have been asked more frequently. This one:

    How Do You Write Such Strong Female Characters?

    This past year, 2011, I was asked this question a lot, and here we are into the first quarter of 2012, and it’s happening again (or still, if you rather). Most frequently, it comes up in regard to my work in the comics industry. If you know comics, and if you know superhero comics specifically, you’ll likely be familiar with the reasons why. Last year was not banner for the ladies, and this one isn’t off to a strong start, either, in fact. Wasn’t good for women within the industry itself, nor within the pages of the stories being told.

    Those who’ve had the unmitigated temerity to actually comment upon this state of affairs publicly have ended up paying a surprisingly heavy price. The gender of the speaker has been largely irrelevant, though to be sure, it’s the women who’ve stepped up have taken the harder hits. But all who’ve pointed out the absence of women both on the page and behind it have been ridiculed, insulted, and, absurdly enough, even threatened with violence. Conversely, those attempting to defend their mistreatment of women within the industry have revealed a staggering lack of understanding, empathy, and self-awareness, while seeming to rejoice in an arrogance that is near heart-stopping in its naked sexism and condescension.

    To say there are those who don’t get it is an understatement; it would be like describing the Japanese tsunami as ‘minor flooding’.

    … Gender isn’t simply a biological trait; it’s a societal one. The female experience is different from that of the male, and if, as a male writer, you cannot accept that basic premise, then you will never, ever, be able to write women well. A man walking alone through Midtown Manhattan at three in the morning may have concerns for his safety, but I promise you, it’s a very different experience for a woman taking the same walk, and it’s different again for a man wearing a dress. Think about it. That’s a societal factor, and it’s a gendered one, and this is not and can not be subject to debate. If you’re looking to argue that sexism is a thing of the past, that the world is gender-blind, you’re not only wrong, you’re lying to yourself.

  • December 20th, 2012 1:52pm

    There were literally hundreds of such often live-by-night magazines with wildly exotic and frequently misleading names from their initial appearance at the beginning of the 1920’a in America. And I would not pretend that everything they published was made of gold. Far from it. We are talking commercial fiction, mostly catering to the lowest common denominator. But then do our modern paperbacks have loftier ambitions and superior hit-rate, quality-wise?

    But what makes them stand out is the fact that the pulps had one golden rules which unsung editors insisted upon and good and bad writers alike religiously followed: adherence to the art of storytelling. Every story in the pulps had a beginning and and end, sharply-etched economical characterization, action, emotions, plenty going on. The mission was to keep the reader hooked, to transport him/her into a more interesting world of fantasy and make-believe, spiriting them away from the drab horizons of everyday life (remember, there was no television in those very early days,or CDs or other modern leisure addictions).

    — Maxim Jakubowski (in the introduction to  The Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction)

  • December 13th, 2012 6:17pm

    ‘No philosopher has ever influenced the attitudes of even the street he lived on,’ Voltaire was reputed to have said. That’s not what I believe. With deep winter upon us and the weather growing colder, even the wood smoke out of the neighbors’ chimneys could be described as philosophizing. I can see it move its lips as it rises, telling the indifferent sky about our loneliness, the torment of our minds and passions which we keep secret from each other, and the wonder and pain of our mortality and of our eventual vanishing from this earth. It’s a kind of deep, cathedral-like quiet that precedes a snowfall. One looks with amazement at the bare trees, the gray daylight making its slow retreat across the bare fields, and inevitably recalls that Emily Dickinson poem in which she speaks of just such a winter afternoon—windless and cold, when an otherworldly light falls and shadows hold their breath—and of the hurt that it gives us for which we can find no scar, only a closer peek inside ourselves where the meanings and all the unanswered questions are.

    —

    Charles Simic, “Winter’s Philosophers”, on NYRBlog

    Only a writer with the uncommon grace of Simic could have written something so slamdunkingly resonant regarding the onset of these now unavoidable winter afternoons and manage to namecheck effortlessly not just Voltaire and Dickinson, as in this passage, but earlier also Dovlatov, Cioran, Plato, Socrates, Pascal, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Marx, Wittgenstein, Boethius, everyone, no one, all of us.

    (via classicpenguin)

  • December 11th, 2012 4:09am

    Most people were heartless about turtles because a turtle’s heart will beat for hours after it has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too.

    — Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (via thepaintedbench)

  • December 7th, 2012 11:05pm

    mfstrange:

    “I was sentimental about many things: a woman’s shoes under the bed; one hairpin left behind on the dresser; the way they said, “I’m going to pee..”’ hair ribbons; walking down the boulevard with them at 1:30 in the afternoon, just two people walking together; the long nights of drinking and smoking; talking; the arguments; thinking of suicide; eating together and feeling good; the jokes; the laughter out of nowhere; feeling miracles in the air; being in a parked car together; comparing past loves at 3am; being told you snore; hearing her snore; mothers, daughters, sons, cats, dogs; sometimes death and sometimes divorce; but always carrying on, always seeing it through; reading a newspaper alone in a sandwich joint and feeling nausea because she’s now married to a dentist with an I.Q. of 95; racetracks, parks, park picnics; even jails; her dull friends; your dull friends; your drinking, her dancing; your flirting, her flirting; her pills, your fucking on the side and her doing the same; sleeping together.” 

    -Charles Bukowski, Women