As far as I know, no actual lawyers were injured in the decapitation of this sign.
I just want to know who the injured party is in this case.
Category Archives: 2015
Haiku to you Thursday: “Parting”
My heart jumps up. /
The elevator lurches down. /
Your lips part for mine.
Filed under 2015, Haiku to You Thursday, poetry by author
Writing tip Wednesday: “Passion”
Five Tips to Keep You Passionate About Your Writing
by M. SHANNON HERNANDEZ
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/m-shannon-hernandez/five-tips-to-keep-you-pas_b_7537224.html
Tap, tap, tap — that is the sound of your creative fingertips hitting the keyboard.
As writers, we spend our days and nights hovering over our keyboards, pouring our ideas into a machine that will hopefully make sense of all that is going on in our brains. And don’t get me wrong — it is a wonderful life — but sometimes we look up to see that we have veered off track. Or perhaps we have worked so hard on a piece that maybe we aren’t quite so passionate about it anymore. I’ve been there before, and I am sure you have, too.
How can we stay on track, writing about those things which keep us passionate, when we must write for a living, day in and day out? Below you will find five tips to keep you passionate in your writing.
- Stay in your lane: To stay passionate throughout your writing career, it’s important that you know the topics you enjoy writing about, and you stick to those topics. When we venture off into writing about things that don’t fully interest us, we risk losing our luster for our craft.
- Define your writing qualities: What formats of writing do you enjoy most? Blog posts, email marketing campaigns, fictional short stories? Be sure you have a clear definition of the types of writing you are willing to take on, and stick to your standards!
- Create a mission statement: Now that you know what topics you are passionate about, and what forms of writing you will spend your time crafting, it’s time to connect to your bigger vision and mission in life. Why do you spend your time writing this stuff? Craft a mission statement that will help you pull it all together and keep you going strong when you begin to waiver.
- Remove the roadblocks:
- Weed out negativity:
Arm yourself with these five strategies so you can continue living and writing passionately. Tap, tap, tap… your keyboard is waiting on you.
Details: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/m-shannon-hernandez/five-tips-to-keep-you-pas_b_7537224.html
Filed under 2015, writing tip, Writing Tip Wednesday
Monday morning writing joke: “Car, bottle, gun”
An old car, a bottle of antidepressants, and gun walked into a bar.
The car blew its horn and eventually had to be belted.
The antidepressants were such a pill, they had to be bottled up.
And the gun shot its mouth off so often nobody else could get a word in. Eventually it triggered a revolt from the rest of the patrons and the three of them were shown the door.
One writer at a back table looks over at his friend: “What do you thing that was about?”
The second writer shrugs. “Chitty pity bang bang.”
Filed under 2015, Monday morning writing joke
New words to live by: “Wallowacity”
It is the first or second (or in this case, third) weekend of the month and time, once again, for a new word to live by. This is a word or phrase not currently in use in the U.S. English lexicon, but might need to be considered. Other words, such as obsurd, crumpify, subsus, flib, congressed, and others, can be found by clicking on the tags below. Today’s New Word is a compounding of word and a suffix two words. Without further waiting, Wallowacity is the new word / phrase for this month:
Wallow, n. The ability to self-indulge or revel.
-acity, noun suffix meaning “strong characteristic of” or “quality of.” or It is Latin suffix and appears Latin words such as tenacity.
tenacity.
New word Wallowacity, n. The state or degree to which you can master wallowing.
Example: There are few things that a man can do that woman can’t do equally as well and sometimes better. There is one thing, though, that men are more naturally born to and that is wallowing. From a young age, boys begin mastering the art of wallowing, but it rarely comes into full bloom or full wallowacity until around 55 years of age.
Boys may read about great men such as George Washington or Napoleon, sports greats such as Babe Ruth, great composers such as Mozart or dynamic world leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., but the men most of them grow up secretly admiring and then emulating is the guy in their circle of friends who has achieved his full wallow potential, his full wallowacity.
Maybe this entry was a week late due to a bit of wallowacity.
Just the gift to give dad for Father’s Day.
Filed under 2015, new word, New words to live by
Photo finish Friday: “Flower plea”
“Oh, please, don’t pick me.”
Flower plea
Oh, please, oh, please, don’t pick me.
There’s only a short life within me.
Leave me so others can see me.
Let me be so I can be me.
Come by as often as you like,
Be it in a car, on foot, or a trike.
I’ll be here for all to delight.
To pick me would leave only a blight.
I’m here for only a short while.
Let my bloom help others to smile.
Do not give in to temptation or denial
And leave nothing but a joy defiled.
Oh, please, oh, please, don’t pick me.
There’s only a short life within me.
Leave me so others can see me.
Let me be so I can be me.
–photo and poem by David E. Booker
Filed under 2015, photo by David E. Booker, Photo Finish Friday, poetry by author
Haiku to you Thursday: “Afternoon”
The afternoon creeps, /
Each minute an hour high /
Piled with things not done.
Filed under 2015, Haiku to You Thursday, poetry by author
cARtOONSDAY: “pICKY”
Sometimes it is hard to decide if the next idea will blossom into a full-fledged story.
Filed under 2015, cartoon by author, CarToonsday
Monday morning writing joke: “Psychological”
A writer and a monkey walk into a bar. First the writer climbs up on a bar stool. Then the monkey does. The writer orders a soft drink. Then the monkey does.
The bartender, when she has a moment, asks the writer what is going on.
“Well,” the writer says, “I have run out of ides. My well is dry. I don’t want to call it writer’s block, but I thought I would do my own experiment. I had heard somebody claim that if you put a group of monkeys in a room and gave them each a typewriter, eventually you’d get Shakespeare. I can’t afford a room full of monkeys. But I thought maybe with a little more time, one monkey might turn out something, even a crappy something that I could then use.”
The bartender walks away, but comes back after serving another customer. “Isn’t that like plagiarism?”
The writer nods. “Maybe.”
This goes on for several months until one evening the writer walks in alone.
After serving him, the bartender asks, “Where’s your … writing partner?”
The writer shots her a sour look, “Stupid monkey. After months of my investing him, teaching him all I know. Just when he starts to write some stuff I can use, he ups and quits on me.”
“What? He found out what you were going to do and got mad at you?”
“I wish. It would have been easier if he had.”
The bartender gets called away to serve another customer, but then returns. “Well, what happened?”
The writer sighs. “It’s a long story, but let me say this. I taught that monkey all I knew and he was getting good at writing a paragraph or two, here or there. Then he got the bright idea that he needed an agent.”
“So?”
“So, he only wanted one agent, a B.F. Skinner,” the writer says, taking a sip of his drink. This time it was something harder than soda.
“Never heard of him. He doesn’t come in here, anyway.”
“I can’t find him. But the monkey says he won’t do any more work until I do.”
“So, what now?”
“I’ve already moved on to another animal. I thought I’d try a dog this time. Thought he might be more loyal.”
“And how has that worked out?”
The writer shakes his head. “It was fine. Then the dog said he wanted to talk to somebody named Pavlov.”
Filed under 2015, Monday morning writing joke
Up the Amazon with the BS Machine
Up the Amazon with the BS Machine,
or
Why I keep Asking You Not to Buy Books from Amazon
by Ursula K. Le Guin
Source: http://bookviewcafe.com/blog/2015/06/01/up-the-amazon/
Amazon and I are not at war. There are vast areas in which my peaceful indifference to what Amazon is and does can only be surpassed by Amazon’s presumably equally placid indifference to what I say and do. If you like to buy household goods or whatever through Amazon, that’s totally fine with me. If you think Amazon is a great place to self-publish your book, I may have a question or two in mind, but still, it’s fine with me, and none of my business anyhow. My only quarrel with Amazon is when it comes to how they market books and how they use their success in marketing to control not only bookselling, but book publication: what we write and what we read.
Best Seller lists have been around for quite a while. Best Seller lists are generated by obscure processes, which I consider (perhaps wrongly) to consist largely of smoke, mirrors, hokum, and the profit motive. How truly the lists of Best Sellers reflect popularity is questionable. Their questionability and their manipulability was well demonstrated during the presidential campaign of 2012, when a Republican candidate bought all the available copies of his own book in order to put it onto the New York Times Top Ten Best Seller List, where, of course, it duly appeared.
If you want to sell cheap and fast, as Amazon does, you have to sell big. Books written to be best sellers can be written fast, sold cheap, dumped fast: the perfect commodity for growth capitalism.
The readability of many best sellers is much like the edibility of junk food. Agribusiness and the food packagers sell us sweetened fat to live on, so we come to think that’s what food is. Amazon uses the BS Machine to sell us sweetened fat to live on, so we begin to think that’s what literature is.
I believe that reading only packaged microwavable fiction ruins the taste, destabilizes the moral blood pressure, and makes the mind obese. Fortunately, I also know that many human beings have an innate resistance to baloney and a taste for quality rooted deeper than even marketing can reach.
If it can find its audience by luck, good reviews, or word of mouth, a very good book may become a genuine Best Seller. Witness Rebecca Skloot’s Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which for quite a while seemed to have immortal life among the Times Top Ten. And a few books work their way more slowly onto BS lists by genuine, lasting excellence — witness The Lord of the Rings, or Patrick O’Brian’s sea stories. Not products of the BS Machine, such books sell because people actually like them. Once they get into the BS Machine, they are of course treated as products of the BS Machine, that is, as commodities to exploit.
Making a movie of a novel is a both a powerful means of getting it into the BS Machine and a side-effect of being there.
Read the rest: http://bookviewcafe.com/blog/2015/06/01/up-the-amazon/
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