writing
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Let’s Make A List
I’d like to have a blog post up on Saturday morning, but it’s Friday evening and I’m simply not prepared for that. Mentally, I am just not there; my hamster wheels are slowing to a standstill, the hamsters themselves having reached their limits of exercise. You can see it in my metaphors, I’m simply out… Continue reading
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Are you too tired to write?
What do you write when your head is foggy, and your hands are tired? You can write about what is bothering you—how foggy your head is, how tired your hands are. You can write about the poor state of the world, if your head is just clear enough to give you an idea of what… Continue reading
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I’m only going to write a little post this week
You see, a lot of things are running around in my mind. I’ve got to finish this revision of my novel, which is hard enough to do without an attention-starved parrot trying to hide inside my desk when he thinks I’m not looking. I’ve let myself let that slide too many times because I decided… Continue reading
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What I want to accomplish when I write poetry
Every once in a while I hit the verse button and post some text with a higher than average percentage of enter key presses. I call these poems, because they resemble poems, although I honestly don’t know what it means to “resemble” a poem. Poetry is a wonderful art form because of the freedom it… Continue reading
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The state of the novel
I’m taking a short break from editing The Ghost of Canard University today in order to talk about how things are going with that book. Sometimes you’ve got to do that, or you go insane from staring at your own words for too long, wondering how you could have put them together so amateurishly. Is… Continue reading
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Hope Is of The Future
Hope is of the future, not the past,because the world that was cannot be savedand wounds that were cannot be uninflicted.Hope requires time to grow, freshlygathered from the mornings yet to comewith careful hands and patient dedication.Hope thrives in an undiscovered land,writes itself in prophecy and dreamsitself to life with sudden inspiration. Continue reading
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Hunkering down for the garage sale
I don’t have much energy to write for the blog this weekend. As the title of this post indicates, I am currently conducting a garage sale (also known as a yard sale, a rummage sale, or surely half a dozen other variants and regionalisms) at my house. Ariele and I made signs, and I posted… Continue reading
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About Sybil Johnson, Thoughts, and Language
Summer is here, and I am finally applying what powers of focus I have toward finishing my first revision of the first draft of my first novel, The Ghost of Canard University. It has been just about a year since I began working on this story in earnest, and I would certainly be further along… Continue reading
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A fly in the ointment
I was having a lovely time at the Portland Opera last weekend. The show was Verdi’s Fallstaff, a widely-acknowledged comedic classic adapted from Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor. The leading man wonderfully embodied the rakish cavalier; the supporting cast sang beautifully and acted hilariously, and the orchestra was finely conducted from beginning to end.… Continue reading
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Stopgap
There won’t be a significant post this weekend, except for this one. There are a couple of reasons for this, and I’ll start with the one that would seem to be the most important: my computer is in the shop! Recently I purchased a new computer to replace the one I’ve had since 2011 or… Continue reading
Ink Tea Stone Leaf 