What I'm listening to as I begin this blog: A silent house and the heat clicking on.
1) Why I love Project Runway's Tim Gunn: "Let me cut to the core of my issue with Chris’s work: human hair. Yes, you read that correctly, human hair. The Project Runway “collection rules” forbid the use of fur, so this was Chris’s alternative. (He said that he had really wanted to use monkey fur, but that’s strictly illegal everywhere, thank god.)" -- Tim Gunn on Season Four contestant Chris
2) Why Clive Davis is one of the savviest men in the music biz: "Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra didn't write, and they are among Time magazine's greatest artists of the century." -- Clive Davis on why singers shouldn't waste their energy on writing songs
3) And since I'm a writer, these last three are about writing: "Writers write. Put your butt in the chair and write on a regular basis. Ray Bradbury said, 'The muse cannot resist a working writer.' I start off by writing why I can't write. Type every reason you can't write. Complain, bitch, whatever. Half a page to a page in, the muse says, 'Well, if you're going to be writing anyway, you can do better than this.' Also, if you don't protect your time, no one will. I wrote my first book two pages a day, five days a week." -- Laurell K. Hamilton, prolific and bestselling writer, in an interview with Writer's Digest
4) "[Y]ou can find certain things that bestsellers have in common: characters you care about, stakes that matter to them, and what he referred to as continuous 'microtension' – a story with a high level of conflict, an underlying sense that something important is always about to happen, or could happen. He also said something that I myself have concluded (and in fact blogged about sometime ago): action, in and of itself, is not tension. In fact, it can be downright boring." -- Tess Gerritsen, suspense writer
5) "But I have to write every day. First and foremost because I like it and it is good for me. Second, because by staying in touch with the story every day, the writing flows better. Third (though this one is pretty important, too), the writing pays my bills. Any career in the arts has a simple truth attached to it: you have to do the work every day. That is how you get better. It doesn't matter how many books I've published. I have never before written the book I am writing now. I have to respect the work and keep striving to learn more, keep searching for new tools for my work chest. If you are standing on the outside looking in, it might seem a little boring, and I admit, there are days when I long for a job that has a guaranteed paycheck every two weeks and some kind of health insurance, but the truth is, I feel incredibly blessed to be able to write stories that people want to read. That is extremely motivating." -- Laurie Halse Anderson, the critically acclaimed YA author
What I'm listening to as I end this blog: A silent house and the humidifier clicking on--and what sounds like a snowblower over at one of the neighbor's.
