A Wolf's Blog about Books, Films, Music, and Language
By Ray Bradbury
ISBN 0-553-29634-5
Publication Year: 1990
Tags: Writing, Art, Life, Philosophical
Rating: ★★★★★
“Every morning, I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together. Now, it’s your turn. JUMP!”
A news item in a CNN email series that I subscribe to announced on September 19, 2018, that Merriam-Webster has added 840 words to their dictionary. In a prepared statement, the publisher noted that, “The addition of new words to a dictionary is a step in the continuous process of recording our ever-expanding language. The dictionary’s job is to report that usage as it enters the general vocabulary.”
Translation: “Because Americans are too lazy to use real language, and too offended not to be included, we’ll make them feel better by putting their disgustingly stupid non-words in our book.” Continue reading “Oh Boy, New “Words””
Getting a job is a full-time job in itself, one that requires not merely dedication but also education — not in the sense of a university degree, but rather in the sense of learning an entirely new and largely deceitful vocabulary. It begins with words and phrases that eliminate anything personal. Companies don’t want people; people are inconvenient. If they could get the job done by a machine, they would. Sometimes, though, they have to have those pesky parasites known as “employees,” and they send out a call for resumés. (Oh wait… “resumes”, since that é is just too French for business to deal with.) Let’s have a look at what that actually means these days. Continue reading “Raising a Ruckus Over Resumés”
There are a great many books out there purporting to be wonderful tools or aids to writing. A frightening number aren’t particularly helpful for anything other than lightening one’s purse a bit. This one, however, I’ve found helpful for writers at many levels, from exercises and writing advice to tidbits for emotional and physical support. Allow me to introduce you to Judy Reeves’ A Writer’s Book of Days (ISBN 0-965-004136). Continue reading “A Writer’s Book of Days”
“Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reason.” —Robertson Davies
The genre of furry, or anthropomorphic, fiction deserves a few specific comments as to the how, why, what, and so on. I’ll start right at the beginning and answer the question on most writers’ (and readers’) minds: Why write furry? Continue reading “Why Write Furry?”
For all you writers out there who are toiling under the misdirection of the so-called experts, I’ll let you in on a little secret: There’s no such thing as the “correct” way to write a story. In some instances, you don’t even need sensible grammar and punctuation (witness the “Benjy” section of Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury, or any reasonably long segment of James Joyce). As a rule, unless you intend for the narrator or the book to be taken as being written by someone for whom the English language is a bit of a mystery, you should observe proper grammar, punctuation, and spelling (or GPS, as I frequently refer to it). Other than that, you’re free to do just about anything you want when telling a story. Continue reading “Writing — The Ten-Minute Warm-Up”