Thomas Harris (b. April 11): “Fear comes with imagination…”

11 Apr

Thomas Harris, born 11 April 1940, is an American author and screenwriter. All of his works have been made into films, the most notable being the multi-Oscar winning The Silence of the Lambs.

Quotes on writing:

  1. Fear comes with imagination, it’s a penalty, it’s the price of imagination.
  2. Problem solving is hunting. It is savage pleasure and we are born to it.
  3. Writing novels is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.
  4. You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It’s all there and you just have to find it.
  5. The intimacy of the detail – why The Silence of the Lambs is quite possibly the Thriller Writer’s bible.

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Paul Theroux (b. April 10): “Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.”

10 Apr

Paul Theroux, born 10 April 1941, is an American travel writer and novelist. The Great Railway Bazaar is his most famous work of non-fiction. He is best known for his novel The Mosquito Coast. He is the father of British authors and documentary makers Louis Theroux and Marcel Theroux.

Quotes on writing:

  1. Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.
  2. Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.
  3. The more you write, the more you’re capable of writing.
  4. A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.
  5. You can’t write about a friend, you can only write about a former friend.
  6. I’m constantly running across people who have never heard of books I think they should read.
  7. Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies.
  8. I know there are writers who feel unhappy with domesticity and who even manufacture domestic turmoil in order to have something to write about. With me, though, the happier I feel, the better I write.
  9. Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn’t say that I’m a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels – and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.
  10. I can’t predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive – no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer’s life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels.
  11. Many aspects of the writing life have changed since I published my first book, in the 1960s. It is more corporate, more driven by profits and marketing, and generally less congenial – but my day is the same: get out of bed, procrastinate, sit down at my desk, try to write something.
  12. Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.

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Anne Lamott (b. April 10): “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts.”

10 Apr

 

Anne Lamott, born 10 April 1954, is an American novelist and non-fiction writer. She is also a political activist, public speaker, and writing teacher. Her non-fiction works are largely autobiographical and cover alcoholism, single motherhood, depression and Christianity. She is most famous for Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.

Quotes on Writing:

  1. My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean.
  2. Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.
  3. I don’t think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won’t be good at it.
  4. Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?
  5. You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.
  6. Don’t be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done.
  7. We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. The writer’s job is to turn the unspeakable into words – not just into any words, but if we can, into rhythm and blues.
  8. For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.
  9. Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.
  10. You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won’t really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we’ll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won’t wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.

 

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Mercury retrograde: useless for three weeks..?

10 Apr

Alan Annand is a Canadian astrologer, accredited by the American College of Vedic Astrology and the British Faculty of Astrological Studies. He consults, teaches and writes on a wide range of astrological topics.

His NEW AGE NOIR crime series (Scorpio Rising, Felonious Monk, Soma County) features astrologer and palmist Axel Crowe, whom one reviewer has dubbed “Sherlock Holmes with a horoscope.”

His books on Vedic astrology include Stellar Astrology, Vols 1 & 2, a series of articles on celebrities and world events that are as entertaining as they are educational, offering many techniques for interpretation and prediction. Parivartana Yoga is a reference text for one of the most common yet powerful planetary combinations in jyotish.

Mutual Reception is an expanded companion volume for western practitioners, covering the subject of planetary exchange through the lens of traditional astrology.

BOOKS by astrologer & writer ALAN ANNAND:

http://www.amazon.com/Alan-Annand/e/B0052MM0PO

https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/alan-annand/id442957999

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/c/alan-annand

http://store.kobobooks.com/en-CA/Search?Query=Alan%20Annand

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/AlanAnnand

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Charles Jackson (b. April 6th): “The writer lives by biting the hand that feeds him.”

6 Apr

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Charles Jackson, born 6 April 1903 and died 21 September 1968, was an American author best known for his 1944 novel The Lost Weekend.

Quotes on writing:

  1. The writer knows his own worth, and to be overvalued can confuse and destroy him as an artist.
  2. The writer must essentially draw from life as he sees it, lives it, overhears it or steals it, and the truer the writer, perhaps the bigger the blackguard. He lives by biting the hand that feeds him.
  3. I know they’re always disappointed to meet a writer; they have some preconceived idea about you and expect you to be ‘interesting’ or intense or drunk or something different from just a normal average guy like anybody else.
  4. Like all his attempts at fiction it would be as personal as a letter – painful to those who knew him, of no interest to those who didn’t; precious or self-pitying in spots, in others too clever for its own good; so packed with Shakespeare that it looked as if he worked with a concordance in his lap; so narcissistic that its final effect would be that of the mirrored room which gives back the same image times without count.
  5. If you should decide that you didn’t like books written in the first person, or books about whaling, patricide, prostitution, war, wretched poverty, divorce, madness, adultery, homosexuality, cripples, or the most erotic kind of fornication for fornication’s sake, and thus rule them off your list, you’d be doing yourself out of some of the greatest works of literature in history – in fact, nearly all of them. What counts is what the writer brings to his story, not the subject itself.

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Merle Haggard (b. April 6th): “I had more freedom on parole than in America right now.”

6 Apr

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“In 1960 when I came out of prison, I had more freedom on parole than there is available in America right now.”
~ Merle Haggard, b. 6 April 1937

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Mutual Reception: Book review by Donna Van Toen, ISAR

2 Apr

Mutual Reception by Alan Annand, Sextile.com, 2016. Paper 339 pp. Price: $6.99 digital, $19.95 paper.

Mutual reception has been around for 2000 years or so, and yet very little has been written about it. Sure, you’ll see mention of the fact that two planets in mutual reception will “help one another out,” but that’s about the extent of what most books tell you. So this book is a welcome addition to our literature. However, before you dash out to buy it, you might want to know how Annand works with them. Specifically, you need to know that he does not include the outer planets. He also uses the sidereal zodiac and a whole sign house system. Aspects are not taken into account in mutual reception. All you need to see is what signs and houses the planets occupy.

Now, you can try this in the tropical zodiac, but Annand cautions you that his experience leads him to believe the information here works better when you’re using the sidereal zodiac. I tried the interpretations in both systems and also with traditional and modern rulers. I had hit-and-miss success with the modern rulers and with the tropical zodiac. I had good results using Annand’s system, though I have to say that in many respects I have trouble relating to my sidereal chart as a whole. Whether this is simply my conditioning (I am a tropical astrologer though I have studied sidereal) or because my tropical chart fits better is a moot point and not necessarily relevant to this review. Suffice to say, I got results in both systems, possibly a bit more with the sidereal, though. And I would note that you get different results – and different receptions – in both systems.

And what is this information I was playing with? Pages and pages of interpretations for each mutual reception by house [66 in all], along with a case study for each position. Oh, and an opening interpretation from Parashara, just to put things in perspective (Annand is a Vedic astrologer.) And from what I can see, these are very good interpretations, no matter which way you use them.

There is also a glossary. Numerous useful tables are scattered throughout. I found these particularly helpful in regard to the jyotish material Annand includes at the end. This, by the way, lists some other types of receptions that are relevant in Vedic astrology.

Regardless of what flavor of astrology you practice, this book could be a very good addition to your library. And if, like me, you’re a Western, tropical astrologer, there’s a good chance you’ll pick up some new knowledge even if you aren’t ready to fully embrace sidereal or give up the outer planets as sign rulers just yet.

– Reviewed by Donna Van Toen, ISAR Journal, Volume 45, Issue #3.

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Émile Zola (b. April 2nd): “I am here to live out loud.”

2 Apr

Émile Zola, born 2 April 1840 and died 29 September 1902, was an influential French novelist, the most important example of the literary school of naturalism, and a major figure in the political liberalisation of France. After the publication of l’Assommoir, Zola became a figurehead among the literary bourgeoisie. His novel Germinal established him as a successful author.

Quotes on writing: 

  1. One forges one’s style on the terrible anvil of daily deadlines.
  2. The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
  3. If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.
  4. There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.

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Milan Kundera (b. April 1st): “All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.”

1 Apr

Milan Kundera, born 1 April 1929, is the Czech Republic’s most recognized living writer. He has lived in exile in France since 1975. Kundera’s best-known work is The Unbearable Lightness of Being. A perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, he has been nominated on several occasions.

Quotes on writing:

  1. All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.
  2. To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.
  3. For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
  4. The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.
  5. Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.
  6. The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists’ discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.

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Otto von Bismarck (b. April 1st): “Laws are like sausages…”

1 Apr

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“Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.”

~ Otto von Bismarck, b. 1 April 1815

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