The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It’s not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.
– Augusten Burroughs
Tag: work
Quotable 112
I would love it if inspiration hit, but the muse can be such an absent bitch. I’ve learned to work without her.
– Patsy Terrell
Fiction: Perks
“Off to work?” Amy asked.
“As always,” Will said. “Off to bed?”
“Yes. Long day.”
“Sleep well.”
“I hope to.” She smiled at him. “Don’t get caught up in your work.”
He grinned back at her. “I haven’t yet.”
“Oh, you might keep an eye out for a pair of earrings that would match the lovely amethyst necklace you got me.”
“I know just the place to look,” he said. “Good night.”
“Night.”
She snuggled into her cool bed, wishing again he was going to be there to share it with her. Still, despite the negative aspects of Will’s job, there were some perks to being married to a burglar.
Quotable 41
There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as do exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft.
– Jessamyn West
Fiction: Outstanding in Their Fields
The oblong little spacecraft overtook the truck on the road and landed gently in front of it, scarcely disturbing the gravel. The driver of the truck, a Blazer from the previous decade, slowed and stopped and stared.
A hatch opened on the side of the spaceship and an extraterrestrial, all four-foot-five of him, stepped down to the ground, his iridescent green scales shining in the afternoon sun. He approached the truck’s driver, a stocky man wearing a brand-new seed cap.
“Good soil to you,” the alien said. He held a small, round device from which the English words flowed; nothing about his mouth seemed capable of producing those sounds.
Fiction: Blades Sharpened Wile You Wate
LaVon limped and trudged from his little house to his workshop after lunch. He hadn’t eaten much; it was too hot to care about food. He had made himself drink one glass of water, but even that had been an effort.
“Don’t rightly know why I’m botherin’,” he told himself as he wiped his brow. “Ain’t no one ’round here been needin’ any blades sharpened in a month of Sundays.” He grunted softly. “Folks ’cross the tracks have their own sharpenin’ man.”
But a man went to work; LaVon had been going to one kind of work or another since he was eight years old, and that had been more than six decades ago. Now his work, when he got any, was running a foot-powered grindstone to sharpen dull blades. He couldn’t lift and tote and bend like he had done in his younger days, and this was what was left to him to keep body and soul together.