Turning Positives into Negatives
Once upon a time, when George Cerny was the publisher, the Enterprise-Bulletin newspaper was an avid and active local promoter: the indefatigable cheerleader for the town; for its events, activities,…
writing
National Poetry Month
April is National Poetry Month in Canada. I don’t know if this gets widespread acknowledgement much less appreciation among the public and in the schools, but it should. Poetry is…
Best Canadian Essays 2014
A couple of weeks ago I had the honour and privilege to be invited as a guest to a book launch in Toronto for a yearly anthology published by Tightrope…
Are you a famous writer yet?
This flowchart may help you answer this “important” question: Alltop is a famous humor aggregator. Flowchart by electric literature
The Ampersand, Etc.
Among my many iPad apps is a simple one called ‘Ampersands.’ All it does is display, in large format, numerous ampersands from different typefaces. A brief introduction tells the viewer…
Breakthrough books and late bloomers
As a “late bloomer” (my first novel wasn’t published until I was 39 and I haven’t had that “breakthrough” book yet), this interactive infographic is kind of reassuring. I hope…
Quote: Vonnegut on reviewers
Originally appears in “The War Between Writers and Reviewers,” by Thomas Flemming in the NYT, 1985. Alltop loves a good bad review.
Short Story
I woke up this morning and what happened next will blow your mind. I put on the pot for hot water and something extraordinary happened. Then I went to the…
200,000 Thank Yous
It seems that only yesterday I was saying thank you to my first 100,000 unique visitors at this blog after just over two years of writing. That was at the…
Larry & Jerry’s Inferno
I had forgotten about this book until recently when I came across a reprint. I read it originally in the late 1970s when I was reading a lot more sci-fi…
The Lobbyist Registry
I was in the local grocery store with Susan, picking over the collection of organic vine-ripened tomatoes, earnestly searching for the best couple of them. A man recognized me as…
A Gift of the Prairie
THE BOOK THAT MY POEMS ARE IN IS HERE! THE BOOK THAT MY POEMS ARE IN IS HERE!! Extra points if you can name the reference there. It’s called A…
Sonnet 103
Alack! what poverty my Muse brings forth, So begins Shakespeare’s sonnet number 103 (I started rereading the sonnets recently because, well because it’s Shakespeare, damn it all, and what other…
Inanity and vanity
Michel de Montaigne wrote in his usual self-deprecating but sardonic way: If other men would consider themselves at the rate I do, they would, as I do, discover themselves to…
Finding my muse in Montaigne
Muse: a source of inspiration; especially a guiding genius; the imaginary force thought to provide inspiration to poets, writers, artists, etc. A muse, for modern writers, is that indefinable force…
Ruthful, funct and doleless
Why can’t someone be clueful, only clueless? Hapful, not simply hapless? Aweless instead of just awful? Ruthful not merely ruthless? Doleless, not just doleful? Gormful, not just gormless? We can…
The Death of Handwriting?
I almost cried in pleasure when I watched this video; the handwriting is so beautiful. Apparently some viewers have, as Jesus Diaz writes. On Gizmodo he says that it’s: …a…
Community
My generation from Verdun grew up With Fathers who worked in factories and Mothers who, if they worked were in retail or service low paying respectable jobs. To do better…