Did you ever see a beautiful painting of a ship with white sails billowing, the prow slicing through the waves, colorful banners fluttering behind? I’ve seen some beautiful paintings like that. Of course, those paintings are absurdly wrong, and that irritates me. A sailing ship is wind-driven. That means the banners and flags are blown in the same general direction the ship is moving and the sails are billowing—not streaming along behind the ship. A wind-driven vessel can not move faster than the wind. A painting like this, however well otherwise done, shows the painter does not know his subject. Continue reading “Getting it Right”
Month: March 2012
Week 10 Flash Fiction Competition: Dead Stop
It took nearly a quarter mile to bring the Nightingale Express to a full stop before the body on the tracks. If they hadn’t been on such a long straight stretch and in broad daylight to boot, they’d have gone right over that corpse and maybe never even have known. The brakeman and the engineer get down to investigate and are surprised to discover they both knew the dead man. Who was it? Why is he there?
In 250 words or less, tell me a story incorporating the elements in the picture. The 250 word limit will be strictly enforced. Continue reading “Week 10 Flash Fiction Competition: Dead Stop”
A Reader’s POV – Past or Present
I have a question for authors this week…..
Looking at my list of books to review, it’s rather eclectic – there are all sorts of genres, fiction and non-fiction. I try not to turn away review requests (I don’t like to refuse a genre I haven’t tried, I might love it!), but to date, I have had to turn away three. The first was a non-fiction book that ‘teaches computer forensics to any level computer user’. With respect, I think I would prefer to pull my fingernails out. The second was 115 Reasons Why It’s Not Your Fault if You’re Fat. Puuuhlease. There is only one reason you’re fat – you eat too much and exercise too little. The third – and I felt just a teensy weensy bit guilty about turning this one down – aside from the fact it was 300k words long, it was in the present tense (3rd person). I confess I have only read one book in the present tense (Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen). I enjoyed that book (sort of), but I just did not warm to the present tense (1st person in this case). I have shied away from this ever since.
Found Words, Waiting
I was thinking about how writing dovetails with our wider lives, the lives we may lead outside the tiny cramped space in which we sit for hours hunched over a screen that slowly eats the cones and rods from within our dark-shadowed eyes, perhaps even the sanity from behind our knitted brows, lost amid a precarious landscape built from stacked pizza boxes and empty wine bottles and other far less wholesome things. You know… that place outside we call “the world”? I ventured into my corner of it recently (Vancouver, British Columbia) and even there I began to notice the marks and stamps left by other writers. Either that or I’m now so delusionally obsessed with writing I’ve reached the point of developing a serious pathology.
Vancouver’s most acclaimed literary figure was probably Malcolm Lowry, who wrote Under the Volcano here. William Gibson and Douglas Coupland also spring to mind. But I don’t really mean that. I’m not so much interested in the indisputably famous and lauded, but more the quieter language moments we sometimes stumble on by accident. Continue reading “Found Words, Waiting”