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From IRISH TAIRY TALES by James Stephens (free on Project Gutenberg, but I heartily recommend getting the version illustrated by Arthur Rackham available at B&N)
The stories of Fionn (pronounced "fewn") are long and tiresome to me, so when I learned that there was another one in the book, but this time all about his dog, I truly gagged at the thought of reading it. I'm glad I pressed on. This fairytale was short and filled with those clever bits that tickle my imagination. Here are three favorites:
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"…in this story there is a man who did not like dogs. In fact, he hated them…Whenever a dog barked he would leap out of his seat, and he would throw everything that he owned out of the window in the direction of the bark. He gave prizes to servants who disliked dogs, and when he heard that a man had drowned a litter of pups he used to visit that person and try to marry his daughter"
- Describing the beauty of fair maidens is something Irish fairytales are renown for. Here Tuiren, the aunt of Fionn, is depicted:
"Her face was fresh as a spring morning; her voice more cheerful than the cuckoo calling from the branch that is highest in the hedge; and her form swayed like a reed and flowed like a river, so that each person thought she would surely flow to him."
Even married men pined to marry Tuiren and there was much weeping when she became betrothed to Iollan. I love this description:
"Lugaidh himself gave the bride away, but it was not a pleasant ceremony for him, because he also was in love with the lady, and he would have preferred keeping her to giving her away. When she had gone he made a poem about her, beginning:
There is no more light in the sky—
And hundreds of sad people learned the poem by heart."
- Lastly, the description of the courtship of mortal, Iollan, and his fairy lover, Uct Dealv (meaning Fair Breast) is dripping in the syrup of romance yet written with poetically beautiful prose which impressed me instead of being a literary ipecac. I'll share my favorite bit here:
"Then they went hand in hand in the country that smells of apple-blossom and honey, looking on heavy-boughed trees and on dancing and beaming clouds. Or they stood dreaming together, locked in a clasping of arms and eyes, gazing up and down on each other. Iollan staring down into sweet grey wells that peeped and flickered under thin brows, and Uct Dealv looking up into great black ones that went dreamy and went hot in endless alternation."
I remember having that date ages ago when I was a teenager. Didn't you? Twitterpation has been captured so beautifully here.
Overall, there seems to be a twinkle in the eye of the storyteller as he starts with the typical storybook descriptions, then twists them with a wry wit as he makes the characters very human and the stories all the more real.
And how then does Bran the dog fit into this? Jilted Uct Dealv turned fair Tuiren into a dog and gave her to the dog hater. He fell madly in love with the dog due to her delicate loveliness, there were puppies (which I assume weren't scandalously created), and one of the pup's is named Bran.
All neatly tied up in the end as fairytales usually are, but with enough twists and turns to make me wonder why this one has never been retold in modern times. I suspect that this tale of Iollan and Tuiren was originally a separate tale but grafted into the Fionn mythos somewhere along the timeline. What do you think of it?
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Share This!Take a glimpse of a product on TV (rotated and cropped):
Then track it down on the internet:
The art department blacked out "Non-Shellac" for the prop's closeup. This way "India Black" is the main focus with "Fountain Pen Ink" as a almost subliminal support. End result? Quickly scanned authenticity. Pointless? No. Think of how distracting "Non-Shellac" would have been in the moment your eyes scanned the frame before the cut back to the cast members.
In the end, the ink used is a Chinese no-name brand. I'm still much better off with my Noodler's black…
Yes, this exercise is definitive proof that not only do I have ADHD, but I also have way too much time on my hands. I did write in my novel, however, so don't get too down on me.
Scott Meredith’s “Writing to Sell” (Amazon link)
This chapter doused my soul with much needed advice because, with a burning case of ADHD, I am a professional procrastinator. Yet, I believe that I can overcome my disabilities with attitude and cheek.
That's why I felt this chapter was worth the price of this book alone. It didn't merely chide me for faults, but provided me with the tools I needed to overcome them.
I've decided to simply retype the chapter here on Twitwall for you to enjoy for yourself. I'm sure I'm not the only writer who could use advice on work habits. I hope you find this section as useful as I did.
Chapter Five, part one
The writing life looks easy to the nonwriter. All you have to do, he says, eying you enviously, is sit down at a typewriter every once in a while and pound out a script and go collect a big check for it. No time clocks; no bosses; no one to tell you what to do and when to do it.
The working writer, however, knows that the job of pounding out that script is anything but easy, particularly after he passed the beginner's stage, where any careless mass of wordage he has produced looks good to him, and he has begun to work in the professional, planned way that produces salable material. He also knows that the complete lack of time clocks and bosses in the writing business, in addition to being its most wonderful aspect, can frequently be its biggest headache.
When a bookkeeper comes to the office and doesn't feel much like keeping the books that day, he keeps them anyway because he knows the boss will bawl him out or fire him if he is caught sitting around reading a magazine. As a result, the work gets done. The full- or part-time writer, however, is his own boss in his writing work, and too often the work does not get done.
Through the years, writers have invented a multitude of excuses and delaying actions to avoid settling down to the man-sized job of turning out that salable script, with their chief ally the conclusion that writing is a delicate mental undertaking which can easily go awry if conditions are not exactly right. Among the devices employed are the wait for inspiration, the presence of that picture on the wall that is crooked and will distract if it isn't straightened, the necessity for sharpening those blunt pencils (even though you type your stuff and practically never use the pencils), the lack of a really suitable hideaway in which to write, the fact that you were out late the previous night and your mind isn't as clear and sharp as necessary, the fact that you had a hard day at the office and your stuff won't receive full justice if you undertake your spare-time writing stint that evening, the noise your family or the neighbor's children are making, and the conviction that the writing just doesn't seem to be coming right that day so what's the sense in continuing? There are about a hundred others; if you have a writer's active imagination, you'll think them up yourself.
Well, your friends and family aren't listening right now, so let me state it bluntly: most of these are just as make-believe as that fiction you write.
If you will force yourself to work out those book ideas without waiting for inspiration to slosh you across the back of the head, and if you will force yourself to write one sentence after another despite the fact that the picture is awry, and the pencils are blunt, and your family is making an awful racket, and you're writing in one corner of a bedroom instead of in a big soundproof study, and you had a big night with the boys last night, and the stuff looks awful as you write it—you will find, when you examine it a day or two later, that the material you've produced is exactly as good or bad as the material you normally produce, or would produce under the most ideal conditions.
Naturally, you will do good work on some days and not-so-good work on others; science is constantly seeking to discover—though it has not yet succeeded—why people in every trade and profession do excellent work at certain times and not-so-excellent work at others. The important thing is that the excuses upon which writers so often seize to avoid work usually have very little to do with it. If you keep a careful check list, you will find, as years pass, that some of your best work was produced under working conditions that were very poor, and that some of your worst material was written while you were working under conditions that were absolutely ideal.
The best cure for the habit of literary procrastination, and the best way to avoid the habit if you have not yet fallen into it, is the stern and rigid working schedule: the setting of specific hours during which you must site and write. If you do this, and abide strictly by the schedule, you will get your work done because you are forcing yourself to be as tough a boss to yourself as a boss in a standard business is to his employees.
Many new writers are shocked at the notion of a writing schedule, and feel they simply can't write that way. This is usually just another subconscious excuse and it can usually be dismissed by a little honest self-questioning and a little logic. After all, when you get right down to it, why can't you? When you attend school, you're under a rigid schedule: you begin work at a specific hour and stop work at a specific hour and work steadily during those hours. When you have a job, you begin and end at set times and work with reasonable steadiness in between. And if you're married and your job is homemaking, you still work on a fairly rigid schedule, preparing the meals and cleaning and doing the other household chores at specific times.
It adds up exactly the same way, except that in school and as an employee, you have teachers and truant officers and bosses to watch over you, and as a housewife, there are the children and your husband to complain if the meals aren't ready on time or if the clothes aren't kept mended and clean. You're on your own as a writer, and you'll get your work done if you set up that harsh boss, the religiously followed schedule to keep you working hard.
When you set up a schedule, don't go overboard with it. It is designed to keep you working hard, but not so abnormally hard that you can't possibly keep up with it for long. Set it so that you get in as much work as you can handle, not any more and not any less. If you're a part-time writer, tow or three hours an evening about three evenings a week is plenty; more than that will make your combined jobs so great a strain on your physical and mental health that you soon won't be able to do either. If you're a full-time writer, from nine or ten o'clock to five, five days a week, with an hour off for lunch, is more than adequate.
All things considered, there is only one kind of writer who should not use the schedule system: the writer who discovers, after extended tryouts of both systems, that he really gets more work done by going to the typewriter at unspecified periods, and who is a good enough self-disciplinarian to spend plenty of total time at his typewriter. If you find that you are really in this small group—and make sure you aren't just talking yourself into it to get away from a tough boss—go ahead and work that way.
Otherwise, stick to a schedule, and force yourself to write steadily during the hours you have set for yourself. You'll find that regular writing will turn into a habit, and that's a wonderful thing.
Scott Meredith’s “Writing to Sell” (Amazon link)
Great chapter. Useful info.
Don't booby trap your submissions to prove they've been read. Waste of time. They're read—or at least enough has been read to make a decision on it.
Editors are busy people who don't have time to give a critique on every submission. Them's the breaks…
Submissions go into two piles: Rush pile & slush pile. Your goal is to get your submissions into the rush pile either by being agented, published, or recommended.
Meredith spent some time discussing the differences between small and large publishers, then the process an editor follows when accepting a manuscript all the way to publication.
Thank you notes are a good idea after being accepted.
The chapter closed with advice for coverletters. My favorite quote: "Fully ninety percent of the letters accompanying new writers' submissions state nothing more, when analyzed, than the fact that the writer is submitting herewith a script, but it's sometimes said interminably. If that's all you have to say, say it in ten words, not in four hundred." This tidbit will forever change my coverletters.
Final advice: "Your best bet, any way you look at it, is to force yourself to forget a script the moment it is put into the mail and concentrate on writing new material. You'll know what has happened to it when you find the publisher's offer in your mailbox."
Scott Meredith’s “Writing to Sell”
Reading a chapter about what "current" editors are looking for in manuscripts sounds like a great idea until you realize the chapter was originally published in 1950. I wasn't expecting much relevance, but was surprised to see that stripped away of its dated material, there was quite a bit of useful advice to be gleaned.
Standard length for a novel is usually between 60,000 to 90,000 words. However, a 60,000 word novel can feel too long if the premise is weak and feels stretched out. Comparitively, a 250,000 word novel can feel just right if the writing is so good that the reader is kept engaged from cover to cover.
Meredith also went over trite conventions within certain genres that a new author should avoid. Now I know where Sanderson picked up his opinion on heroines looking at themselves in mirrors and describing themselves for the reader. (This may have been trite 60 years ago, but with editors screening these scenes out for so long, can they still be considered trite? Just curious)
Meredith also covered the concept of submitting spec manuscripts for approval before going to all the bother of writing a novel nobody wants. His opinion is it's a great idea for established authors. However, new authors need to prove they are capable of finishing a book.
What do you think?
Scott Meredith’s “Writing to Sell”
This chapter focused on informing the hopeful writer that there wasn't much of a difference between hard cover and paperback industries - mostly 60 year old advice that is still good: Hard covers are best and most lucrative. Paperback companies are reducing their inventory to, in modern terms, abandon the long tail and chase the short one.
Today, many genres are solidly still in the paperback camp, and big houses move hard covers into the paperback market when demand tapers off. This much really hasn't changed, despite the predictions of Meredith.
If the chapter could be summed up concisely, it would best be stated as "Don't sell yourself short." With the current market in flux due to the poor economy and the burgeoning advent of digital sales as a market force, a new writer would be better served reading current trade magazines than this chapter. The basis of the chapter was sound, but the specifics were outdated.
Of course, the big change between when this book was written and now is that agents have become the gatekeepers, especially considering that big houses won't even consider unagented material.
Scott Meredith’s “Writing to Sell”
First thoughts: “Hey! This book is out of print! Can it still be relevant?”
So I bought a used copy several months ago for a few dollars, but only now got around to cracking the cover.
I’ll explore each chapter here on Twitwall since 140 character reviews sound time consuming. I’d love to hear your feedback.
Let’s begin:
Aside from an interesting Introduction, Chapter One “You, Writer” is fairly basic. Meredith dispells the myth that one should work one’s way up to proper literary fiction by starting in the genre slums. He posits that we cannot write well when we are writing about things we do not care for. Some in the pay-per-blog community might disagree with him, but considering what a wasteland the blogosphere is, I tend to agree with him.
If you want to write literary fiction, start writing literary fiction. If you like science fiction, don’t feel you need to graduate from it. There’s plenty of money to be made within genres.
Overall, good advice. Next up: “Off on the Right Foot - Getting to know the market”.
Tonight's homework assignment is to write down both the concrete and
emotional objects of desire for your main character, and then write
one paragraph from that character's point of view thinking about that
concrete or emotional desire.
Concrete object of desire: To solve the mystery of her missing father
Emotional object of desire: To be happy again.
August 23rd,
I suppose I should try to write in a journal again. Mom has been bugging me to keep one and I’ve got nothing else to do today except unpack and watch rain. Now is as good a time as any.
So what do I write? It’s raining.
I hate rain!
I remember walking in summer showers with Dad and loving it, but ever since he didn’t return from his last business trip I’ve hated rain. Hurts too much. We still don’t know if he’s alive or dead. Mom keeps hoping for news from the police, but it’s been over six months.
That’s why I’m so glad to be here in Hoxie. Dad used to do business here. Maybe I can find out what happened to him. Maybe I can talk to somebody the police haven’t. I can’t believe he’s gone. I can’t believe he’s left us. Somebody out there has to know what happened to him.
This journal is making me upset and I’m so tired of being sad and upset.
I need to sing. I don’t know if I’ll write here again.
###
Interesting assignment. Really made me think.
Here's the email he sent out to my family:
“Hi everyone, I took a desperate picture while I was in the wilds of Sandy, Utah over the weekend. This is not a doctored photo; this is real proof that Douglas road a bike this weekend. I know what you’re thinking! You think this picture is as credible as some snapshot of a large, hairy blur in the woods attributed to Bigfoot; however, this picture is genuine. I think I might sell it to National Geographic.”
I am plotting my revenge.
Would I trade five years of my life away to be beautiful?
If I knew I would live to see 100 years on this Earth, then living for only 95 of them in exchange for rocking the world as a hottie might be tempting. I don't consider myself particularly ugly. I just need to remember never to smile.
My teeth are like piano keys, out of tune, yellowed due to a freak accident with flouride as a child, and spaced so widely that I can rent my mouth out for parking during sports events. My smile is an unsightly blemish on my face no amount of acne medication can cure. I bear deep rooted scars due to those spaces. They have robbed me of self-esteem and respect. Tragically, my teeth have been making a glacier-like journey to the back of my mouth for decades. By the time I'm 95 I'll only be able to chew when I swallow.
I would trade five years in an instant if beauty meant I could smile and people wouldn't recoil in revulsion.
Then again, what if I'm only going to live until I'm 60? Then 55 isn't really old enough to be worth the trade. I'd live long enough to pay off my wife's school loan before she flew off to the Bahamas on my life insurance with a man she met at the senior's center soon after my funeral. Worse yet, what if I am only going to live until I'm 47? Then you'd make me beautiful just in time for me to die. Where's the fun in that?
Life is a commodity that I treasure because I have no idea how much of it I have left. Making me beautiful in exchange for five precious years is too high a price to ask. However, if you throw in an 18 year old's metabolism along with a God-like physique, I'd toss in another five just as a tip.
About DouglasCootey
- Name Douglas Cootey
- Location Utopia, UT
- Web http://cootey.com
- Bio I am caught in an epic struggle between writing a novel and raising four daughters. Shouldn't Man vs. Time be an archetypal conflict?
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