Our youngest daughter and I play cello duets.
While neither of us is Yo-Yo Ma, I have experience powerful healing in this shared experience with our fifteen year old daughter.
Never mind she plays much better than I, her
Of Cello Duets, Adolescence and The Art of Living …. Read More »
“To re-present words is far more difficult, because the relation is so close between model and artist. The novelist works in the very material out of which the object he is trying to render is made. He must use, to express soul, the signs which soul uses to express it self. It is relatively easy
The Dance Between Words and Paint, Paper and Canvas Read More »
It requires skill to craft tantalizing titles, bylines, etc. that coaxes readers, even those who receive your blogs as I do those written by The Mommy Psychologist
to actually stop what we are doing and take in the blogger’s words.
That what we read leaves us thinking, and pondering the subject of their website and blogs, which for The Mommy Psychologist is the whole gambit of parenting in the 21st century, evidences grasp of an art.
Readers can be grateful when the very topic of a blogger’s discussion plunges
Of Jonathon Franzen, Loneliness, and The Still Point of Attention … Read More »
Unless a publisher can provide strong marketing and distribution, I cannot see where they have earned 75% of royalties from electronic book sales.
In the past, when books only came in hard/paperback, publishers could justify their actions in that they paid the bill on having copies of our books printed up.
Now with Amazon stating that Kindle sales of books out number those of hard/paperback 150:100 publisher must rethink the service they are providing authors.
Authors too, must become more business savvy.
Of E-books, Royalties and Taking Charge of Finances… Read More »
Recently I’ve been helping my high school teenager with the story they are writing. Now that school has ended and summer vacation has begun they are spending more time writing on their work.
It is wonderful to watch them pour their energy in passion into the project.
Doing so revives wistful memories of when I began writing nearly two decades ago.
Recalling my first attempts at writing a novel, brings to mind not simply the excitement and angst at setting out accomplish such a great feat.
I doubt we would have succeeded had most of us who have accomplished this goal understood the full nature of our undertaking and what it would and has required.
And so it has been with care and caution in choosing my words and responses that have and sought to nurture my child’s passion when they have sought my guidance and consultat
Introspection, Thought and Nascent Creations… Read More »
The Muse then is that most terrified of all the virgins. She starts if she hears a sound, pales if you ask her questions, spins and vanishes if you disturb her dress. We might start off by paraphrasing Oscar Wilde’s poem, substituting the world “Art” for “Love.”
Art will fly if held too lightly.
Art will die if held too tightly.
Lightly, tightly, how do I know?
Whether I holding or letting Art go?”
–Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing/Essays on Creativity
Beckoning and befriending The Muse takes work and energy. The focus required to summon The Muse asks that we turn inward. Looking at one’s own self consolidates awareness of our motives, those conscious and unconscious, what drives us to move through and impress ourselves upon the world in a unique manner that distinguishes us and expresses our personality.
The impetus to create involves two simultaneous processes, one of bringing the formless into form, making something out of the rawness of nothing. And then there is transformation under which each artist goes when carving and crafting our creating.
The Muse oversees and directs these two aspects of making while being remade, molding while being reshaped.
Art, The Muse and Beholding The Other… Read More »
“It isn’t easy. Nobody has ever done it consistently. Those who try hardest, scare it off into the woods. Those who turn their backs and saunter along, whistling softly between their teeth, hear it treading quietly behind them, lured by a carefully acquired disdain.
We are speaking, of course, of The Muse.”
–Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing/Essays on Creativity
Many people imagine the life of a writer as one of awakening each morning to a flowing stream of words that pour onto our writing tablet or through our fingers and onto the computer string, our greatest challenge being that of writing or moving our fingers quick enough on the computer keys to catch the words.
There are times like that. But more often than not, we struggle to find those words that ideally give readers a smooth ride into the escape of our stories and novels.
A more honest way of describing what we do is to say that the smoother our sentences flow and the more intense a readers entrancement into at story, the more the writer toiled at kneading and carving that ease of journey presented in the magic carpet of our words.
But what of The Muse?
The Muse, Mystery and Grace… Read More »