Saturday 17 December 2022

Self-care, not self-delusion

From This Is What ‘Self-Care’ REALLY Means, Because It’s Not All Salt Baths And Chocolate Cake, by Brianna Wiest (via @luliinvierte)

True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.

If you find yourself having to regularly indulge in consumer self-care, it’s because you are disconnected from actual self-care, which has very little to do with “treating yourself” and a whole lot do with parenting yourself and making choices for your long-term wellness.

It is becoming the person you know you want and are meant to be. Someone who knows that salt baths and chocolate cake are ways to enjoy life – not escape from it.

Wednesday 23 March 2022

A year later...

From Bleed into black, by Canis_chimera (Canis_cosmos), showing once again that fanfiction is in no way a lesser form of literature:

Everything cycles round, Stiles, history repeats itself. But the roles we play can change; the victim may become the victor, the villain may become the hero, because life lets us learn - if we keep an open mind. And we can see each new loop as a fresh chance to do better.

Life lets us learn and be better, if we try.

Wednesday 10 February 2021

Me, again

So many things have changed since my last post. And so many things haven't yet changed. But, inspirational quotes, here, have some, both by Christopher Morley, an American novelist, essayist, theater producer...

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.
Read more at https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/christopher-morley-quotes

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.

 (thanks, puppernutter, at Distributed Proofreaders)

Big shots are only little shots who keep shooting.

(and myself, for checking the previous quote here, where I found more)

Monday 15 January 2018

Deep thoughts on lit

When reading sth in an academic manner, I first try to place the author, check their bios, other works, times, themes, and a long etc. Sometimes I research a bit more on the subject if needed. And then I read. And then I read other people's reviews and opinions, to see if what I understood is what is generally understood.
I might be a bit unsure of my reading comprehension skills.
Then, I read Kizmet's mention of Death of the Author, and researched (of course!) till I met this opposing view:
 Death of the Author
...is the birth of the reader.
Death of the Author is a concept from mid-20th Century literary criticism; it holds that an author's intentions and biographical facts (the author's politics, religion, etc) should hold no weight in determining an interpretation of their writing. This is usually understood as meaning that a writer's views about their own work are no more or less valid than the interpretations of any given reader. Intentions are one thing. What was actually accomplished might be something very different. The logic behind the concept is fairly simple: Books are meant to be read, not written, so the ways readers interpret them are as important and "real" as the author's intention. On the flip side, a lot of authors are unavailable or unwilling to comment on their intentions, and even when they are, they don't always make choices for reasons that make sense or are easily explainable to others (or sometimes even to themselves).
In the same page, this Eco quote:
A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would not have written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.
— Umberto Eco, postscript to The Name of the Rose
Further research, (I'm coping from Wikipedia, that is still the easiest source when properly checked) told me that:
"The Death of the Author" (French: La mort de l'auteur) is a 1967 essay by the French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes (1915–80). Barthes' essay argues against traditional literary criticism's practice of incorporating the intentions and biographical context of an author in an interpretation of a text, and instead argues that writing and creator are unrelated. The title is a pun on Le Morte d'Arthur, a 15th-century compilation of smaller Arthurian legend stories, written by Sir Thomas Malory.
Result: I've downloaded the essay and am about to read it - it's such a departure from my own approach! It bears investigating.

Also: another proof that fanfiction is a worthwile endeavour.

Tuesday 12 December 2017

Happy Holidays?

Trying to post regularly and failing, I will keep posting at random like this quote, from the mouth of one of my fave charas, in a ficlet:
“See,” Tony said, “here’s the thing. New Year’s… it’s just a day. Calendars are random human bullshit that don’t have anything to do with the actual passage of time. Time’s not a series of little circles, over and over again, it’s one big piece, stretching out to infinity in either direction, and we’re just tiny, tiny little blips. Hardly significant at all.”
[...]
“If you want to change your life,” Tony said. “You don’t need to wait until New Year’s to do it. Just… decide you want to improve and get to work on it. You don’t have to wait. Seize the day, and all that.”

Tuesday 28 November 2017

Some tips



From tumbl:
Tips For Writing Prompts: #1
  • Write / type your prompt. (The sentence, paragraph, or word.)
  • Create an outline of what you want to happen in the story.
  • Focus on the genre. What kind of story is it? How can you bring forth the overall feeling of the story.
  • Listening to a song that relates to the genre of the story could help.
  • If the story relates to you think about what happened to you, how you felt, and how it affected you.
  • Don’t feel pressured into making your story a specific length. Unless there’s an instructed prompt limit, feel free to make it as long as you’d like. Just make sure you get your point across.
  • Always triple check your writing for grammar, spelling, and any errors in general.
  • Always accept constructive criticism.