All is Well

Before me, even as behind, God is, and all is well ~ John Greenleaf Whittier

Two Great Articles to Help You Celebrate "National Handwriting Day"–(Yes, there is such a thing)

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January 23rd is National Handwriting Day!  I know I’m excited, and I bet you can’t wait either!

Truthfully, there is something very cool about receiving a letter or manuscript that is written by hand–it is something to be treasured, and something that is becoming rarer with each passing year.

Below are two links to great stories centered on the handwritten:

1.The Cult of the Moleskine explores why those notebooks are so popular
2. How Twitter Made Handwriting Cool is a great article about all sorts of writing tools–from simple notebooks to the “World’s Best Pencil”

Take time this Sunday to handwrite someone a note!

**Update:
A helpful article on listkeeping and Moleskine Here

The Strange Act of Writing, or, in other words, Erasing my Previous Writing

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I love to write.


I could spend hours writing.  I do spend hours writing.

It’s when I am writing that I best express my thoughts.  Sometimes that is a good thing.  Sometimes it is a great thing.  And sometimes, not so much.

This morning was one of those times.  I wrote a piece comparing working at a Christian Bookstore with working at Baskin Robins.  While I received all positive feedback from it, I kicked myself all day for writing it.  Why?  Because I wrote it when I was experiencing much un-gratitude for something that I should feel and do feel, generally, much gratitude for.  A job.  A job where I get the chance to have interesting conversations with people.  Like the Catholic customer who asked me questions last night, affording me the opportunity to look up in Logos on my phone, the answers to her questions.  And the couple who, for the first time in their lives, were searching for Bibles to purchase and read.  I am grateful.

I am also grateful for my sense of humor.  I agree with Bill Cosby that “You can turn painful situations around through laughter.  If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it.”  There is much to laugh about in life.  There is much to laugh about me—I produce enough fodder for jokes and the ridiculous to keep any stand-up comic in business.

However, sometimes my sense of humor takes on the edge of circumstances.  This morning was one of those mornings, that after a short night, my sense of humor “got the best of me”.   And thus, born out of that, was a writing that was both, at once, humorous (to me anyway) and ungrateful.

Being the overthinker that I am, I have stewed about my writing the entire day while substitute teaching.  Thus here I am, writing once again.  But this time I’m writing my way through my “stewedupness”, trying to make heads or tails out of my love of writing and the way it presents at times.

Of course, I realize none of this may make sense to anyone except for myself. But then, what really is a blog for?  It’s pretty self-indulgent actually.  Thus I think I’ll be able to go off to work in the next hour now to the Christian Bookstore somewhat assuaged and relieved.

What an odd duck I am.

C.S. Lewis on Writing

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Justin Taylor had a fantastic post today full of great quotes from C.S. Lewis on the subject of writing.  You can read his post HERE

or if you don’t have time to read what is there, then here is my all-time favorite quote from Lewis on writing (I have lots of favorite quotes from my “Uncle Lewis” on several different subjects):

Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.


I happen to LOVE big words, so it is a reminder to me to choose my words wisely when writing.  🙂


Quotes by Writers about Writing

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Robert Frost:  Poets need not go to Niagara to write about the force of falling water.

Flannery O’Connor:  Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.

Robert Benchley:  It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.
George Orwell:  In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.

Steven Wright:  I’m writing an unauthorized autobiography. 
William S. Burroughs:  In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.

Gustave Flaubert:  The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
Stephen King: I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.

Ernest Hemingway:  Write drunk, edit sober.
Hunter S. Thompson:  The only thing to be said this time about Fear & Loathing is that it was fun to write and that’s fair, for me at least because I’ve always considered writing the most hateful kind of work.
 
Elmore Leonard:  I try to leave out the parts that people skip.


Isaac Asimov:  If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood.  I’d type a little faster.  
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