On Your Desk: a blog series I have been enjoying reading

I recently started reading Terri Windling’s blog again recently, having stopped at one stage due to being annoyed by the fact that she has her rss feed set to be truncated.  I generally loathe going to sites to read blogs – I like reading them all in Google Reader or using Reeder on the iPad, and it’s just counter intuitive to have to go outside of these applications for me.

Anyway.  That complaint aside, there are a couple of blogs with truncated feeds for which I make an exception – Terri Windling’s is one of them.

And I’m finding myself very glad that I started reading it again.  She’s been posting a fascinating series of photos submitted to her by a range of creative types – On Your Desk.  That link takes you to all of the entries posted under the tag – go and check them out.

This also has me kind of enthused to get my writing area prettied up a little.  Stay tuned for photos to come.

Mirrored from Stephanie Gunn.

Do not waste time

“Write as if you were dying. At the same time, write as if for an audience consisting only of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?”

“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something will arise for later, something better. These things fill in from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
“After Michelangelo died, someone found in his studio a piece of paper on which he had written a note to his apprentice, in the handwriting of his old age: ‘Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio, draw and do not waste time.’”

- Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Mirrored from Stephanie Gunn.