~ Telling the Truth, Mainly
Beats me.
See what other qualifications Ms Welty offered her potential employer at Letters of Note: “How I Would Like to Work for You!”
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/10/how-i-would-like-to-work-for-you.html
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Image by Billy Hathorn (National Portrait Gallery, public domain.) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons
“Do you remember when you learned to read, or like me, can you not even remember a time when you didn’t know how?” ~ Harper Lee, in a letter to Oprah Winfrey
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/10/some-things-should-happen-on-soft-pages.html
I’m really not trying to rely on other bloggers for all my posts, but one this from Letters of Note is too good not to share. It isn’t what I expected it to be–it’s even better.
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/05/thank-you-mr-hitchcock.html.
Photo by mansionwb at flickr via Wikipedia, CC BY 2.0
When she was twelve, Helen Keller was accused of plagiarism. Mark Twain’s letter to her expressing his views on plagiarism, written ten years later, appears on Letters of Note.
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/05/bulk-of-all-human-utterances-is.html
While I’m in the throes of doing laundry so I can be up in five hours with all the other chickens and get to the airport (and consent to another pat down because the X-ray machine says I have metal under my arm), E. B. White provides today’s post.
Mr. White responds to the ASPCA, which has accused him of “harboring” an unlicensed dog.
Thanks to Letters of Note for sending Mr. White’s missive into my e-mail in-box this morning. And thanks to the ASPCA for accusing Mr. White and thus eliciting this lovely piece of American literature.
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/02/she-doesnt-answer-phone.html
If Mr. White’s letter pleases, proceed to Mark Twain’s letters to the Hartford Gas Company. One of the letters is quite brief and appears in an editor’s note just below Mr. Twain’s signature (S. L. Clemens).
http://mark-twain.classic-literature.co.uk/mark-twains-letters-1886-1900/ebook-page-03.asp
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To all who have visited and commented while I’ve been otherwise occupied, many thanks. No matter what it looks like, you are not being ignored.
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Image of E. B. White Cornell University senior photograph. Uploaded by w:user:cornell2010. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Another round of ROW80 begins today, and I’ve signed on. I would like to say I’m doing it because I was so successful the first time, but that would be overstatement bordering on a lie. In fact, it would be a lie. I became so tired of reporting that I couldn’t even remember my goals that I stopped reporting and just wrote whatever came to mind.
(Oh, joy. The Internet is down again and I must reboot the router. It’s okay. I get a lot of exercise walking across the room and toggling a little switch.)
Back to ROW80.
One of my CPs came across the following post on the blog Letters of Note. It’s a copy of a letter in which Pixar animator Austin Madison tells aspiring artists how to handle times of “creative drought.”
“In a word,” he writes, “PERSIST.”
So I dive into ROW80 once more because I’m persisting.
And because I want to. I discovered some interesting/entertaining/informative blogs during the first round, and I hope to discover more.
It’s also good to write in the company of others. Not to be accountable to them, but to share their energy. We’re all working toward the same thing.
Part of the ROW80 contract is a statement of goals. I’ll keep it simple.
My third goal is to eschew perfectionism, but I’ve been eschewing so competently that I don’t need to put it in writing.
I hope everyone reading this post will click over to Austin Madison’s letter. His ideas aren’t new, but they’re often forgotten. Sometimes we need to read them in new words, from new people, and we need to read them again and again.
Image of Reveille by Patrick Boyd (cropped from [1]) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Kathy Waller 