In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits in the mind like a piece of overheard gossip or a bit of intriguing tattle. The story process is like taking up such a piece of gossip, hunting down the people actually involved, questioning them, finding out what really occurred, and visiting pertinent locations. As with gossip, you can’t be too surprised if important things turn up that were left out of the first-heard version entirely; or if points initially made much of turn out to have been distorted, or simply not to have happened at all.

Delany, Samuel R. About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, & Five Interviews. Wesleyan University Press.   (via ceeainthereforthat)

When you’re an artist, nobody ever tells you or hits you with the magic wand of legitimacy. You have to hit your own head with your own handmade wand.

Amanda Palmer, “The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help” (via brainpickings)

Hitting a Wall

Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality.

Ursula K. Le Guin (via palegirlinthecity)

If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

Ray Bradbury (via thechocolatebrigade)

“What’s your best writing advice?”

“What if my first draft sucks?”

When a story isn’t going where you thought it would...

…but it’s working.

Outside My Window

You can order a print of this comic (and most any other Incidental Comic) - visit my shop for details. 

Fletcher Mansion, New York - Jean-Francois Raffaelli

(via Book quote)

… you can feel the stars and the infinity of the sky. Since life, in spite of everything, is like a fairytale.

Vincent van Gogh (via oiseauperdu)

Good and evil are a great deal more complex than a princess and a dragon…is not the dragon the hero of his own story?

Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus (via vintageanchorbooks)

Here's my first mini challenge for the Read-a-Thon.

I've finish three short books since my last update. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, Number the Stars by Lois Lowry, and Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children: The Graphic Novel. Not sure where I am with the page count because of the graphic novels, but oh well. Next up I'm thinking some poetry.

The second complete book I've finished today is Through the Woods by Emily Carroll. This is a book of graphic stories. The illustrations are both beautiful and, at times, horrific. It's full of wonderfully creepy fairy tale horror.