Diary - Entry 4/15

25 February 1957

Ted's book of poems - The Hawk in the Rain - has won the first Harper's publication contest under the 3 judges: W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender & Marianne Moore! Even as I write this, I am incredulous. The little scared people reject. The big unscared practising poets accept. I knew there would be something like this to welcome us to New York! We will publish a bookshelf of books between us before we perish! And a batch of brilliant healthy children! I can hardly wait to see the letter of award (which has not yet come) & learn details of publication. To smell the print off the pages!

~ Sylvia Plath

Babylon 5 or Farscape? - Please give your opinion

I am looking for a next tv show to be obsessed about, and would love your opinion before parting with hard earned cash. To give you an idea of what I like, Stargate S.G. 1 and Atlantis are my all time favourite. I can and do watch them repeatedly and not get bored. Firefly was okay, but I don't love it like Stargate. Another all time favourite is Charmed. Buffy and Angel are good, but again, not in love with them like Charmed in that genre. So based on that any opinions? Babylon 5 and Farscape both have good reviews. I find it positive that two of the characters in Farscape are same from Stargate (Cam Mitchell and Vala) so I know I like their acting. But other than that I am not really sure...

Diary - Entry 3/15

13 February 1951 It must be told that my second work day is a bust as far as getting into the writing. I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straightening shyness that assails one. It is as though the words were not only indelible but that they spread out like dye in water and colour everything around them. A strange and mystic business, writing. Almost no progress has taken place since it was invented. The Book of the Dead is as good and as highly developed as anything in the 20th century and much better than most. And yet in spite of this lack of a continuing excellence, hundreds of thousands of people are in my shoes - praying feverishly for relief from their word pangs. And one thing we have lost - the courage to make new words or combinations. Somewhere the old bravado has slipped off into a gangrened scholarship. Oh! you can make words if you enclose them in quotation marks. This indicates that it is dialect and cute. ~ John Steinbeck

Diary - Entry 2/15

12 February 1951

Lincoln's Birthday. My first day of work in my new room. It is a very pleasant room and I have a drafting table to work on which I have always wanted - also a comfortable chair given me by Elaine. In fact I have never had it so good and so comfortable. I have known such things to happen - the perfect pointed pencil - the paper persuasive - the fantastic chair and a good light and no writing. Surely a man is a most treacherous animal full of his treasured contradictions. He may not admit it but he loves his paradoxes.

Now that I have everything, we shall see whether I have anything. It is exactly that simple. Mark Twain used to write in bed - so did our greatest poet. But I wonder how often they wrote in bed - or whether they did it twice and the story took hold. Such things happen. Also I would like to know what things they wrote in bed and what things they wrote sitting up. All of this has to do with comfort in writing and what its value is. I should think that a comfortable body would let the mind go freely to its gathering. But such is the human that he might react in an opposite way. Remember my father's story about the man who did not dare be comfortable because he went to sleep. That might be true of me too. Now I am perfectly comfortable in body. I think my house is in order. Elaine, my beloved, is taking care of all the outside details to allow me the amount of free untroubled time every day to do my work. I can't think of anything else necessary to write except a story and the will and the ability to tell it.

~John Steinbeck

Diary - Entry 1/15

26 January 1930

When we made up our six months accounts, we found I had made about £3020 last year - the salary of a civil servant; a surprise to me, who was content with £200 for so many years. But I shall drop very heavily I think. The Waves won't sell more thna 2,000 copies.

~Virginia Woolf

June 2009 - Short Story Challenge

So how are you doing with the June challenge? With barely two weeks left to me in the month, I am still at the idea stage. So let's what I can do in the next couple of days. But at least the idea is there. I have more hopes for July challenge. How is your progress?

Writer's Diary

Do you keep a diary? Personal pages meant only for your eyes? Thanks to the Internet, blogs, and online diaries, not much of private thoughts remain. We share the struggles of our journey online. We worry if we are the only ones who are having trouble. The struggle is not new, and neither are the problems which may seem unique to us.

Writers from the past shared many of the same issues we feel today. Looking at the thoughts of some of the most famous writers/poets, I find comfort that they weren't born successful.

So for the next two weeks, I will share an entry a day from the private journals of some of the writers/poets. May you find inspiration and comfort from that too.

Back In The Real World

No, I didn't go away to another planet or fantasy land, but it may as well have been. I love travelling, so when I am on holiday (which for me means getting up early, being busy all day and going to bed exhausted) all the boring stuff of life just disappears. That's what two weeks in Turkey were like. Extreme non-stop touring, but brilliant. But what has that got to do with writing? Well, while I didn't work on any stories or assignment, I did keep a travel journal. There is a lot still I need to write in it, which I didn't have time for, so by the time I am finished, the whole journal will be complete. Then there is the fact that I shall be using various cultural/historical things I learnt during the trip for my stories. So travel is good. I doubt June will be very productive in writing terms as now only two weeks left, and I am currently obsessing over new SIMS 3. So two weeks to play it to death, and take it easy with writing. Easy, not stop. I still hope to achieve some productivity. With which project exactly - that remains to be seen....