Last Month Of 2010

Since NaNoWriMo is now over, I have started work on the first revision of my novel. Strangely enough, the scene with which I opened the original story is the one I chose to use in the revision. But I did do some rewriting of the scene, and I appended to it two of the other scenes I'd used in the original, again with much rewriting. Who knows, this novel might work. It might actually become a publishable book.

If I don't wimp out.

. . .

I left myself a note on my desktop's *NOTES* page that reads: Recently I read somewhere, can't remember where:

Writer and physicist Alan Lightman, was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1948. He reportedly said that as a kid, "I was always troubled and awed by the big questions. Why are we here? Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the meaning of life? How did the universe begin?"

Well, don't we all ask those same questions at one time or another throughout our lives?

But it seems to me that the questions are meaningless. They have no answers beyond what we perceive within our individual minds (brain processes) by way of the interaction of chemical actions and their reactions. Asking such questions and expecting to eventually receive answers presumes that the human race is somehow special among Earth's multitudes of biological life forms. Because we think that our ability to think is something special in the universe. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity indeed.

Just because a person believes a thing does not make it so. Subjective beliefs are not objective facts. When Occam's Razor shaves away the Earth's minuscule stubble that is biological life, what remains is objective reality.

And I simply cannot understand why every reasoning man or woman capable of conceptual discernment is (apparently) unable to perceive that singular truth.

These are ideas I hope to incorporate in a novel.

Someday.

. . .

Another of the notes I found on that page is -- Quiz Question: Who wrote under the pen names Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, Sergeant Fathom, Rambler, and W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab"

Hint: another of his pen names was Mark Twain.

Yes, it was Samuel Langhorn Clemens. Mark Twain hated the writings of Jane Austen. He once said that every time he read Pride and Prejudice, he wanted to dig up Austen and "beat her over the skull with her own shin bone."

From Mark Twain's new autobiography: For many years I believed that I remembered helping my grandfather drink his whisky toddy when I was six weeks old, but I do not tell about that any more, now; I am grown old, and my memory is not as active as it used to be. When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying, now, and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the latter. It is sad to go to pieces like this, but we all have to do it.

If I had identified the source of the above notes I would mention them here. But I did not do so.

. . .

The Writer's Almanac for December 1, 2010 has some good stuff. You can take my word for it or you can read it yourself. It contains, for example, a short piece about Julia A. Moore, famous for writing really bad poetry:

She's sometimes referred to as a "poetaster, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as "a petty or paltry poet; a writer of poor or trashy verse; a rimester." This distinction usually entails things like the use of awkward meter, painfully sappy sentimentality, words that rhyme in an unpleasant way, or poor taste in subject matter.

There is also an insightful little piece about Woody Allen.

__________

"I love books, food, music, sleep, people who work, heated arguments, the United States of America, and my wife and children. I dislike politicians, preachers, genteel persons, people who do not work or are on vacation, closed minds, movies, loud noises, and oiliness."
--Rex Stout