Tom Tomorrow writes:
So, let’s talk about evil for a second. The president has used the term so often and so clumsily that it has begun to lose meaning, become part of the background noise of the culture, easily tuned out. And that’s unfortunate, because it was an act of evil. This is what the patriotically correct crowd doesn’t understand: you can try to understand how such a thing could have happened, what factors could drive men to such extremes–and still consider their acts evil, beyond redemption. No rational person would be so foolish as to pretend that the Holocaust was not evil, and yet no one would argue that the Nazi party simply sprang into being fully formed, unaffected by historical context.
Caitlin R. Kiernan writes:
I’d be willing to suppose that at least 50% of good writing is just knowing when the hell to shut up.
And me? I write…well, nothing really. Maybe it’s that I’m too tired, or too hungry, or too cold — or maybe it’s because I think that everything I write has to be perfect, exactly the right words in exactly the right order, and I worry about what I’m going to say, or how I’m going to say it, when really I should just be getting words on paper or screen and worrying about revising them later. I agonize over words and phrases, struggle with beginnings…and so I rarely get past them. Even when there are ideas in my head — and there are many — stories seem to stall somewhere in their first few sentences because I’m unwilling to accept them as works in progress. I’m unwilling to accept the initial problems in my prose. I never want to leave in something and move on if it isn’t quite as good as I think it could be. But I need to allow myself the freedom to fail, the freedom to fall flat on my face, to write something that isn’t perfect, to just write.
We’ll see how I feel after lunch.