Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass.. it is about learning to dance in the rain

Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass.. it is about learning to dance in the rain

I suppose I should not be surprised.. I have been here supposedly before. I doubt I recall. I know I cried then as I do now.. In yet.. black and green moons.. to which do I belong? I wonder to travel by moonlight is much like to travel by candle light. The spell is the same people forget and then remember and forget .. I never was a witch.. I was a bear. We did not need to forget..Wind blows, trees sway, a brush with the night hour. A treat for prayers for All Saints Day. A mask or gourd or pumpkin to scare the spirits away. The color orange to represent harvest time while black means death for all time. Halloween is the spirit's night.Halloween Spirit oh how I miss the dreamers at nightall waiting in the patch at night,living loving within laughter of the street lightloads of candy and sweets tonightopens your bag hope you can see well by the moonlightwinter is nearer tonighteternity will remember the spirits prancing in the streetlightseverlasting streetlightsneeds more candy to dance tonight.Spirit on all hallow's Eveprancing in the dusk of the moonindeed dreaming of candy under the moonreality watching the drifting mooninwardly hoping for a sight of a spirit tonighttime to ask for more candy tonight.acrostic Halloween Spirit short prose introductionI do not want realism. I want Magic - Yes magic. Make a fairy tale and go live in it. Worry s a misuse of your imagination. You have to remember fear is not real. It is a product of the thoughts you create. Do not misunderstand me. Danger is very real. But fear is a choice. My enter life can be described in one sentence: It did not go as planned, and that is okay. Speaking from Bolivia I realize I should have been a writer along time ago. However, all the stories I had to tell were not so good. Now what to do is just write. The magic - I was reading Through the Looking Glass - falling asleep Curiouser and Curiouser cried Alice. At which point the reader thoughts were distracted. For a moment, Wonderland folded in and onto itself as if a book being a pop-up. Time flew by as if a raven was heading north by northeast had hit a head wind and stopped for no other reason but to watch a curious site unfold. Time after all was all that reality had. For imagination of those that read is greater at times than time itself. For who wants to live in a realistic world when magic is about. At which point the book folded into a tea service set and tea table along with a complete different book of characters. Alice was transformed into dominatrix with full leather and chaps, while politician toke the place of the mad hatter. Of course, the insane hare and mouse stayed the same just a bit more grey. Curiouser and Curiouser said the new Alice, who toke without asking or being inquired two lumps of sugar with her herbal tea not black tea. Do tell of this politician abusing a pig... Did he get away with it? The new mad hatter, I mean politician was at a loss for words still being brought from a past reality of magic into the present time. However, being a politician, he could muffle a few words. Indicating that the pig was in truth not hurt and sexuality being in questioned of the politician was deemed not a fair controversy. Thus the new Alice showing her more dominate side reached out and smacked the hare with a tea pot. The mouse seeing this breaks into a laughter that is followed by the mad hatter, to error here I mean the politician. The hare staring off into the past seeing a different Alice one with less force and more a little girl than dominatrix who stands before him now. The reader yawns and the book refolds itself. The book folds itself into a farther future this time a robot looking Alice is reflecting a messy tea service set, and tea table. Curiouser and Curiouser said the robot Alice to a caged rabbit whose eyes set open like those of a science experiment that has gone wrong. A mouse does pop up next to the table but does nothing. At the end of the table is a skeleton of what looks like a politician but with enough skin that you realize, he must have died a while ago. However, the dead skull moves and realization are a zombie has taken the mad Hatters seat or maybe the zombie is the politician in a hatter's seat. Just then the rabbit starts crying in a yelping voice scaring the mouse and forcing the robot Alice to be concerned. Subsequently, away following the reader yawns again, and the book poofs! Back and forth between all three scenes catching a wild little girl having a tea party at one moment, then a dominatrix bending a politician over a tea table the following, to a robot Alice desperately helping a lunatic hare from a cage. Curiouser and Curiouser said the reader finally laying down the book and nodding off to sleep. At which point magic takes over, and the reader is part of the tea party. Initially helping to serve tea with a little girl, chatting with the mad hatter, sipping tea with the insane hare, and conversing with the mouse. Next flirting with the dominatrix Alice, her dominating the reader will have to serve tea, and forcing a bit more conversation about hares, a mouse and politician than would be normally thought of. Finally within a future of robots, zombies, and mad experimental rabbit that all defer to a mouse whose main goal is to finish the tea.Finally, the reader drifts away like a butterfly towards a dimly lighted moon that can be seen through the clouds. The reader wondering if maddest is that which is caused by reading Alice in Wonderland or Curiouser and Curiouser is it the loneliness of reader and dreamers of the magic held within such books. A thud noise happens. The reader awakes to the voice of an Alice Curiouser and Curiouser. Is this the dream or magic? The reader decides that the noise is part of the dream. When it starts raining and filling up with all sort of creatures and books, the reader realizes the wetness, and water is causing a shortness of breathe. Swimming for what looks like a book the reader hands clasp upon it. Pinching trying to wake-up only to find that the magic the book is more real and shows more reality than what the reader was hoping to wake up to. The reader shouts with hope Curiouser and Curiouser and the magic is broken. The reader wakes up with a book resting in hand.https://www.minds.com/.../green-moon-or-or-it-s-the-first...

A dragon or fairy story

Dragons. People tend to forget their history. In fact, if it was not for my family. Which my family related to Sir Siegfield. Who slayed the dragon at Furth im Wald. Personally I would not know much more than the fantasy books and television programs.

The last dragon killed by a farmer my great some number back grandfather on my father’s side in Bavaria. The tale went that the farmer was brave. And that the dragon had been eating goats, and animals through the forest there. And causing all kinds of confusion. The official battle noted is some German church. There the embellishment went. That Sir Siegfield with a spear in an open field attacked the dragon. The battle went hard for Siegfield. His clothing torn to fragments, and he was bloody and smelly. Fiercely the fight went back and forth with him using a spear, and the dragon was fierce burning down a shed or outbuilding. The fight lasted hours per the biblical scholarly hand copy in high German writing. In the end, my high German Google translator made the fight seem as follows.

Sir Siegfield spear pierced the dragon. While the dragon fire went wide burning a building with beasts in it. That is the short and delightful tale of the conclusion of the last dragon.

What is missing is family lore, and an original journal kept by Sir Siegield’s son?

The family lore was less ferocious. Mr. Siegfield which was a farmer not a fighter nor knight at the time went to find his lost hog. He had with him his hiking stick. Now, his swine had been eating mushrooms. Or something of a quirk in the woodland, and appropriately he went there hoping to find his hog. He found his pigs tracks and walked right to a shed in the middle of the forest. There was this huge dragon thing eating his hog. Being quite mad. Because that was his hog. And not thinking he swung his stick at the dragon that seemingly had a fire going cooking his hog. Now, the humor is rather wild here. The dragon jumped into the fire creating a fire that burnt said, shed down. While on fire, the hog which evidently had not been cut up or slaughtered correctly blew up. Pig shit, went everywhere hitting Mr. Siegfield and making a rather stinker mess.

Now, the dragon also seems to have run straight into Mr. Siegfield’s stick. Right into its eye killing it. That was family lore. Being a somewhat curious child. When I was a child, my great grandfather Christoper opened a journal. That had been in the family and read in German then translating to me this bit.

The offspring of Siegfield notes in his journal. That the resident lord knighted his father for slaying the said dragon. And when old Sir Siegfield confessed that the dragon did not die.

He said the folk lore. The story was amended in every part except what happened after the dragon had run into his walking stick. Now this part written in the journal translated from an old German to a kid who did not understand German. The story written stated that the dragon lost only an eye. However, upon losing an eye, the body slumped and out, stepped a fairy or person in a body of a human. What transpired there was a thank you. That Mr. Siegfield had taken part in some shape-shifting spell. In which the eye of a dragon needed. To transform all dragons from their dragon likeness to what Mr. Siegfield saw before him. For his help, he received his life. I thought the story book was great and asked for more. My great grandfather past that night and I never got to see that book again.

Now, you would think that was the end of the story. Humor, I am on my own adventure these days. You see I was watching Don Quixote in a play in Bolivia several years ago.

One lady who argues with the main lead lady a fine ballerina, she was good she was a dragon. You could tell she wanted or thought she deserved the lead. I watched her. And there in the middle of, a play exclaimed did you see that. You see, her eyes... Her eyes. Yes, I am sure it was her eyes. They were gold. They held that arrogant look of a woman. And my exclaiming came as her eyelids went both ways. What do you mean? She had two eyelids per eye. One down and when she was self-thinking people were watching the play not her. Well, her eyes had ones that blinked together like in pride. It was the wildest thing. I wrote about her giving details on Cosmofunnel about her along with her name, etc.

Now that blog and computer are all gone. Access denied and funny computer had a hard drive crash with nothing recoverable on it. So, the truth being Sir Siegfield did not kill the last dragon. And they still live among us and those that are traveling often see them. That is my story of the last dragon, Furth im Wald and the family of Siegfield.

If you notice I did not use dragon, I used reptile in the title. For you see. I have been seeing them a lot more. Who knows? Dragons were once upon a time rulers of this earth. Are they coming back? I believe so. For to me, I am seeing the time of tribulation. Some call it the Mandela effect. Myself, I would say a soul traveling backwards in time to see a battle between good and evil. The awkwardness type of evil does a time traveler of Sir Siegfield get to see during what he claims is the time of tribulation?

Lets be honest. His fairy story is much better. He was a Peace Corps volunteer in Caracato, Bolivia. Walking to a village in the middle of no where he kept on hearing boom boom boom. He got to the village to find a farmer dropping large rocks down a cliff.

Walking back. He stumbled upon three native girls bathing in the boff. However, that night the winds blew and rain happened and he swears he saw five partnered fairies dancing on the mountain tops on a path where the next day only he could walk without falling over the edge below.

Or Chuma where he swears he danced for two weeks on straight with tribe women. Only to find out the party was only supposedly three days long. Is he telling you a fable a myth, or fact?

For those days when the well is feeling dry and a tad echo-y, I keep a running list of my favorite quotes—things I’ve read, things I’ve edited, things I’ve found in the WD archives, things people have said to me in interviews.

Such tiny, perfect revelations.

A couple of years ago, I posted a portion of this list on my old WD blog (around the same time we ran a great quote feature on 90 tips from bestselling authors in the magazine). Recently, someone asked if I was still collecting quotes.

Here’s the latest iteration of the list. (I’d love to expand it, too—please share some of your favorites in the Comments section of this blog post.)

Happy Friday, and happy writing.

*

“The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.”

—Philip Roth

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”

—Stephen King

“Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it’s the answer to everything. … It’s the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it’s a cactus.”

—Enid Bagnold

“To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.”

—Allen Ginsberg, WD

“Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.”

—William S. Burroughs

“All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.”

—Steve Almond, WD

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”

—George Orwell

“It ain’t whatcha write, it’s the way atcha write it.”

—Jack Kerouac, WD

“Not a wasted word. This has been a main point to my literary thinking all my life.”

—Hunter S. Thompson

“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”

—George Orwell

“I don’t care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.”

—Roald Dahl, WD

“The freelance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.”

—Robert Benchley

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”

—Ernest Hemingway

“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.”

—Virginia Woolf

“Making people believe the unbelievable is no trick; it’s work. … Belief and reader absorption come in the details: An overturned tricycle in the gutter of an abandoned neighborhood can stand for everything.”

—Stephen King, WD (this quote is from an interview with King in our May/June 2009 issue)

“If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.”

—Peter Handke

“To defend what you’ve written is a sign that you are alive.”

—William Zinsser, WD

“If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.”

—William Faulkner

“For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.”

—Catherine Drinker Bowen

“Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. … I have 10 or so, and that’s a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.”

—Gore Vidal

“We’re past the age of heroes and hero kings. … Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it’s up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.”

—John Updike, WD

“The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.”

—Samuel Johnson

“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.”

—Elmore Leonard

“Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts.”

—Larry L. King, WD

“Know your literary tradition, savor it, steal from it, but when you sit down to write, forget about worshiping greatness and fetishizing masterpieces.”

—Allegra Goodman

“I’m out there to clean the plate. Once they’ve read what I’ve written on a subject, I want them to think, ‘That’s it!’ I think the highest aspiration people in our trade can have is that once they’ve written a story, nobody will ever try it again.”

—Richard Ben Cramer

“There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.”

—Doris Lessing

“Style means the right word. The rest matters little.”

—Jules Renard

“Style is to forget all styles.”

—Jules Renard

“I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.”

—Tom Clancy, WD

“The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again.”

—Eudora Welty, WD

“One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I’ll have lost nothing—writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.”

—Lawrence Block, WD

“Don’t expect the puppets of your mind to become the people of your story. If they are not realities in your own mind, there is no mysterious alchemy in ink and paper that will turn wooden figures into flesh and blood.”

—Leslie Gordon Barnard, WD

“If you tell the reader that Bull Beezley is a brutal-faced, loose-lipped bully, with snake’s blood in his veins, the reader’s reaction may be, ‘Oh, yeah!’ But if you show the reader Bull Beezley raking the bloodied flanks of his weary, sweat-encrusted pony, and flogging the tottering, red-eyed animal with a quirt, or have him booting in the protruding ribs of a starved mongrel and, boy, the reader believes!”

—Fred East, WD

“Plot is people. Human emotions and desires founded on the realities of life, working at cross purposes, getting hotter and fiercer as they strike against each other until finally there’s an explosion—that’s Plot.”

—Leigh Brackett, WD

“The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written.”

—Joyce Carol Oates, WD

“When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.”

—Stephen King, WD

“Genius gives birth, talent delivers. What Rembrandt or Van Gogh saw in the night can never be seen again. Born writers of the future are amazed already at what they’re seeing now, what we’ll all see in time for the first time, and then see imitated many times by made writers.”

–Jack Kerouac, WD

“Long patience and application saturated with your heart’s blood—you will either write or you will not—and the only way to find out whether you will or not is to try.”

—Jim Tully, WD

“All stories have to at least try to explain some small portion of the meaning of life. You can do that in 20 minutes, and 15 inches. I still remember a piece that the great Barry Bearak did in The Miami Herald some 30 years ago. It was a nothing story, really: Some high school kid was leading a campaign to ban books he found offensive from the school library. Bearak didn’t even have an interview with the kid, who was ducking him. The story was short, mostly about the issue. But Bearak had a fact that he withheld until the kicker. The fact put the whole story, subtly, in complete perspective. The kicker noted the true, wonderful fact that the kid was not in school that day because “his ulcer was acting up.” Meaning of life, 15 inches.”

—Gene Weingarten, WD

“Beware of advice—even this.”

—Carl Sandburg, WD

“I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide.”

—Harper Lee, WD

“I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that’s the job of art.”

—Andre Dubus III, WD (this quote is from an interview with Dubus in our July/August 2012 issue)

“Geniuses can be scintillating and geniuses can be somber, but it’s that inescapable sorrowful depth that shines through—originality.”

—Jack Kerouac, WD

“People say, ‘What advice do you have for people who want to be writers?’ I say, they don’t really need advice, they know they want to be writers, and they’re gonna do it. Those people who know that they really want to do this and are cut out for it, they know it.”

—R.L. Stine, WD (this quote is from an interview with Stine that ran in our November/December 2011 issue)

“I don’t need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.”

—Ray Bradbury, WD

“Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.”

—Ray Bradbury, WD

“Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.”

—Ray Bradbury, WD

“Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.”

—Ray Bradbury, WD

“I don’t believe in being serious about anything. I think life is too serious to be taken seriously.”

—Ray Bradbury, WD

“It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.”

—Ernest Hemingway

“Writers are always selling somebody out.”

—Joan Didion

“Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.”

—Robert A. Heinlein

“Keep a small can of WD-40 on your desk—away from any open flames—to remind yourself that if you don’t write daily, you will get rusty.”

—George Singleton

“There is only one plot—things are not what they seem.”

—Jim Thompson

“Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at 15 to write several novels.”

—May Sarton

“I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.”

—William Carlos Williams

“The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.”

—Andre Gide

“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”

—Virginia Woolf

“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

—Elmore Leonard

“You do not have to explain every single drop of water contained in a rain barrel. You have to explain one drop—H2O. The reader will get it.”

—George Singleton

“When I say work I only mean writing. Everything else is just odd jobs.”

—Margaret Laurence

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is … the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

—Mark Twain

“I always start writing with a clean piece of paper and a dirty mind.”

—Patrick Dennis

“Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.”

—Annie Dillard

“A book is simply the container of an idea—like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.”

—Angela Carter

“I almost always urge people to write in the first person. … Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.”

—William Zinsser

“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people, not characters. A character is a caricature.”

—Ernest Hemingway

“Write while the heat is in you. … The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with.”

—Henry David Thoreau

“You don’t actually have to write anything until you’ve thought it out. This is an enormous relief, and you can sit there searching for the point at which the story becomes a toboggan and starts to slide.”

—Marie de Nervaud, WD

“Whether a character in your novel is full of choler, bile, phlegm, blood or plain old buffalo chips, the fire of life is in there, too, as long as that character lives.”

—James Alexander Thom

“Writers live twice.”

—Natalie Goldberg

http://www.cnn.com/.../politics/pentagon-zombie-apocalypse/ ummm if the military is taking this seriously should you

a trick or treat story for Halloween ' well a Halloween warning ' the zombie recipes origami nano material sent to the brain via water.http://news.discovery.com/.../elusive-on-off-switch-found... a world forgets' those that can be turned on mmore than five times live, those that do not' their bodies well. imagine a hungry body without a mind. searching for like living creatures. life is difficult. sometimes life is weird when you realize that advance extreme high frequency satelliteshttp://www.afspc.af.mil/library/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=7758 are ready to turn on and off the switches being dumped by the plane load into the rain clouds http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_nanotechnology for what purpose. Zombified ¿ why because the antichrist must rule the world to get things done the way he wants. you ever wonder how 8 million voters voted in more than two states and no fraud charges ' plus almost 2 million dead votgers ' http://www.npr.org/.../study-1-8-million-dead-people... humor me a few sececonds' who would have let a president play golf during wars and start three wars when he claimed peace and removal of soliders from war humor 'http://www.washingtontimes.com/.../obama-golf-trips-cost.../ are you truely in control of your vote ' vote third party neither republicans nor democrats have saved nor helped you and they seem to want zombies.

Russia turns drug over to cheap fix for us citizens for future zombie wars ' http://www.ibtimes.com/zombie-apocalypse-russia-krokodil... hopice they are murdering the old, for their social security and murdering vetrans and giving bonuses to those that allow murdering of the vets .... Halloween after all is a bit about the truth or dare... to write the reality of the times.

Say why are people afraid to take a bathe 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dA0Qhgmuvrc trick or treat

I am a bit off today... I can not spell. something more wrong with me than normal.. Humor me tell me hello at least...