Hand-built clay sculpture, The Guardian, by Tammy Vitale of Tam’s Originals

The gods do not wish me to post on this blog.  Here we go for the second time.  Typepad encountered a "difficulty" while I was trying to check links (and being blocked by by pop-up scanner for some odd reason engaged today and never before) and ohbytheway, erased my whole blog.

That’s okay.  I am not frustrated.  All things are as they should be.  Ohmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

The Guardian here was one of my first pieces.  I loved her.  I had her for sale at a ridiculous price (in other words, look but don’t buy) at a shop in Front Royal, VA.  She never made it home.  She simply "disappeared."  Much like my blog.  Some days are like that.  This week looks promisingly like that (for more on day-to-day stuff, check out my myspace blog – that is if it’s so inclined to let you this week.  Sometimes it does.  Sometimes it doesn’t.)

And if links don’t work on this post, I’m sorry.  I’m not checking them and losing this whole post again. 

Now, unlike yesterday when my "Selling Art" post had nothing to do with selling art, I will continue with this post and write about writing so that those of you who have never checked in before can feel fairly certain that on a normal day (someone please define that for me), you get what you came for.

"The story curls inside you, hardly formed, just eight weeks along. Two months – still time for a miscarriage. Has anyone else ever had that happen?  Told the world they were going to be a novelist and then had the damned book slide out slippery as a dead fish?  It’s true what they say – you need a good counselor.  It wrecks your goddamned heart.

"There’s only one thing you can do.  Toss.  Take a helluva big breath.  Start again.  Like the doctor said:  You’re not too old.  You can have another novel."  Jane Eaton Hamilton

"Write to empty your waste basket, to follow ants back to their queen, to barge past bouncers at the Temple Bar.  Write to forget the past twenty years and then write forward twenty years.  Write careful lines posed elegantly like nudes displayed on Renaissance draperies for tasteful examination by millions of serious art students and their professors.  Write to unzip or zip up.  What difference does it make?  Oh, for Christ’s sake (and believe me, Buddha will do just as well), don’t write.  What two bit, hollow romance is this hard gripping of the long, firm pen until it’s so hot the plastic softens, of this tip-tapping of fingers over a keyboard like fingers lightly grazing warm, bristly shoulders or smooth shoulders.  Don’t do this."  Susan Suntree

"In the 1940s, two of my books, Winter of Artifice and Under a Glass Bell, were rejected by American publishers…I want writers to know where they stand in relation to such verdicts from commercial publishers…I did not accept the verdict and decided to print my own books."  Anais Nin

"I was in my thirties before I ever held a book written by a black woman in my hand; that was Maya Angelou’s I know Why the Caged Bird Sings.  Now I am in my fifties and have read a few more such books, not as many as could be reasonably expected given our numbers – Africa alone has three hundred million women….I am no historian.  Thus in my case, the telling cannot be in that mode.  History’s dry exactitude kills the story….My personal preference is music.  If I could sing, I would leave songs that spoke of incredible beauty and unspeakable horror…. Sindiwe Magona

all of the above from The Spirit of Writing:  Classic and contemporary Essays Celebrating the Writing Life ed by Mark Robert Waldman

Thought for the Day:  "We are Controlled by the Unspoken." Jean Emerson A Little Help From Your Friends:  A Guide for Small Writing Groups