38 Comments
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Dave Palmer's avatar

"My job is to carve off a sliver of the ineffable, and to eff it."

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David R. Michael's avatar

The inevitable ineffable pun. =)

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Claudelle's avatar

This was fun to read on the morning of my 28th birthday 🥳

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Walter Bouldin's avatar

And on my 90th.

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Claudelle's avatar

Happy birthday, Walter!!! Cheers to our trips around the sun :)

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Neil Shurley's avatar

#19 made me think about the two postcards I got from Isaac Asimov. Is the actual content all that special? Of course not. But he was replying to letters I wrote him, and so for just those few moments he was writing something directly and only to me. What a gift.

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Myq Kaplan's avatar

dear adam,

great piece! some of my favorite nuggets from it:

"The beauty ain’t in the necklace. It’s in the neck."

"My job is to carve off a sliver of the ineffable, and to eff it."

"lots of people think they need to get better at writing, but nobody thinks they need to get better at thinking, and this is why they don’t get better at writing."

"Every writer, whether they know it or not, is subtweeting themselves."

thank you for sharing as always!

love

myq

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Cyril's avatar
10hEdited

Re 2: "The begining was the Word and we just play with the phonetics"

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBOdvZi9Ng8

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direwolff's avatar

Thanks for writing this.

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Jake Bernstein's avatar

I was half expecting a clickbait post, but ended up thinking this is some of your best work yet! Reading these posts is always a highlight of my day

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Uluscri's avatar

Gathered a lot of insights from this, thank you! I eapecially like your thoughts on thoughts and how writers viewed their own works. Food for the writing side of me.

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Lise Andreasen's avatar

(3) Everybody wants to be somebody else. Elvis wanted to be an actor. H.C. Andersen wanted to dance ballet, or at the very least write for adults. There's a more general law here, not just for writers.

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Leo Abstract's avatar

7 and 8 accurately describe why i restrict my literary output to being a reply-guy

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John Quiggin's avatar

On 3, I read about half of *The White Company* not long ago. It's not very good.

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E R Lurie's avatar

Great stuff.

Pointy wung.Last sentence has "one" missing.

Wait, does no ... else do this?

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Leo's avatar

re: #5 Wadsworth Constant: Today I learned that the Wadsworth Constant, a circa 2011 meme originating from user u/Wadsworth, is not to be confused with the Wadsworth Constant Deviation System, related to optics, specifically used in designing spectrographs, as developed by Frank L. O. Wadsworth (1867-1936) [who may have been a British mathematician and scientist and/or an engineer from the Ohio State University who worked for Albert A. Michelson at Clark University in the development of the spectrograph.]

Thanx for the rabbit-hole!

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Charles Justice's avatar

I love reading your posts because they always perk my interest. I totally get the Ray Bradbury quote, although for me it's the space of a week. I can go a few days without writing, but by the time a week rolls around I get anxious, and need to sit down and write something. Also: fascinating what you say about motivation. I'm always motivated to write. There are so many things wrong with the world that need to be corrected, or, as in philosophy, wrong with how people are seeing things that need to be corrected. My work is never done! I appreciate your sense of humour.

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Neil's avatar

Definitely all neck!

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amdancks's avatar

Lotta gems there, Adam. Thank you.

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