Margo

To:      Employer

Cc:      Tammy

From:  Exemplary Employee

Date:   Tuesday, June 30, 2015, 8:10 AM

Re:      Vacation week

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I’d like the week of August 3^rd off.

Thank you.

(e-signature)

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To:      Exemplary Employee

cc:       Tammy

From:  Employer

Date:   Tuesday, June 30, 2015, 8:30 AM

Re:      Re: vacation week

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Should be fine.

Check status of my

April conference reimbursement.

(small first initial signature)

 

 

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The scientist, astronomer, and author, Carl Sagan, on the magic of books:

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

(excerpt from the Writer’s Digest)

• begin at a pivotal moment
• add an unusual situation
• add an intriguing character
• conflict
• add an antagonist
• change emotion
• irony and surprise
• make people wonder
• dread factor
• keep narrative voice compelling

 

Have fun!

The wonderful thing about fiction: the meaning of a story is contained in the way it unscrolls, in the experience the reader has, phrase by phrase. Everything else—the analysis we tend to feel the need to do—is reductive (fun, but reductive). The reading experience, when you think about it, is so complex and lovely and hard to describe: ideas come up and are complicated and refined by the next beat; moral notions arise and are challenged; the language surprises; parallel images from our own life are continually invoked; questions that, in our everyday mode, we’d be more simply opinionated about are endorsed and negated and complicated. All this happens at once, and in a granulated way that’s impossible to describe. I think it’s important to be respectful of how mysterious the whole deal is: a person being moved by a story another person made up. It’s weird but it happens and it can really change people’s lives. I think fiction at its best can serve as a moment of induced bafflement that calls into question our usual relation to things and reminds us that our minds, as nice as they are, aren’t necessarily up to the task of living, and shouldn’t get cocky. ~ George Saunders

 

 

Timeless Advice from 1932-1933

My favorites are 1,7,10,11

Which are yours?

Leave a comment so I know.