May 2009
61 posts
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Seven enviable lines: advice for freelance writers
rachelhills:
A transcript of the speech I gave at the Emerging Writers’ Festival in Melbourne this morning.
1. It’s true, the media industry is about who you know - or more accurately, who knows you - but you don’t have to know people to get started. Getting to know people who will publish you and getting known is process that happens over time, and in my experience, it’s been more about...
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Feministing: Read this discussion on sexy... →
ponymalta:
…and then, if you like, this piece at Emily Magazine about the backbiting among women, particularly for “hogging attention”. Then, if you really want to delve into this with me, read many of the pieces floating around right now about Helen Gurley Brown and her take on “feminism” and working the “patriarchal male gaze”— here is the most recent one from the New Yorker.
Most of the...
“Another one (Tamarin) jumped from branch to branch to the top of the cage where...”
– Finn (excerpt from her daily writing assignment)
The girls daily writing assignment goes from two pages to three pages this summer and they groaned at me when I reminded them that it was coming. When I told them that in a couple of years they would be doing five pages a day, the groans turned into...
Things that keep me awake at 3am and I am never...
Nostalgia for print objects
A maniacal regard for certain authors
Winter fruit studded with unripe seeds
The movement of sweat through clothes as I walk up a hill and recollect shame
Standing next to smokers, sharing the same air, swallowing ash and their personal scent and taking it into your body
Buddy Bolden, a jazz musician whose great talent painted him into a corner and so the thing...
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“Magazine editors are among the most unhappy people in the country.”
– Dan Baum (via portraitoftheartistasayoungman)
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Hugging becomes the new trend in high schools and... →
Girls embracing girls, girls embracing boys, boys embracing each other — the hug has become the favorite social greeting when teenagers meet or part these days. Teachers joke about “one hour” and “six hour” hugs, saying that students hug one another all day as if they were separated for the entire summer.
A measure of how rapidly the ritual is spreading is that some students complain of peer...
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Australian musicians?
My friend in the UK runs a music zine and is thoroughly involved in the underground British scene (years ago she featured a then-unknown Florence and the Machine and The Go! Team; I would say she knows how to pick them) but she knows next to nothing about Australian music. When she understandably assumed Architecture in Helsinki were Finnish, I realised just how low a profile locally-known...
“I suspect a lot of bloggers may be introverts, because blogging is great if you...”
– Jonathan Rauch, via (The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan)
Certainly rings true for me. (via buyhercandy)
And me!
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“I wanted to make him and everyone in the room aware of the dehumanizing effect...”
– Debriefing Scalia (via igather)
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Antilamentation
Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read to the end just to find out who killed the cook. Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark, in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication. Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot, the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones that crimped your toes, don’t...
UNKNOWN HIPSTER →
Sartorialist, eat your heart out!
I was wearing all my buys at once, and feeling strongly appealing to the occasional Street-Fashion blogger ! But somehow, this great look failed to catch their eyes. Maybe they had seen to much over the week? or just wanted to relax? or reflect on the true meaning of Life, versus the seductions of Appearance ? I took it as a lesson in humbleness, or as...
heute-und:
They all sound amazing! My God, choc chip bread… Like a sweetbread with choc chips, or choc/choc chip? Either is good, I just need clarification for my bread fantasy :)
Just the choc chip, I’m working my way up the bakery chain until I reach try wholemeal and also proper chocolate bread. After that it’s croissants!
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Unphotographable: a text account of pictures... →
This is a picture I did not take of four men standing in the DC Metro on their way to Barack Obama’s inauguration; three of them African American, in matching black leather jackets and knitted black ski hats, each hat emblazoned with the sequined word “OBAMA”, and the fourth man, Chinese, standing right beside them in jogging sweats, wearing a knitted black ski hat embroidered...
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Florence and the Machine - Hospital Beds (Cold War...
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The First Move
When the grids you slot them into dissolve, think how people always surprise you. Always better, kinder, than you allowed. Think how each suffers as much and more than you. Think how you love the things of this world. The birds, the stone, the flowers, the water. Everything that cannot love you back. How easy to love the wordless wild and dead. Your father said he believed in mercy, not...
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Ten things only writers understand →
Worth reading for
8. Just as you’re dropping off to sleep you think of a brilliant line or plot twist but can’t face turning on the light to write it down. So you convince yourself you’ll remember it in the morning, only to find it has gone the moment you open your eyes.
and
9. Sometimes when you read certain other authors you admire, you feel so envious of their brilliance that your teeth...
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Realise Your Dream 09 British Council Australia... →
laundromat:
The British Council Realise Your Dream programme awards excellence in the arts and creative industries and offers talented Australians the chance to further their career in the UK. Now in its seventh year, Realise Your Dream provides financial and professional support to help candidates make lasting connections and expand their horizons in one of the world’s most vibrant cultural...
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directory/and they aren't my flowers →
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two girls one glove
buyhercandy:
She tells me my hands are cold, but they’re always like that, and I say so. She smiles, says, “They should make gloves for two, you know, for two people to hold hands in.”
She holds my hand tighter, demonstrating, and I grin, say that maybe each person could just wear their own gloves, it’d be easier. She says I’m missing the point.
<3
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“Writers don’t make any money at all. We make about a dollar. It is terrible. But...”
– don miller (who else?) blue like jazz (via titlepage)
Oh, this is painfully accurate. Insert “baked in a blind rage” somewhere into that passage and it perfectly describes my weekend. We are worth so much more.
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On Writing
nickzed:
“I go to the library, and I open my laptop, and I sit there, regardless of whether or not I feel like it. I gave a reading at a high school the other day, and one of the students asked, ‘what do you do when you don’t feel inspired?’, and I said ‘I’ve never in my life felt inspired, it’s not a question of inspiration.’ It’s a question of this mundane, or this seemingly mundane act of...
the heart emoticon as currently popularly rendered...
mumblelard:
I <3 the heart emoticon!
For it to look like a heart, it has to be read backwards. If it is parsed in the same direction as every other emoticon, it looks exactly like a DUNCECAP sitting on a pair of BUTTCHEEKS. Every time anyone uses this, I read it something like this “I ASSHAT kittens” or “I ASSHAT Zooey Deschanel.” Then I have to be confused for a moment and try and figure...
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"so you want to be a writer"
technicoloring:
if it doesn’t come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don’t do it. unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut, don’t do it. if you have to sit for hours staring at your computer screen or hunched over your typewriter searching for words, don’t do it. if you’re doing it for money or fame, don’t do it. if you’re doing it because you...
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Websites for writers →
iainbroome:
Oh hello Tumblrers. Please may I introduce you to my new project. It’s called Websites for writers and fingers crossed, people will dig it and it will become a marvellous, collaborative effort.
Let me know what you think.
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NOOOOOOOOOOO
A sad message to all our friends Dear Friends, There’s no easy way to put this, so please accept our apologies for the seemingly abrupt nature of this post. We are saddened to announce that after sixteen years as The Lucksmiths, the band has decided to break up. The last few years have been an uphill battle in many ways, so this isn’t a hasty decision based on any falling-out...
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“When people talk about patriarchy and then it divulges into a complex...”
– My Ecdysis: Accepting Kyriarchy, Not Apologies
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“I will apologise for many things that I have done but I will not apologise for...”
– Stephen Fry. (via slightly)
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Fuck Tumblarity Script →
interpellate:
“Tumblarity does not value original content and encourages users to post based on the criteria “Will this garner a lot of shallow internet attention?” rather than “Is this meaningful?”. Or: it sucks.
Rather than having such a shallow metric constantly thrown in your dashboard-checking face, install this userscript, remove that nasty shit, and keep on keepin’ on.”
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Lily
buyhercandy:
Tell me your secrets, she tells her friends. Tell me anything, she says, because I will forget it all. And the friends laugh. They know she is serious. She is a good friend because she will listen, and ask questions, and commiserate, and she will tell no one their secrets, because she will forget their secrets almost instantly. Because though she does care about her friends, she...
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Lurid Lit →
igather:
Celebrating the world of literary sleaze. Comics, Pulp Fiction, Horror and Adult Books are all reviewed, analyzed, and discussed.
Bed time stories.
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A study in second-hand transactions
I’m waiting in line at my local op shop when a woman walks in and pushes her way to the register. She is wearing a track suit and a purple silk scarf and an irate expression, and demands to exchange a black bag she recently purchased.
The grandma-type behind the counter rolls her eyes and makes the necessary arrangements. Meanwhile the woman wanders further into the store and returns with a...
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A sticker on a warning sign: “Boticelli was a child molester”
A ladybird beetling its way up a window.
A woman says to her husband, “He had the bourgeois blues.” They discuss world music and cheese toasties.
I count three homeless men on street corners while I walk to a department store.
