“If there is something comforting – religious, if you want – about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Denton, Texas
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“My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists.”
― Nikola Tesla
Denton, Texas
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“Then the singing enveloped me. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone’s very heart. There was no sense of performance or judgment, only that the music was breath and food.”
― Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
Courthouse Pickers
Denton, Texas
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Photo taken turning the weekly Courthouse Pickers – bluegrass jam session every Saturday at the county courthouse, Denton, Texas
For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.
Today’s tip – Where Do You Get Your Ideas
Source – Telling Lies For Fun & Profit by Lawrence Block
Bits of fact can fit together. Almost all of the successful fiction writers I know share a tendency to retain odd scraps of data to no apparent purpose. Sometimes these orts prove useful, sometimes they do not. I know, for example, that in 1938 the state of Wyoming produced one-third of a pound of dry edible beans for every man, woman and child in the nation. I should be roundly surprised if I should ever build a story around this nugget of information.
He’s right – nobody gives a damn about how many beans came from Wyoming in 1938. However, I do know, from experience, that at one time, in Olney, Texas (quite a while ago, however time doesn’t really move in Olney, Texas… does it) there was a Dairy Queen. A hundred tiny hand-lettered signs hung from the ceiling in the Dairy Queen, each saying, “Thursday Night Is BEAN NIGHT – all the beans you can eat for 99 cents!”
I’ve always wanted to use that in a story. The probable title – Stay Out Of Olney On A Friday Morning.
BTW – An Orts is a small bit of uneaten food after a meal.
“When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle
Taken Saturday at the AOT Just Ride Dallas Drag Race on the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge.
Bicycle Drag Races
Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge
Dallas, Texas
Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.
—-H.G. Wells
Taken yesterday at the AOT Just Ride Dallas Drag Race on the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge.
Bicycle Drag Racer on the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge
“For God’s sake, let us be men
not monkeys minding machines
or sitting with our tails curled
while the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone.Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Selected Letters
Deep Ellum
Texas
“I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Polo Sculpture
Plano, Texas
“Strange how one person can saturate a room with vitality, with excitement. Then there are others, and this dame was one of them, who can drain off energy and joy, can suck pleasure dry and get no sustenance from it. Such people spread a grayness in the air about them.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America
Plano, Texas
Sometimes you can find interest, maybe beauty, in the simplest and most ordinary of things.
“Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what’s for lunch.”
― Orson Welles
Main Street Garden Park
Dallas, Texas
Bill Chance 