…and placed on adjacent shelves in such as fashion as to make the similarity of colour schemes all the more apparent.
Well, it made me smile.
Category: Uncategorized Page 23 of 122
Just a quick money-saving book-related tip I wanted to pass on to you good people: if you buy items totalling over £25 from Borders Online, you can save £5 off that total – and, even better, get 5% of your total spend donated to Oxfam – by typing the code loveoxfam into the ‘promotional code’ box. This offer runs until 24 December 2009.
I have to admit that I don’t use their online service very often (though I frequently find myself losing hours in their shops), but a fiver off and money to Oxfam appeals to my miserly and philanthropic tendencies at the same time, so I thought I’d share.
Feel free to tell your friends (and enemies, and people who are emotionally neutral towards you).
I’d like to have been at Companies House the day the incorporation paperwork for these arrived.
I post about writing often enough, it seems right that I occasionally say something about reading (well, more accurately spelling), wouldn’t you say?
A very old friend of mine (by which I mean she’s been a friend for a long time, not that she’s particularly aged, though knowing me has probably put the appearance of years on her), Rachel, is an experienced teacher, and she and an artist friend have recently put together an item designed to help children learn to spell. It’s called Picture Spell.
I’m not an expert on spelling and/or teaching, but the basic idea behind Picture Spell strikes me as a solid one; it uses pictures to teach children about the way the same sound can be formed by different combinations of letters.
Granted, as a reader of comics, I’m bound to be biased when it comes to items which combine words and pictures, but it seems a pretty sensible way to work on both hemispheres of the brain, and combining images and letters has a long and well-established history when it comes to helping people remember things; as well as the fact that the US Army has long used text and illustrations to teach soldiers how to carry out their duties, there was a little pics’n’words combo called the Bayeux Tapestry.
Anyway, this seems like a good idea, and so if you’ve got children who are about 5 or 6, you might want to think about this as a supplement to their school reading scheme. There are also packs for schools, of course, so if any of you are, or know, teachers, you might want to see if Picture Spell’s suitable for your classroom.
Learning to spell is I think, a very important thing, and anything that makes it easier has to be supported – after all, if you hadn’t learnt about the way words are spelled, the words you’re looking at right now would probably be nothing but meaningless black squiggles on a white background. A scary prospect, I know (though I’m sure some of you might aver I shouldn’t assume that my words have any real meaning, regardless of the reader’s ability to interpret them).
A moment’s reverent hush, if you will, for the news that venerable music duo Chas and Dave have split up .
(Pause)
Thank you. As you were.
I’ve been thinking about opening lines to books a bit recently, not least because The Body Orchard, the next book I want to write, has been stewing in my head for a while, and I’m ready to start writing it.
It’s a truth universally accepted that most articles about Jane Austen will start with a paraphrase of the opening line of Emma, though I must admit I’ve always found the sentiments of the sentence (which I’m far from inclined to accept) tend to put me off a bit.
I recall being told at school that the start of The Catcher In The Rye was noted for its length and flippant tone, and I could kind of see why, but then a decade or so I found an ‘uncut’ version of the book, which included a whole new section at the end of that well-regarded sentence, which was a bit off-putting.
I’ve always been fond of the beginning of Kafka’s The Trial, with its almost casual reference to the fact that the soon-to-be persecuted protagonist is innocent, and now I think about it the start of Metamorphosis is pretty classy too, and is certainly bolstered by the fact that (if memory serves) the story doesn’t go on to explain exactly why Gregor has turned into an insect. The opening sentence draws you in with the ‘what the hell..?’ factor, and then it’s too late, they’re knocking at the door and you’re in the story.
Isn’t there a story by Poe or Defoe (or maybe it was Cotton Eye Joe?) which has a line on the first page to the effect that if you read a page of it, you’ll soon forget the fact it’s meant to be a tale which the narrator is telling you? “Read one page, and I will be forgot” or something like that. Classy if you can pull it off, but I’m not so sure I could be that confident, and besides I’m such a rampant egomaniac I want everyone reading my stuff to be remembering my name, fame, I’m gonna live for ever.
More than anything else, though, I found myself thinking that one of the best opening lines I’ve ever read is the first line of the first chapter of the first book of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series:
“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
I think that’s very effective writing – sets up who, where and what’s going on, and of course raises a lot of questions in the reader’s mind. A good way to rope you in (which is probably very wise indeed, as Mr K intends to keep your attention for seven books before the tale is told).
So, it’s very probably with this line very much in mind that, last night, I wrote the following:
The dying man coughed, sending a spray of blood onto the living room carpet.
Sure, the content’s not very pleasant, and I’m sure that it’ll get changed more than once in the rewrite… but it’s a start.
I see that the Writers’ Guild Of America has announced the results of their recent elections.
And their new president is John Wells.
John ER, West Wing Wells?
Yeah, I can see how he might know a thing or two about the business of writing.
The eminent philsopher David St. Hubbins once noted that there’s “a fine line between stupid and clever”.
GQ Style, I would politely suggest, are so far into the zone marked stupid they’d need a pair of 20×50 binoculars in order to see the hint of a suggestion of the line, just vaguely on the edge of visibility.