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Midweek Music Break: Pendyrus Male Choir, “Cwm Rhonnda“
[Image: the valley of the Rhondda] I’ve mentioned before that while writing Seems to Fit, I used a variety of musical playlists to put me in the proper frame of mind for a given chapter. The selections on the day’s playlist were among those which (so I imagined) would be favorites of the character most heavily [...]
“You Didn’t Forget the Words, Did You?”
[Video: a zebra teaches a little girl to scat-sing. Found it at Zooglobble, home of "kids' music worth sharing." Warning: do not visit that site if you are even mildly distractable.] My Dad taught me many things about music, especially jazz, even (I’m certain) in ways which I have yet to understand or even recognize. [...]
Perfect Moments: The Author’s Book, to Its Author
[Ed. Note: minor identifying details of this recently discovered letter have been obscured, to preserve the anonymity of the parties involved.] Dear J_____, So, you have finally finished me. I suppose I should offer not only thanks but congratulations to you — if so, then, sure: Congratulations! But I also can’t help thinking that maybe we [...]
Bringing Worlds Out from Within
[Video: Lista (The List), a short film by Paweł Łyczkowski. It won the 2010 "Best Film" Suzanne Award, for users of the Blender open-source animation and visual-effects software.] From whiskey river: Lao Tzu exhorts us to listen to the world “not with ears but with mind, not with mind but with spirit.” Some days I [...]
Perfect Moments: Two Beautiful Women, a Certain Amount of Booze, and Maybe I’ve Got a Story…!
In the mid-1990s, boy, was I ever confused, perplexed, and probably (by many measures) in need of adjustment. Especially about my writing. Here’s what my quote-unquote oeuvre consisted of then: A non-fiction Op Ed memoir(ish) piece in a regional edition of the New York Times. A published mystery. (Depending on who I was talking to at [...]
Something in the Air
[Image: at left, all the Earth's water collected into a single ball, about 865 miles in diameter; at right, all the Earth's atmosphere in a single ball, about 1240 miles in diameter, assuming sea-level pressure. (source)] From whiskey river: One final paragraph of advice: Do not burn yourself out. Be as I am — a [...]
On the “A” Word
[Image: "Left-Hand Rule." For an explanation about something other than the subject of this post, see this page at the University of Maryland's Department of Physics site.] …or: what It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World has to do with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. (Well, no, not really. The post started out to connect [...]
Emerging, Blinking, into the Sunlight
If you’ve been visiting RAMH for more than a few months, you probably know I’ve been a bit… distracted recently. And it’s probably going to happen again in a few weeks, when I again take up my rock hammer, rope, and lanterned helmet, wandering back into Seems to Fit for the Nth and final time.* In the meantime, [...]
Not “The End,” But Maybe The End
Nothing definite yet, of course. (It won’t be definite until I wash my hands of the last galley edit, ha.) But I think Seems to Fit ends as follows: Woot.
What We Owe Our Characters
In about four hours’ work today on Seems to Fit, I wrote just about two thousand words. Which was neither bad nor exceptional, and just fine — not least, because it brings me within perhaps a thousand words (but probably less) of The End. I’ve been thinking a lot about the structure of this last [...]
