Flannery O’Connor, one of my favorite writers. Makes me proud to be a Georgian. If you’ve never read any of her work, start with the short story”A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” then work your way through the rest of her short stories and her wonderful Southern Gothic masterpiece Wise Blood.
(via fuckyeahreading)
(Source: Flickr / loutdizon, via writersrelief)
Many professional writers credit their success to both hard work and to being in the right place at the right time (note: Writer’s Relief can help with the latter!). But sometimes, being in the right place and working hard simply aren’t enough. Unless you’re truly open to success, you’ll have stacked the deck against yourself even before the cards are dealt! Here are five signs that you might be self-sabotaging your own writing career.
An illustrated reference book about moths wakes to find herself in a strange apartment in this exclusive short story by Audrey Niffenegger (for The Guardian)
The book woke up in a strange man’s apartment.
The book had been published in 1928 in Minneapolis. She was exceptionally well illustrated, with many colour plates; most of the illustrations featured moths, larvae, pupae, caterpillars, cocoons. She had 364 pages, all clay-coated stock, and was cloth bound in faded saffron buckram with her title stamped in silver on the cover and spine. There was some foxing. Her title was Moths of the New World.
Or: the book was a small-boned light-haired woman with big brown eyes and a startled expression. She was shy and always wore nondescript clothing. She preferred to fade into the background and seldom spoke. Like most real books she spent a great deal of her time sleeping, but even so there were dark circles under her eyes. She had never met her author and because her original print run had only been 500 she was seldom read now. Most of her copies had been relegated to special collections and rare book rooms, or cut up and sold for the pictures. So Moths of the New World spent her nights and days dozing on her shelf in the Library, content to be left alone.
How did I get here? She looked around at the heaps of books and wondered if she had been taken to some unfamiliar part of the Library, but there was something about this place that was wrong. It smells wrong. The Library smelled of paper, umbrellas, furniture polish, warm computers; it had a delectable mustiness. This place certainly smelled of paper but also of bacon, mould, armpits and unwashed hair. It was disorganised, even filthy, and crammed with every sort of book but also with broken appliances, congealed half-eaten food, balding stuffed animals, dusty shoes, an old bicycle with deflated tires. Moths of the New World had no idea what the bicycle was; to her it was a sad and slightly ominous machine. Someone was moving around in another room.
She lay open on top of a stack of other books. Not books she knew, they were only common books, not real books. She was the only real book here. She began to be frightened. Where is Analeise? Where is Bo?
