Hello everyone! Exciting news: I am headed to the Isle of Lewis next week!
Lovely Boyfriend are going to go and stay in a wooden hut next to the sea, with no internet connection or phone signal — and we’re hoping this will translate into writing, writing and more writing!
Basically, I would like to know from you: what should I do with my holiday?
We’ll be spending two or three days driving from Edinburgh up to the crossing to Lewis, so first of all — what should we stop and see on the way? Is there anywhere amazing we can stay over to break our journey? We’ll have a car and all our camping gear, but we’d also be open to hotels, B&Bs, hostels, tree houses, hobbit holes — whatever!
Secondly — what should we do while we’re on Lewis? What should we see? What time of day should we see it?
And thirdly — with Lewis as our basecamp, where else can we go? Which islands should we explore? Where can we see seabirds and ocean-dwelling critters?
Importantly: what can we do when it’s raining? What should we do if, by some miracle, it is fine? What will we need our wee car for, and what can we go and do on foot?
(Photo credit)
Please do share your thoughts, ideas, recommendations, fangirlings, warnings and personal stories here in the comments box (NB: there is a mod queue), on Twitter, or by emailing claire[at]onenightstanzas.com
Thank you a million!
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Like shiny things? Check out Edinburgh Vintage, a totally unrelated ’sister site’ full of jewels, treasures and trinkets. If you want to get in touch you can follow OneNightStanzas on Twitter, or email claire[at]onenightstanzas.com. I reply as swiftly as I can!
This skeleton, totally flirting with Lovely Boyfriend.
Forest Cafe’s new summer look.
Faces in things.
Amusing pop culture references.
This smiling bagel.
A kitty!
Stickers galore.
This Canonmills hotrod.
Daisies.
Furry flowers for bees to snuggle.
A van full of wine.
A skateboard bench!
This city centre idyll.
Tasty sorbet.
This chilled out dog.
Reassuring graffiti.
…and LIES.
What are YOU loving this week?
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Like shiny things? Check out Edinburgh Vintage, a totally unrelated ’sister site’ full of jewels, treasures and trinkets. If you want to get in touch you can follow OneNightStanzas on Twitter, or email claire[at]onenightstanzas.com. I reply as swiftly as I can!
You write because you have an idea in your mind that feels so genuine, so important, so true. And yet, by the time this idea passes through the different filters of your mind, and into your hand, and onto the page or computer screen—it becomes distorted, and it’s been diminished. The writing you end up with is an approximation, if you’re lucky, of whatever it was you really wanted to say.
When this happens, it’s quite a sobering reminder of your limitations as a writer. It can be extremely frustrating. When I’m writing, a thought will occasionally pass unblemished, unperturbed, through my head onto the screen—clearly, like through a glass. It’s an intoxicating, euphoric sensation to feel that I’ve communicated something so real, and so true. But this doesn’t happen often. (I can only think that there are some writers who write that way all the time. I think that’s the difference between greatness and just being good.)
Even my finished books are approximations of what I intended to do. I try to narrow the gap, as much as I possibly can, between what I wanted to say and what’s actually on the page. But there’s still a gap, there always is. It’s very, very difficult. And it’s humbling.
Just one of the brilliant, comforting and very true thoughts from How To Write: A Year In Advice. Read it! Even Jonathan Franzen has something sensible to say!
Scottish poetry books to buy in July — thanks, SPL! (I already have Dat Trickster Sun and it’s great!)
This is a great article by Scottish Book Trust’s Chris, on why Michael Gove’s new “ideas” for the classroom are more harmful than people think.
I don’t even know what to say about this: “I don’t mean that Twitter is stupid but rather that it rewards careful phrasing, careful impersonating, brisk readings of cultural attitudes — in short, rhetoric.” Go ahead and replace “Twitter” with “poetry” in that last sentence and tell me if the meaning changes any for you.
How Not To Review Women’s Writing is just completely sublime.
I just discovered Kim Addonizio’s twitter feed, and it’s full of small poems she’s written specially for Twitter! Brighten up your lunch break!
Not many writers manage to get sober and those who do often suffer a decline in output: testament not so much to the power of alcohol as a creative stimulant as to its role in destroying brain function, obliterating memory and playing havoc with the ability to formulate and express thought in former alcoholics. But Duras wrote one of her best and certainly most famous novels two years after she stopped drinking. The Lover tells the story of a 15-year-old French girl in Indochina who has an erotic relationship with – yes – a much older Chinese man. Much of the book was drawn from the violence and degradation from which Duras had emerged.
Would it have made Sexton happy to know she won the award by default? She thought she’d won based on the merit of her work. Everyone else (except perhaps those in the know, the literary elite) thought so, too. That’s how awards look—on the outside. In the end, none of the jurors got what they wanted. And the Pulitzer Prize made Anne Sexton a star. She was primed for it: beautiful, sexy, chain-smoking, death-obsessed—“the living Sylvia Plath,” as she came to call herself. The first two books she wrote after winning the Pulitzer, Love Poems and Transformations, were bestsellers. They’re Sexton at her apex. The prize gave her confidence; it loosened her up. In Transformations she even let herself have some good, mordant fun.
So what happens to nerdy guys who keep finding out that the princess they were promised is always in another castle? When they “do everything right,” they get good grades, they get a decent job, and that wife they were promised in the package deal doesn’t arrive? When the persistent passive-aggressive Nice Guy act fails, do they step it up to elaborate Steve-Urkel-esque stalking and stunts? Do they try elaborate Revenge of the Nerds-style ruses? Do they tap into their inner John Galt and try blatant, violent rape?
Do they buy into the “pickup artist” snake oil—started by nerdy guys, for nerdy guys—filled with techniques to manipulate, pressure and in some cases outright assault women to get what they want? Or when that doesn’t work, and they spend hours a day on sites bitching about how it doesn’t work, like Elliot Rodger’s hangout “PUAHate.com,” sometimes, do they buy some handguns, leave a manifesto on the Internet and then drive off to a sorority house to murder as many women as they can?
THANK YOU SO MUCH SARAH for sending this woman into my life. (Don’t ask questions. Just watch this.)
& finally… here is a cat beating a human at Jenga.
Have a great weekend!
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Like shiny things? Check out Edinburgh Vintage, a totally unrelated ’sister site’ full of jewels, treasures and trinkets. If you want to get in touch you can follow OneNightStanzas on Twitter, or email claire[at]onenightstanzas.com. I reply as swiftly as I can!
Obligatory proud parents shot. Also obligatory silly-face-without-them-knowing!
A quick wide shot so you can check out my rather stunning dress.
Three of my favourite people.
Totes NBD.
I was given these stunners by Dad-of-Lovely-Boyfriend and his lovely partner Mary-Helen. Thank you, you guys!
The colour-coding is just perfect!
What are YOU loving this week?
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Like shiny things? Check out Edinburgh Vintage, a totally unrelated ’sister site’ full of jewels, treasures and trinkets. If you want to get in touch you can follow OneNightStanzas on Twitter, or email claire[at]onenightstanzas.com. I reply as swiftly as I can!
There’s a great big sale on at Edinburgh Vintage! Over a third of the entire store is reduced in that sale, with more items being added all the time. Here are ten cool items that might be particularly tempting to all you writerly types…
1. First edition Maya Angelou poetry collection
The literary world lost A GIANT in Maya Angelou. This collection of poems — one of her best — proves it.
2. An antique leaded crystal and solid silver inkwell, dated 1906
OK, you may not actually use a quill pen… but all writers have pretentions, right?
3. A fancy vintage bookmark.
You can never have too many of these things. And this one is in the $10 clearance section!
4. A really, really swish cup of tea.
Or coffee. Or whatever hot tasty beverage keeps you going through a marathon writing session. Have it in this very pretty cup!
5. A rather suave pocket watch.
All writers need a timepiece, to keep an eye on how much they’re procrastinating! Might as well be a super cool Soviet era pocketwatch…
6. A wise old owl…
…to store some pennies in. Sorry, it’s true: most writers are poor. You need this.
7. A retro pocketbook.
When did they stop making these? They’re wallets, but with a space for a little notebook! This one even has a Latin inscription.
8. A literary souvenir…
(From Paris, obv, one of the great literary cities of the world.)
9. …or two.
(Or from London, which is another one!)
10. Some kitsch classic literature…
…complete with cute illustrations.
Over 600 items in the shop — EV also has a Facebook page and a Twitter — and I’d appreciate you forever if you’d go and send me some love!
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If you want to get in touch you can follow OneNightStanzas on Twitter, or email claire[at]onenightstanzas.com. I reply as swiftly as I can!
EDINBURGH VINTAGE IS HAVING A HUGE SALE! This is for July only, so get in there and rummage! New items are being added all the time, too!
When you announce that you’re a ghost-writer, people look at you askance. Some say, “You’re writing about ghosts?” Others, with some condescension, ask you when you’re going to write your own book, the inference being that ghost-writing is for those who can’t make it up. And whilst there is a grain of truth in that, to my mind, ghost-writing is a skill and an art of its own.
This guy plants his self-published book in bookstores… and people buy it.
My loyalty to Levin in Anna Karenina is of an entirely different nature to my loyalty to, say, Paul Newman’s caesar salad dressing, which I like very much: it is not a preference but an affinity, an encounter so genuinely self-revealing that the relationship required me first to work and then to alter. My relationship with Levin cannot be improved upon or reproduced.
So I just finished reading Eleanor Catton’s “The Luminaries” [SPOILER: it is amazing, read it], and I am just as enchanted by this excellent essay she wrote about literature and capitalism. (Side note: I cannot believe this woman is only one year older than me. She is a total genius and makes me feel like a failure at life.)
Not buying from Amazon is less a tactic of starving Amazon of a sale, they’re hardly going to miss it. Not buying from Amazon is taking those missed sales to other venues; Waterstones and independents. I’ve had people say to me off-handedly that they don’t expect Waterstones to be around in 5 years. That thought upsets me. So I’ll happily impulsively buy a nice hardback, a slightly overpriced cup of tea and cake as an investment. Please don’t squander my investment, Waterstones.
One woman’s vow to boycott Amazon: her end of year review!
And speaking of which… got a problem with Amazon? No matter what it is, here’s the cure.
Have you checked out Scottish Book Trust’s Opportunities for Writers page lately? Loads of good stuff there at the moment!
I drew plans of my protagonist’s house, her daughter’s house, her brother in law’s, and her friend’s houses. I also printed out, cut up and glued together images from Google maps to create my own picture of her local area.
I realise now that I am neither normal nor ordinary, and I become less and less ordinary as time passes. I don’t want to be told that I’m not allowed to react negatively to Paxman’s demand that I speak to everyone except people like me; people who have been historically excluded from poetry events by definition, by default; and who, when they raise that issue, get lumped in with a “pellety nest” by those who refuse to see their privilege
That’s the excellent Mark Burnhope, responding excellently to recently-retired, flailing-against-his-own-irrelevance Jeremy Paxman. (Buy Mark’s new book!)
There is an oversupply of PhDs. Although a doctorate is designed as training for a job in academia, the number of PhD positions is unrelated to the number of job openings. Meanwhile, business leaders complain about shortages of high-level skills, suggesting PhDs are not teaching the right things. The fiercest critics compare research doctorates to Ponzi or pyramid schemes.
I first read this just as I was starting out on my PhD. Yesterday I graduated. Turns out, the Economist was kinda right.
Have you, like me, ever wanted to escape the tyranny that is hair care? Check this out!
You guys saw this, right? A dude got stuck overnight in an airport in Vegas… so he single handedly shot an epic music video on his phone.
Finally, I kinda want to be friends with these weird guys. (Apparently, so do all the MRAs in the world, because they’re hanging out in the video’s comments. Weeeird!)
Have a great weekend!
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Like shiny things? Check out Edinburgh Vintage, a totally unrelated ’sister site’ full of jewels, treasures and trinkets. If you want to get in touch you can follow OneNightStanzas on Twitter, or email claire[at]onenightstanzas.com. I reply as swiftly as I can!
