Jun. 4 TED
conference: I cut out the Globe and Mail article “The instants that
sparked the ideas” by Marsha Lederman on Mar. 22, 2014:
Elizabeth
Gilbert:
Elizabeth
Gilbert produced a massive bestseller with Eat, Pray, Love, but that
came with its share of terror. How to follow up such a huge success? She felt
certain that fans of her memoir would be disappointed with whatever she wrote
next. She considered giving up writing altogether.
She,
weirdly, found herself identifying with her younger self – an unpublished
waitress in a diner coming home daily to a mailbox stuffed with rejection
letters for almost six years. It made no sense. What did constant failure have
to do with success beyond her wildest dreams?
Here’s
what she discovered: The answer, in both cases, was to keep doing the thing she
loved not for the end game but for the activity itself. It was her love of
writing that inspired her writing.
“That’s
how, in 2010, I was able to publish the dreaded follow up to Eat, Pray, Love.
And you know what happened? It bombed. And I was fine. Actually I kind of felt
bulletproof because I knew that I’d broken the spell and that I’d find my way
back home to writing for the sheer devotion of it.”
Sting: For Sting, it was a glimpse of a different kind of life
that provided motivation to get out of his shipyard building town, Newcastle, and what seemed his inevitable future working there. That
shipyard at the end of his street made some of the biggest vessels in the
world. So big, that sometimes royalty would show up on launch day. When Sting
(then Gordon Sumner) was a boy, he remembers the Queen Mother coming to town
for one of those events. He stood at the side of the road, in front of his
house, wearing his Sunday best and holding a Union Jack. Finally, her
Rolls-Royce drew near.
“I
started to wave my flag vigorously and there is the Queen Mother,” the
superstar musician told the audience. “I see her and she seems to see me, she
acknowledges me. She waves, and she smiles. And I wave my flag more vigorously.
We’re having a moment, me and the Queen Mother. She’s acknowledged me. And then
she’s gone. Well, I wasn’t cured of anything. It was the opposite, actually. I
was infected. I was infected with an idea. I don’t belong on this street. I
don’t want to live in that house. I don’t want to end up in that shipyard. I
want to be in that car. I want a bigger life. I want a life beyond this town. I
want a life that’s out of the ordinary.”
My
opinion: I never read any of Elizabeth
Gilbert books, but the above was inspirational.
I’m going to put it in my inspirational quotes. I’m not really a fan of Sting’s, but I liked
his part in the article too. The rest of
the article talks to Sting and the artist Lars Jan.
Justin
Cronin: I wrote about him before. I found this 2010 Globe and Mail article
called “A 13-yr-old’s idea” by John Barber. I
couldn’t find the article on the internet, so I’m going to type up some things.
Cronin is
a university professor and a novelist. He
says “writing has always paid for more writing.”
It says
he sold his manuscript and 2 planned sequels for $3.5 million US and the
director Ridley Scott would pay $1.5 million for the film rights.
Cronin was talking to his 13 yr old daughter Iris and she
loves Harry Potter. She told him to
write a book about a girl who saves the world. She
goes bike riding and he jogs as they talk about the story. After the summer ends, it’s too dark out. Cronin wasn’t going to write, but then
thought the story seemed really good and decided to write it.
The
Twelve: Here is another review of his book
called The Twelve. This is the Globe
and Mail article “Apostles of apocalypse” by Zsuzsi Gartner on Oct. 20, 2012. Here are some
excerpts:
Project
Noah, a secret military experiment (is there any other kind?) in Colorado, goes
haywire, unleashing 12 predators, former death-row inmates injected with a DNA-altering
virus, who, in a matter of weeks, lay waste to the entire United States, aided
by their millions of bitten followers. (There is no mention of Canada or Mexico, and the world beyond reacts with haste to enforce a
quarantine of the North American continent, laying mines along the entire
coastline and blowing up the vessels of those who try to flee.)
The
(d)evolution of this man (to name him would to give away too much) over the
course of almost a century is a study in how a human being loses his moral
compass to become a being of unadulterated evil. Cronin also manages to wring
sympathy from the reader for all manner of cretins, including a hapless
pedophile who gains humanity through becoming inhuman.
He
invests a dizzying array of primary and secondary characters with satisfying backstories,
emotional lives and distinct voices.
(Wouldn’t
it be great if some of our iconic writers of fine prose and character studies
followed Margaret Atwood’s lead and speculated about the future and other
levels of reality, combined soulfulness with page-turning narratives?)
Jun. 9 3.5
floppy disks: I was helping my brother find his glasses in his room and I
found a green Memorex 3.5 floppy disk.
From the label, it seemed the last time he used it was in high school,
so probably 2004. I tried it on the
computer and it doesn’t work. The disk
looked like it was only used for one class.
A few
days ago, I tried my orange Memorex disk, and it stopped working. It had my weekly emails saved onto it. Fortunately, I saved it also in my drafts in
my email. A gray disk stopped working
back in Apr. and it had my emails saved onto it.
The
orange one was used by my sister when she was in university. I saved my The Vertex Fighter 1, 2, 3, and 4
drafts onto this before I transferred it onto another disk.
I’ll give
Memorex points that they lasted this long.
They were bought in 2002.
Jun. 12 Recycle:
I was talking to my friend Jessica earlier this week and she found lots of dead
pens when cleaning. I told her to
recycle them at the Staples in Oliver square and she says it won’t be worth the
trip to drive there to recycle it. I
told her I can take the pens from her and recycle it for her. Seriously.
I’m very into recycling.
The
Staples also recycle batteries and printer toners.
Meet
Up: Yesterday I went to my second Meet Up
for screenwriting. There were 4 more
people than last time, so I met them.
Jun. 16:
I went to Staples twice in May to recycle.
2 weeks ago I was going to recycle some more pens and batteries, but
then I decided not to because I was kind of sick of going there. So I should go there once a month so I won’t
get bored of it.
Cancelled
shows: This was awhile ago but in Fall
2013, there were a lot of TV pilots I saw.
I saw a whole bunch, but I only liked two shows where I kept watching
it.
1. The
Tomorrow People- cancelled
2. Marvel
Agents of SHIELD- renewed
3. Dads-
cancelled
4. Hostages-
cancelled
5.
Dracula- cancelled
6. The
Blacklist- renewed
7. Sleepy
Hollow- renewed
8. Brooklyn Nine- Nine- renewed
9.
Believe- cancelled
10.
Helix- renewed
I only
kept watching Dracula and Believe, and they’re both
cancelled. I just saw the series finale
to Believe on ctv.ca. It was a
good ending. It was a little open. Dracula was open ended too. The thing is with season and series finales,
you have to finish some story lines and set up new storylines for the next
season.
Here’s a
site with all the Fall 2013 TV shows that got cancelled.
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