“I love music. Various pieces have inspired each of the books, and I’m convinced music has had a near magical effect on my creative process. When I sit on planes, or go for walks, or drive and listen to music I can see scenes from the book I’m about to write, or am writing. I can feel the characters. Hear them. Sense them. It’s thrilling. Gamache and Clara and Beauvoir come even more alive when I’m listening to certain music. It’s transformative. Spiritual, even. I can feel the divine in the music.” — Louise Penny, in Acknowledgments, The Beautiful Mystery
“I wondered what I’d learned, and found myself remembering something Gene Wolfe had told me, six months earlier. “You never learn how to write a novel,” he said. “You just learn how to write the novel that you’re writing.” — Neil Gaiman, on finishing American Gods
“It’s like the people who believe they’ll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn’t work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you. If you see what I mean.” — Silas, in Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book
Nine Exoplanets Discovered in Solar System's 'Twin' : Discovery News -
Food for thought:
As we continue hunting for exoplanets, it’s only a matter of time until we make the groundbreaking discovery of an Earth-mass world orbiting its sun-like star within the habitable zone — the distance from a star where water may exist in a liquid state.
Neil Gaiman interviews Stephen King -
“Absolutely – you reach out and it’s there. The time that it happened the clearest was when Ralph, my agent then, said to me ‘This is a bit crazy, but do you have any kind of idea for something that could be a serialised novel like Dickens used to do?’, and I had a story that was sort of struggling for air. That was The Green Mile. And I knew if I did this I had to lock myself into it. I started writing it and I stayed ahead of the publication schedule pretty comfortably. Because…” he hesitates, tries to explain in a way that doesn’t sound foolish, “…every time I needed something that something was right there to hand.
“When John Coffey goes to jail – he was going to be executed for murdering the two girls. I knew that he didn’t do it , but I didn’t know that the guy who did do it was going to be there, didn’t know anything about how it happened, but when I wrote it, it was all just there for me. You just take it. Everything just fits together like it existed before.
“I never think of stories as made things; I think of them as found things. As if you pull them out of the ground, and you just pick them up. Someone once told me that that was me low-balling my own creativity. That might or might not be the case. But still, on the story I am working on now, I do have some unresolved problem. It doesn’t keep me awake at nights. I feel like when it comes down, it will be there…”
“But paper and ink have conjuring abilities of their own. Arrangements of lines and shapes, of letters and words on a series of pages make a world we can dwell and travel in.” — Lynda Barry, What It Is
“Imaginary enemies are not hard to conjure into being. Adults are especially good at it, able to create them and unite against them for ages.” — Lynda Barry, What It Is
“Hope is an essential thread in the fabric of all fantasies, an Ariadne’s thread to guide us out of the labrynth … Human beings have always needed hope, and surely now more than ever.” — Lloyd Alexander, from The Wand in the Word
These bookplates are adorable. Yes - mine, all mine! :)
10 Healthy Snacks that Will not Make you Fat
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Snacking is a hard habit to break. But if you must snack, then make sure it’s on something healthy. Healthy snacks can actually be good for you, especially if you are working non-stop, throughout the day. Here are 10 heal…
Because I’m a snacking reader …