In this post, we share the American writer and painter, Henry Miller’s 11 Writing Commandments.
Henry Miller was an American writer and painter. He was born 26 December 1891, and died 7 June 1980. His autobiographical novels achieve a candour—particularly about sex—that made them a liberating influence in mid-20th-century literature. He is also notable for a free and easy American style and a gift for comedy that springs from his willingness to admit to feelings others conceal and an almost eager acceptance of the bad along with the good. Because of their sexual frankness, his major works were banned in Britain and the United States until the 1960s, but they were widely known earlier from copies smuggled in from France.
The list read as follows:
Work on one thing at a time until finished.
Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.”
Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
When you can’t create you can work.
Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.
Transcending
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Born on this day in Yorkshire, in 1816, the third of six children. After their mother and two sisters died, the young Bronte’s were educated at home. They developed a rich fantasy life amongst themselves, constructing together the imaginary world of Glass Town and writing of it in dozens of microscopically printed ‘books’. Charlotte and her brother Branwell invented their shared kingdom of Angria in 1834. In 1846, at Charlotte’s instigation, the Bronte sisters published Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.
Charlotte’s first novel, The Professor, was rejected by several publishers and not published until 1857. Jane Eyre appeared, and was an instant success, in 1847. Then… Branwell Bronte died in September 1848, Emily in December of the same year, and Anne in May 1849. Charlotte, the onluy survivor of 6 siblings, continued to live at Haworth Parsonage with her fater. Shirley was published in 1849 and Villette in 1853, both pseudonymously. In 1854 Charlotte married her father’s curate. She soon died on March 31, 1855.
Mad Men is a collection of three disturbing horror shorts from authors living in the Midwest. The themes explored in this collection range from man versus self, man versus man, and man versus creature.
[caption id="attachment_4742" align="alignleft" width="188"] Mad Men eBook at Mind on Fire Books[/caption]
Mad Men begins with Matt’s tale, a thought-provoking thriller which causes the reader to question his reality and what he fears within himself. The second tale explores the grotesque juxtaposed with beautiful nature, where the ending unfolds into a horrific dream, waking in even more terrible pain. The third tale is by seasoned horror writer, A.R. Braun – and his diabolical creatures never disappoint! A.R. Braun’s goal is to be on the banned book list; we think this tale may just be evil enough to be considered. A must read before it does get banned!
Mainstream Horror Shorts don’t always satisfy us in the way they should. They don’t open conversations about what it is that we fear or why we fear such things, they focus mainly on pop culture and gore. The writers in the Mad Men anthology understand the need for literate horror, opening discussions of man’s psyche. When these writers set out to tell a story, they are less interested in conveying fear and more interested in wonder, the sublime, and the infinite strangeness that drives all man and woman. Highly recommended for tweens, teens, and adults.
The Mad Men anthology published by Mind on Fire Books. Written by Willy Martinez, A.R. Braun and Matt Lavitt. No part of this book shall be copied without permission from the publisher.
Ernest Taylor Pyle was a Pulitzer Prize—winning American journalist and war correspondent who is best known for his stories about ordinary American soldiers during World War II. Pyle is also notable for the columns he wrote as a roving human-interest reporter from 1935 through 1941 for the Scripps-Howard newspaper syndicate that earned him wide acclaim for his simple accounts of ordinary people across North America. When the United States entered World War II, he lent the same distinctive, folksy style of his human-interest stories to his wartime reports from the European theater (1942–44) and Pacific theater (1945). Pyle won the Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for his newspaper accounts of “dogface” infantry soldiers from a first-person perspective. He was killed by enemy fire on Iejima (then known as Ie Shima) during the Battle of Okinawa.
At the time of his death in 1945, Pyle was among the best-known American war correspondents. His syndicated column was published in 400 daily and 300 weekly newspapers nationwide. PresidentHarry Truman said of Pyle, “No man in this war has so well told the story of the American fighting man as American fighting men wanted it told. He deserves the gratitude of all his countrymen.”[1]
“Of course I was under the spell, and the wonderful part is that, even at the time, I perfectly knew I was. But I gave myself up to it; it was an antidote to any pain, and I had more pains than one.” —THE TURN OF THE SCREW by Henry James, born on this day, April 15, 1843.
American novelist and, as a naturalized English citizen from 1915, a great figure in the transatlantic culture. His fundamental theme was the innocence and exuberance of the New World in clash with the corruption and wisdom of the Old, as illustrated in such works as Daisy Miller (1879), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Bostonians (1886), and The Ambassadors (1903).
Although his work did not gain much recognition during his lifetime, Henry James now has a standing amongst the most significant writers of the nineteenth century realism. The Portrait of a Lady and Daisy Miller are his most widely read and best known works. Henry’s critique, short stories and novels are heavily influenced by European history and culture. His interest in Europe’s upper class and their formal traditions is evident in his writing. Henry’s engaging stories of Americans exploring the prim and proper lifestyle of the Europeans have gained him immense popularity. James has to his credit 22 novels, more than a hundred short stories, autobiographical works, several plays and critical essays.
Photo of Henry James, Horror writer. Used for mind on fire books.
Do you work as a freelance writer? Celebrate, my colleagues, for this is our week–National Freelance Writers Appreciation Week. The second week of February is National Freelance Writer Appreciation Week. While it’s always a good idea to show gratitude to anyone who contributes to the success of your organization, this week is a great time to reach out to the writers who drive your content marketing or other projects.
#1 – Write a Blog Post Highlighting Freelancer Efforts
Consider highlighting the role of freelancers in your organization if it’s appropriate for your brand. Write a blog post or create a video thanking your writers or sharing some fun behind-the-scenes information about how writers help you achieve your goals.
#2 – Share the Details of Success with Writers and Editors
Freelancers often work with little feedback or understanding of how their work contributes to your organization. Many of the best writers take ownership of their work, though, and when you let them know how they can help you succeed – or share what’s already working – you might be surprised at the response you get.
Take time this month to share feedback, statistics, and goals with your freelancers. Let a writer know the landing page they wrote helped you earn 10 percent more revenue last quarter, or tell your SEO writing team that their efforts resulted in an increase in page traffic. These little details make freelancers feel like part of something bigger, and it often spurs them to continue creating excellent content for you.
#3 – Send a Physical Thank You Card
With so much information exchanged in digital format, a physical mailing catches the attention. A hand-written thank you card shows that you cared enough to make a special effort. If you work with a crowd of freelancers, a preprinted thank you card in the mailbox can also make a writer smile.
#4 – Run a Giveaway to Celebrate the Week
If your budget won’t cover individual gifts or you work with a large freelance group, consider running a giveaway. When running a giveaway, keep things as simple and transparent as possible, and have fun with the entire premise.
#5 – Shout out on Social Media
Don’t be afraid to tag all of your writing friends and let them know how important you are to them. Writers love recognition, it’s how we make a living, so please share our work.
#6 – Hold a Digital Party for Freelancers
Invite freelancers to join you in a forum, Facebook group, or on Skype at a certain time, but avoid making video streaming a requirement since many writers choose to freelance because they value their privacy. Play some fun online party games, introduce various members of your in-house team, or present information about how your freelance team made an impact to your organization recently. Incorporate giveaways or awards to get freelancers excited and involved.
Thanking your freelancers doesn’t take a huge effort, but the impact of showing your gratitude can be enormous.
For this writer Wednesday, I would like to share with you all a video produced by professional fiction editor, Ellen Brock. In this video she breaks down the four types of writers that she has experienced in her career:
The Plotter: A writer who plans their story before writing the first draft.
The Pantser: A writer who “flies by the seat of their pants” when writing the first draft (doesn’t plan).
The Intuitive: A writer who bases their story and edits on their gut feelings and instincts.
The Methodological: A writer who bases their story and/or edits on techniques, methods, and theories.
Personally, I think I am more of an Intuitive when I’m writing fiction. But when I write copy or non-fiction, I am definitely Methodological. Which are you, and what do you think of this quadra break-down of the writer archetypes?
In Jeff VanderMeer’s work, nature is often the stuff of nightmares. In his recent novel Dead Astronauts, he describes a duck with a reptilian, serrated smile, its body sometimes covered with a thin, oozing crust of blood. In one encounter, it feasts on a rodent with a creepy insatiableness, delicately keeping its prey alive as long as possible. Meanwhile on Twitter, plants and birds make daily appearances in another tone. Alongside a photo of a fluffy bird’s butt one day, VanderMeer wrote: “Any old fool can ID a bird. But it’s a rare talent to ID a bird from its ass. Do you possess that power? DO YOU?!”
The genre-bending “weird Thoreau” built his writing career on just this kind of range. He’s always sought experimental ways to address sobering issues of climate change and exploitative systems, and Dead Astronauts takes a particularly otherworldly tack that’s also darkly humorous, heartbreaking, and disturbingly familiar. Much of the book’s impact comes from the non-human characters whose psyches VanderMeer explores more deeply than in his previous books. With a Twitter naturalist’s taste for weird humor and a desire to address the hypocrisies and horrors of human-nature interaction more head-on, VanderMeer’s latest helps readers shake out of their own perspectives and grapple with just how bizarre a reality we’re already living in.
Part of what makes VanderMeer’s weirdness so striking is his ability to create believably strange natural worlds from a place of granular fascination. He’s often credited this to his time living in tropical locales, especially Florida. VanderMeer has described images in Annihilation inspired by the state as “ecstatically beautiful,” though others may find them startling. His outlook is one that’s familiar to me. Growing up in South Florida, I remember seeing the state’s overwhelming abundance of swarming, growing, dying, consuming creatures as quotidian: gators and buzzards threatening to snatch small dogs, all the leathery flattened toads in the road with their innards artfully askew. It’s impossible to shut out the abundance of life or ignore death and decay, and possible to spend hours engrossed by it. A childhood friend’s mom gold-leafed roadkill toads and mounted them on the wall. On a school snorkeling trip, after a classmate got seasick over the side of the boat, we all got in the water and watched tiny jellyfish swarm the sick.
The way VanderMeer inhabits animal consciousness makes use of that immersive, sensory appreciation for the natural world: “throb on a cusp of reed, clutch water-lily stalks / cling hidden against / the drift warp / of swirling thick water / infintesimal on the edge / of the infinite.” And Dead Astronauts opens as if mid-sentence, mid-run with a pack of sand-colored foxes. An oracle-like blue fox warns them of “scavengers” approaching their city and speaks of three humans, who we soon join in their mission to stop the threat. The book moves through multiple timelines and perspectives as the explorers and onlooking characters experience the fallout of a biotech company that performs horrible experiments on animals. The book takes place in the same universe as the 2017 Borne, a post-apocalyptic City terrorized by creatures made by an entity known only the Company. Dead Astronauts addresses several origin-story elements of its predecessor, but reads very differently, like a hallucinatory epic-slash-poem-slash-internal monologue. Or sci-fi with some Beowulf and The Sound and the Fury thrown in. It gives VanderMeer’s readers exactly what they would expect: something entirely different.ARTICLE CONTINUES AFTER ADVERTISEMENT
“I get bored doing the same book twice,” he told Lit Hub. “And I think if you use the same narrative structure too often, you’re not making any progress in your own self-education.”“What I’m trying to preach, if I’m preaching anything, is the idea of doing the least harm possible.”
Dead Astronauts also strives beyond the human perspective that characterized Borne and brings back creatures briefly mentioned in its predecessor: a duck with a broken wing, a giant fish, a blue fox. But this time, they get an internal life. Some offer a poetic stream of consciousness (“Lurking under mud flats, swallowing ballast to sink into mire and muck, mottled-mute until only eyes protruded, gold-rimmed…”). Others talk and leave nothing to interpretation. “Do you ever wonder what it would be like not to live in the world of humans?” the bloodthirsty duck comes to ask.
VanderMeer has always cared about bringing an understanding of animal behavior and biology to his work while knowing his limitations. If it’s impossible to fully understand how another human thinks, it’s even harder to extrapolate how an animal’s mind works. The animals in Dead Astronauts, though, have all been messed with by humans, and adapted into something that more resembles human consciousness. “That gives me the kind of narrow pathway to still try to do something that goes beyond the human, but has a certain amount of plausibility to it,” VanderMeer said.
Erin Berger Catches Up With the Author of Dead Astronauts
The fox in particular gets a strong voice to expose the hypocrisies of how humans exploit and modify nature. After being subject to experiments by the Company, including one that gives him a blue color, his section goes increasingly off the rails. He takes violent revenge on humans (“Some we killed with chainsaws, to remind them of what it really meant to be a tree. A messy business”), mingles at a dinner party and rages at humans (“I wondered if I ran over the taxidermist and preserved her in resin if she would feel beautiful”), remembers how happy he was before the humans (“The joy of running. The joy of digging. The joy of hunting earthworms through the dirt”).There’s something queasily lighthearted about a section that watches a leviathan fish, once employed to eat all the Company’s failed experiments, losing its appetite.
“The fox may come across as very angry because I just didn’t want that character in particular to be espousing a human point of view at all,” VanderMeer said. Remembering the moment he’s taken by the Company, the fox recalls the look in his mate’s eyes but stops short of giving us the sentimental satisfaction we expect. “The tale you always need to care. Which shows you don’t care. Why we don’t care if you care.”ARTICLE CONTINUES AFTER ADVERTISEMENT
VanderMeer laces the book with these jolts, though many of them are more wink than face-slap. The animals are sarcastic, self-aware, confused by their own monstrous tendencies. There’s something queasily lighthearted about a section that watches a leviathan fish, once employed to eat all the Company’s failed experiments, losing its appetite. The blue fox, recalling some vile and pointedly human-like things it did, said, “But I was a fox. How could I do any of that?… What do you think, human? Do you think I could do that?”
Where VanderMeer’s treatment of nature might feel familiar to a Floridian, his surrealist humor will likely feel familiar to his 36,000-plus Twitter followers. Much of his timeline employs his distinctive sensibility in lovingly pedantic daily backyard updates. He started sharing more when he and his wife, editor Ann VanderMeer, moved to a home in Tallahassee with a better view of the backyard than their last. He started watching birds out the window every day, and the nighttime wanderings of critters like raccoons on a trail camera. He’s come to know many more species of birds, insects, and trees, and even some individuals, like the three box turtles who live in a ravine near his house. “It’s just the process of accumulating layers, so to speak,” VanderMeer said of getting to know the landscape around him. “Something that I thought was three dimensional was actually two dimensional, and now it’s more three dimensional. I think that also affects the work going forward.”
His posts are often shots of cool plants and animals with a simple identifying caption, an earnestly unhinged joke (he pulled a Halloween prank involving a squid suit and his trail cam), or an educational tidbit (don’t leave out yarn for birds to make nests with—it’s bad for them!). “All I thought was, I’m gonna post all these photos of my backyard and I’m gonna lose followers in droves,” he said. “And in fact, the opposite happened.” Followers started telling him that they’d been inspired to, say, stop using pesticides and herbicides in their own backyards.
Sure, it’s just Twitter. But it’s also a neat encapsulation of the work required to be a thoughtful member of a healthy functioning ecosystem. VanderMeer is making a near-daily practice of learning and sharing what he knows, whether he’s discovered that a bush in his backyard is actually invasive and produces berries that are poisonous to birds, or how mowing and landscaping a yard has a ripple effect on all the life that interacts with that space. “What I’m trying to preach, if I’m preaching anything, is the idea of doing the least harm possible,” he said. “And I think that is both a tactical and a strategic thing.”
While Dead Astronauts deals with more immediately apocalyptic ripple effects, it still shares some of the DNA of VanderMeer’s online presence. His tonal switches, from enraged to darkly humorous to off-the-rails and back again, seem very much of the Internet. So does his impulse to be more didactic than in past books. It doesn’t take a close reading to know that the fox’s entire chapter is a damning look at how we dehumanize wildlife, even when we mean well. At one point he captures a biologist, bands and studies him. “It’s what we do. We band things. It’s nothing personal. It’s about the species.” The Company’s most notorious villain gets an origin story depicting a well-meaning but (literally) tortured boy who believes his animal experimentation is creating a magical garden. It’s not hard to see similarities between the tech unicorns of late-stage capitalism and the Company, which is described as an opaque force lacking face or body but with many limbs that meddle in all kinds of mysterious ways. “I think there’s a lot of horror in the fact that we are trapped in these systems where no matter what we do, it’s very difficult not to do harm or not to buy into the system,” VanderMeer said. The human characters of Dead Astronauts are morally direct depictions of the choices we can make within those systems: how hard it is to fight back (the astronauts), or all the ways we fool ourselves into thinking that buying in isn’t so bad (most of the other humans).
In Dead Astronauts, as in real life, the stakes are high and the problems are daunting. How not to be swimming in dread all the time? How to snap out of your own day-to-day? The book, for all its darkness, feels like one hopeful answer: stay awake to what makes your reality baffling, horrifying, ridiculous, and worthy. Those who do it best in Dead Astronauts, of course, are the talking animals, who aren’t wise woodland nymphs or innocent creatures who don’t understand why the humans are treating them so badly. It’s all the more striking to hear both the beauty of a well-functioning ecosystem, and the horror of tinkering with it, from the mouth of a fox who’s cynical, human-hating, and somehow all-too-human. “That, I think, channels that sense of humor and joy that you see on Twitter, because it’s very much a slapstick comedy at times,” VanderMeer said. “It’s also very serious.”
Erin Berger
Erin Berger is a Santa Fe-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in Outside, The Guardian, Popular Science, and elsewhere. Erin Berger
Happy 71st Birthday to one helluva creative writer, Haruki Murakami. Haruki is a Japanese writer. His books and stories have been bestsellers in Japan as well as internationally, with his work being translated into 50 languages and selling millions of copies outside of Japan.
“Today when I awoke from a nap the faceless man was there with me. He was seated on the chair across from the sofa I’d been sleeping on, staring straight at me with a pair of imaginary eyes in a face that wasn’t.” – Excerpt from his latest #novel, ‘Killing Commendatore” A tour de force of love and loneliness, war and art. Killing Commendatore is a stunning work of imagination from one of our greatest writers.
Mad Men eBook at Mind on Fire Books[/caption]
Mad Men begins with Matt’s tale, a thought-provoking thriller which causes the reader to question his reality and what he fears within himself. The second tale explores the grotesque juxtaposed with beautiful nature, where the ending unfolds into a horrific dream, waking in even more terrible pain. The third tale is by seasoned horror writer, A.R. Braun – and his diabolical creatures never disappoint! A.R. Braun’s goal is to be on the banned book list; we think this tale may just be evil enough to be considered. A must read before it does get banned!
Mainstream Horror Shorts don’t always satisfy us in the way they should. They don’t open conversations about what it is that we fear or why we fear such things, they focus mainly on pop culture and gore. The writers in the Mad Men anthology understand the need for literate horror, opening discussions of man’s psyche. When these writers set out to tell a story, they are less interested in conveying fear and more interested in wonder, the sublime, and the infinite strangeness that drives all man and woman. Highly recommended for tweens, teens, and adults.
The Mad Men anthology published by Mind on Fire Books. Written by Willy Martinez, A.R. Braun and Matt Lavitt. No part of this book shall be copied without permission from the publisher.
