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Hump day happenings
Jul. 18th, 2018 07:53 pm1. Finally got a plumber to come out. It's an ordeal, naturally. The plumbers seem professional and on-the-up-and-up (unlike the first set I tried to get to come out here who wouldn't give me the time of day). They have to order a faucet because everything in this house is custom made and wack-a-doo. So, sink will be fixed next week with a much heftier price tag than I had anticipated.
2. But! We bought a bed and spent about 1200 less than I had budgeted, so it'll all come out in the wash.
3. Got our first energy bill for the new place, and I am ecstatic. This place is so much bigger with so many more windows. I was really worried our energy bills would be out of control. But! It's comparable to/a little less than what we were paying at the rental! Yay! Now I just need to get the water/gas/trash combo bill and see what the damage is there. I am very optimistic.
4. And now for a little plagiarism in the world of writing manuals:
Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is not the edition of the book I read; I think the one I read is from the original 1934 printing of the book.
So, I've fallen down the rabbit-hole of reading lots of writing manuals and books about writing while researching my project on writing anxiety/the writing marathon.
Like some of the other books I've read, this one is a little off the beaten path and might prove useful to someone who's read a lot of writing manuals and is looking for something a little different to jump start her writing or for novel ways to get over blocks or for new approaches to developing a writerly life. Brande has some very interesting and specific exercises that writers at any stage might find helpful. It's also a very short book and not a huge time commitment to read.
What I find so fascinating is that the concept of morning pages (Julia Cameron The Artist's Way) seems to have originated with Brande; I've never read The Artists's Way, so I've ILLed to see just how close the parallels are (I mean, Brande even calls them "the morning's pages"). Amazon's search inside a book feature lets me know that the word brande appears on page 196 of The Artist's Way, so maybe Cameron credits Brande for the idea, but, of course, that page is not one I can view. Additionally, Brande describes in 1934 something extremely close to freewriting, which Peter Elbow is going to popularize in Writing without Teachers; I have read Elbow before--in fact, I own a copy of that book, and he credits/cites absolutely nothing in the text. That's next on my reading list as it's been about 20 years since I've read it.
Tracing these ideas backwards is absolutely riveting.
Brande provides a list of writing manuals she's found formative (who knew so many of the Victorian authors wrote writing manuals?), and if I wanted I could easily start going down those rabbit holes to see whether morning pages and freewriting are concepts Brande borrowed from elsewhere (as Robert Boice says, in one antecedent--freewriting is an extrapolation of the automatic writing done by 19th century spiritualists who believed they were communicating with another world). But I will save that exploration for when this current project has concluded.
View all my reviews
2. But! We bought a bed and spent about 1200 less than I had budgeted, so it'll all come out in the wash.
3. Got our first energy bill for the new place, and I am ecstatic. This place is so much bigger with so many more windows. I was really worried our energy bills would be out of control. But! It's comparable to/a little less than what we were paying at the rental! Yay! Now I just need to get the water/gas/trash combo bill and see what the damage is there. I am very optimistic.
4. And now for a little plagiarism in the world of writing manuals:
Becoming a Writer by Dorothea BrandeMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is not the edition of the book I read; I think the one I read is from the original 1934 printing of the book.
So, I've fallen down the rabbit-hole of reading lots of writing manuals and books about writing while researching my project on writing anxiety/the writing marathon.
Like some of the other books I've read, this one is a little off the beaten path and might prove useful to someone who's read a lot of writing manuals and is looking for something a little different to jump start her writing or for novel ways to get over blocks or for new approaches to developing a writerly life. Brande has some very interesting and specific exercises that writers at any stage might find helpful. It's also a very short book and not a huge time commitment to read.
What I find so fascinating is that the concept of morning pages (Julia Cameron The Artist's Way) seems to have originated with Brande; I've never read The Artists's Way, so I've ILLed to see just how close the parallels are (I mean, Brande even calls them "the morning's pages"). Amazon's search inside a book feature lets me know that the word brande appears on page 196 of The Artist's Way, so maybe Cameron credits Brande for the idea, but, of course, that page is not one I can view. Additionally, Brande describes in 1934 something extremely close to freewriting, which Peter Elbow is going to popularize in Writing without Teachers; I have read Elbow before--in fact, I own a copy of that book, and he credits/cites absolutely nothing in the text. That's next on my reading list as it's been about 20 years since I've read it.
Tracing these ideas backwards is absolutely riveting.
Brande provides a list of writing manuals she's found formative (who knew so many of the Victorian authors wrote writing manuals?), and if I wanted I could easily start going down those rabbit holes to see whether morning pages and freewriting are concepts Brande borrowed from elsewhere (as Robert Boice says, in one antecedent--freewriting is an extrapolation of the automatic writing done by 19th century spiritualists who believed they were communicating with another world). But I will save that exploration for when this current project has concluded.
View all my reviews
