Category: Writing & Books

What Writers Think About

ideas

One of the cool things about calling yourself a writer is you get to do all kinds of things that everybody else calls bone-ass lazy.  Stuff like spending hours drinking coffee, taking long strolls through the Internet and staring off into space.  Wordy Wordsworth called it, “… powerful feelings: … recollected in tranquility” or something like that.  This “work” is essential for writers to hone their craft.  The serious upside is you get to discover all kinds of interesting facts, and you have time to come up with even more interesting conclusions.  Here are just a few things I’ve been pondering for the last couple of months.

There’s a town in Canada called Smithers — which means the people who live there are Smithereens.

On average, the Dutch are the tallest people in the world — even though a lot of them are standing below sea level.

Apparently, a huge bunch of people born between 1977 and 1983 are sick and tired of being lumped in with those terminally malcontent millennials.  They have decided to perform a generational Brexit (Genexit?) and want to be referred to as Xennials.  I can’t say I blame them.

In the future, people will look at their electronic devices and think “What a stupid icon for a telephone.”

Despite everybody and her friend claiming they broke the Internet – you can’t.  The truth is the Internet is no longer vulnerable to human attack: there are just too many servers scattered across the planet.  However, before you go all SkyNet/Terminator, 99.99% of all electronic devices are just dumb machines used for storage.

Humans first walked on the moon 50 years ago in 1969.  That was 2 years before women got to vote nationally in Switzerland and 8 years before France quit using the guillotine for executions.  Weird, huh?

One of the earliest and most persistent symptoms of lead poisoning is irritability, so it’s interesting that statistics show violent crime (aside from armed robbery) has been steadily decreasing since lead was banned from automobile fuel in the late 1980s.  Coincidence?  Maybe. . .

For several years, universities have been adding puppies to their “safe spaces” to combat student stress and exam anxiety.  Whatever!  The weird thing is nobody is willing to talk about what happens to the puppies when they’re no longer puppies.  Creepy!

Over 100 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute.  Wow!  And, according to the last time they kept records (several years ago) it would take you approximately 93,000 years to watch everything YouTube has to offer.  That is a lot of avoidance behaviour!

In the last 10 years, restaurant revenues, movie theatre revenues and department stores revenues have all declined — whereas the revenues of home delivery companies like Uber Eats, GrubHub, Netflix, Hulu and Amazon have all dramatically increased.  If this trend continues, eventually millennials will never have a reason to leave their apartments.  And this is a bad thing?

Andy Warhol was wrong.  In the future, everybody will have 15 minutes of privacy.

And finally:

I think it’s absolutely hilarious that a generation raised on South Park and Family Guy spend so much time being eagerly offended by everything.  Irony is not dead.

Dogsh*t Without Tears

ebookcover

Finally available in paperback (or ebook) Dogsh*t Without Tears

You can order it from Amazon HERE

Weird title, huh?  Not really.  Dogsh*t Without Tears is the signature blog of this collection– a roll-your-eyes look at just how emotionally fragile we are in the 21st century and how our coping skills have gone to hell.  Plus, it’s one of the four most popular blogs I’ve ever written – go figure!  From there, it’s W.D. Fyfe — selected, collected and bound in a wander of words that the French would call flânerie: a stroll that doesn’t have an identifiable destination, but still has a vague purpose.  In this case, a loose chronicle of the teenage years of the 21st century — with all the drama and confusion that entails.

Dogsh*t Without Tears is a witty, irreverent and often ridiculously funny collection of blogs from the mind of W.D. Fyfe.  Nothing is sacred.  I have an opinion on everything from Time Travel and Trigger Warnings to Why I Hate Summer.  Enjoy such titles as Yes, We Have No Vaginas and The Power of “But.”  Find out why there is a War on Plaid and the historical significance of The Girl with the Anal Tattoo.  These byte-sized insights chronicle the teenage years of the 21st century from 2011 to 2019 with a bit of nostalgia thrown in — just because.  If you’ve ever asked yourself the question, who are the 5 People [I’ll] Meet in Hell this collection is for you.  If you’ve never asked yourself that question, Dogsh*t Without Tears is still an excellent Christmas, birthday, wedding, divorce or graduation gift.  Think about it!

Anyway, if you enjoy reading Dogsh*t Without Tears as much as I enjoyed writing it, we will become simpatico souls — and that’s a very rare commodity in the 21st century.

And please! PLEASE! PLEEEASE! leave a review.

First Lines Are Important

first lines

Writing is a complicated business, beset on all sides by pending disaster.  Those who choose to tell stories to strangers must begin at the beginning — and that’s where the trouble starts.  Tons of good tales die on the first line because they never get one.  Writing the first line of any story is hard.  Authors have a tiny window to convince potential readers that the approaching landscape is worth their time and trouble.  Unfortunately, most authors get it wrong.  For example, one of the most famous first lines in literature, “Call me Ishmael” is actually a total disaster.  It does nothing to pull the reader into the story.  In fact, it’s a little misleading.  The only important thing Ishmael does in Moby Dick is – uh – survive.  Melville would have done a better job with, “Call him Ahab!”  But seriously, a first line should leave the reader with a nagging feeling of what-the-hell-is-going-on-here? — and a strong temptation to find out.  Here are a few first lines that do exactly that.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

George Orwell – 1984

My mother died today.  Or maybe it was yesterday; I can’t be sure.

Albert Camus – The Stranger

There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.

Neil Gaiman – The Graveyard Book

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.  My sin, my soul.

Vladimir Nabokov – Lolita

The Man in Black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed.

Stephen King – The Gunslinger

All children, except one, grow up.

J.M. Barrie – Peter Pan

It was a pleasure to burn.

Ray Bradbury – Fahrenheit 451

Marley was dead, to begin with.

Charles Dickens – A Christmas Carol

All this happened, more or less.

Kurt Vonnegut – Slaughterhouse-Five

This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.

William Goldman – The Princess Bride

The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.

Ian Fleming – Casino Royale

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

J.R.R. Tolkien – The Hobbit

It was the day my grandmother exploded.

Iain Banks – The Crow Road

“Where’s Papa going with the ax?” said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.

E.B. White – Charlotte’s Web

Elmer Gantry was drunk.

Sinclair Lewis – Elmer Gantry

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.

Dodie Smith – I Capture the Castle

I’m pretty much fucked.

Andy Weir – The Martian

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.

Hunter S. Thompson – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

And, of course, the best first line ever written:

Once upon a time. . .

 

*Illustration from The Far Side