MUSIC AND LOVE

Can you tell I'm absolutely loving this?


Anyway... my next invited quoter is Tiffany Murray.



She has not only written one of the books I've enjoyed most for a long long time but it features one of the wildest old woman I've read about recently. And I thought my Mrs Oliver in GETTING THE PICTURE was wild.



Diamond Star Halo is completely enchanting, every bit as good as I Capture The Castle, and even Cold Comfort Farm - two of my favourite books so that's a big claim for me. Tiffany's main character, Halo, was born to be a drummer. Literally. When she was born she bounced off some drums in her parents recording studio. She lives on Rockfarm in Wales, which is just that - a farm for rock stars - and it's the story of what happens after an American band come to record there. Or more importantly, who is left behind after the band have gone.

Music runs through it, which isn't surprisingly when Tiff's biography drops in about how part of Bohemian Rhapsody was written in her house when she was a child. Here are her choice of the ten best Rock'n'Roll novels.

Anyway, as I said, in Diamond Star Halo Tiffany has created the BEST old woman ever. Here's what she says about her...

Nana Lew, who from the age of seventy to one hundred years old, has a live in lover, Rhysie the postman, (a man who delivers more than her letters). Nana has a red silk silk petticoat. Nana worships Johnny Cash.

Yes! I love her!

She also has her very own capel lined with bones*.

(*Nana Lew, that is, not Tiffany. I don't think so anyway.)

And Tiffany has chosen two songs for the competition.

The first is Old Friends/Bookends by Simon and Garfunkel. She says, "since I was a kid I've always pictured this song as a short story about two old lovers (I think some songs are the best short stories)." And the bit of the lyrics she picked goes:

'Old friends, winter companions, the old men
Lost in their overcoats, waiting for the sunset
The sounds of the city sifting through trees
Settle like dust on the shoulders of the old friends.'

Tiffany comments: "There's something so beautiful about two old lovers sitting there as the buzz of the city whisks about them."

and here's her second...



Oh, does it get better?

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
-- Mark Twain

IS THERE A BETTER TV SERIES THAN THE WIRE?

WHY WRITERS SHOULD TAKE UP GOLFING

"I do much of my creative thinking while golfing. If people know you're working at home, they think nothing of walking in for a cup of coffee, but wouldn't dream of interrupting on the golf course." Harper Lee

HOW TO MAKE SOMETHING EXCITING

(From the Newseum, Washington)

AUTHENTICITY

“Be a first rate version of yourself, not a second rate version of someone else” Judy Garland

The Butterfly of the moment

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Vita Sackville-West

Words on Writing

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all. ~Richard Wright, American Hunger, 1977

"Read, read, read. Read everything- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write." William Faulkner

Being Alive

"There is a Latin saying: Ars longa, vita brevis. Art is long, life is short. But the true and beautiful thing is that nothing lasts. Everything changes and passes. The creative process is just that. Not a means to an end, but a continuing engagement with being alive.

Breathe in, and begin"

Kim Addonizio, from Ordinary Genius.

Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements. I believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing process, which is not to say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply, it is real.
Jeanette Winterson

New writers are often told, "Write what you know." I would broaden that by saying, "Write what you know emotionally. "
Marjorie Franco

Reasons to write

"I think you write to make contact with people, or to extend yourself farther out in the world than you could possibly travel on your own. In some way, it's like a shy person trying to get a date. But there's not a specific person."
A.M. Homes

I'm exaggerating now so you'll get to know me faster.

Amy Hempel

Why do it?

"Why should we all use our creative power...? Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money." Brenda Ueland

"Why do writers write? Because it isn't there."

Thomas Berger

Foreign countries...

"Men like women who write. Even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country." Marguerite Duras