Friday Fact(s)

From A Writer's Book of Days by Judy Reeves:

Different ways of invoking the Muse

* The poet Friedrich von Schiller used to keep rotten apples under the lid of his desk, open it, inhale deeply, and compose.

* Balzac drank fifty cups of coffee in a day.

* Colette first picked fleas from her cat, then wrote.

* Voltaire used his lover's naked back as a writing desk.

* Alexandre Dumas, the elder, wrote his nonfiction on rose-coloured paper, his fiction on blue and his poetry on yellow.