I wished to get her home at once

— Fortune favored us

When I bent over her I could see that she was still asleep. Her lips were parted, and she was breathing, not softly as usual with her, but in long, heavy gasps, as though striving to get her lungs full at every breath. As I came close, she put up her hand in her sleep and pulled the collar of her nightdress close around her, as though she felt the cold. I flung the warm shawl over her, and drew the edges tight around her neck, for I dreaded lest she should get some deadly chill from the night air, unclad as she was.

I feared to wake her all at once, so, in order to have my hands free to help her, I fastened the shawl at her throat with a big safety pin. But I must have been clumsy in my anxiety and pinched or pricked her with it, for by-and-by, when her breathing became quieter, she put her hand to her throat again and moaned. When I had her carefully wrapped up I put my shoes on her feet, and then began very gently to wake her.

At first she did not respond, but gradually she became more and more uneasy in her sleep, moaning and sighing occasionally. At last, as time was passing fast, and for many other reasons, I wished to get her home at once. I shook her forcibly, till finally she opened her eyes and awoke. She did not seem surprised to see me, as, of course, she did not realize all at once where she was.

Lucy always wakes prettily, and even at such a time, when her body must have been chilled with cold, and her mind somewhat appalled at waking unclad in a churchyard at night, she did not lose her grace. She trembled a little, and clung to me. When I told her to come at once with me home, she rose without a word, with the obedience of a child. As we passed along, the gravel hurt my feet, and Lucy noticed me wince. She stopped and wanted to insist upon my taking my shoes, but I would not. However, when we got to the pathway outside the churchyard, where there was a puddle of water, remaining from the storm, I daubed my feet with mud, using each foot in turn on the other, so that as we went home, no one, in case we should meet any one, should notice my bare feet.

Fortune favored us, and we got home without meeting a soul.

—Bram Stoker, Dracula

Painting: Amedeo Modigliani, Portrait of Jeanne Hébuterne


Editor's Note:  Jeanne Hébuterne was a French artist. She was the frequent subject and common-law wife of Amedeo Modigliani.

Psychological Insights

—The burden of guilt

I would have to describe a great many unamorous experiences to explain why I left Hungary again, this time for good—and so soon after offering to die for her. It seems I loved my country as ardently as if she were a woman, and just as inconstantly.

As love is an emotional glimpse of eternity, one can't help half-believing that genuine love will last forever. When it would not, as in my case it never did, I couldn't escape a sense of guilt about my inability to feel true and lasting emotions. This shame was surpassed in intensity only by my doubts as to whether my lover had ever really loved me, when she was the one who ended the affair. In this I'm like most of my skeptical contemporaries: since we no longer reproach ourselves for failing to conform to absolute ethical precepts, we beat ourselves with the stick of psychological insight. When it comes to love, we reject the distinction between moral and immoral for the distinction between "genuine" and "superficial."

We're too understanding to condemn our actions; we condemn our motives instead. Having freed ourselves from a code of behavior, we submit to a code of motivation to achieve the sense of shame and anxiety that our elders acquired by less sophisticated means. We rejected their religious morality because it set man against his instincts, weighed him down with a burden of guilt for sins which were in fact the workings of natural laws. Yet we still atone for the creation: we think of ourselves as failures, rather than renounce our belief in the possibility of perfection. We hang onto the hope of eternal love by denying even its temporary validity. It's less painful to think "I'm shallow," "She's self-centered," "We couldn't communicate," "It was all just physical," than to accept the simple fact that love is a passing sensation, for reasons beyond our control and even beyond our personalities. But who can reassure himself with his own rationalizations? No argument can fill the void of a dead feeling—that reminder of the ultimate void, our final inconstancy. We're untrue even to life.

—Stephen Vizinczey, In Praise of Older Women

Painting: Amedeo Modigliani, Portrait of a Woman in a Black Tie 

Definition

Inconstant: adj.; not faithful and dependable;  someone who is inconstant is not loyal and cannot be trusted; unreliable, untrustworthy, fickle

Don't cut my throat, sir

Hold your noise! cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. "Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!"

A fearful man, all in coarse gray, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared, and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.

"Oh! Don't cut my throat, sir," I pleaded in terror.

—Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Painting: Jozef Quisthoudt, Belgian (1883-1953); St. Peter's Church in Ypres;   Naïve style


Naïve art is a classification of art that is often characterized by a childlike simplicity in its subject matter and technique; and the artist appears to have little or no formal training. Above, the middle paragraph is loaded with images but lacks a complete sentence.

How a natural law is contained

—the will and convenience of society

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it.

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody.

—Thomas Jefferson, Writings 

Sketch: Leonardo da Vinci

The Symbol of Our Labor

Hidden wisdom and mysterious revelations.

The peril of our new way of life was not lest we should fail in becoming real-life farmers, but that we should probably cease to be anything else. While our enterprise lay all in theory, we had pleased ourselves with delectable visions of the spiritualization of labor. It was to be our form of prayer and ceremonial of worship.

Each stroke of the hoe was to uncover some aromatic root of wisdom, heretofore hidden from the sun. Pausing in the field, to let the wind exhale the moisture from our foreheads, we were to look upward, and catch glimpses into the far-off soul of truth. In this point of view, matters did not turn out quite so well as we anticipated.

It is very true that, sometimes, gazing casually around me, out of the midst of my toil, I used to discern a richer picturesqueness in the visible scene of earth and sky. There was, at such moments, a novelty, an unwonted aspect, on the face of Nature, as if she had been taken by surprise and seen at unawares, with no opportunity to put off her real look, and assume the mask with which she mysteriously hides herself from mortals. But this was all.

The clods of earth, which we so constantly belabored and turned over and over, were never etherealized into thought. Our thoughts, on the contrary, were fast becoming cloddish. Our labor symbolized nothing, and left us mentally sluggish in the dusk of the evening.

—Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance

Painting; Van Gogh,  The Sower

I knew I had a fever

Phases of the Disease: a brick in a giddy place; a steel beam in a whirling engine; my own person

That I had a fever and was avoided, that I suffered greatly, that I often lost my reason, that the time seemed interminable, that I confounded impossible existences with my own identity; that I was a brick in the house-wall, and yet entreating to be released from the giddy place where the builders had set me; that I was a steel beam of a vast engine, clashing and whirling over a gulf, and yet that I implored in my own person to have the engine stopped, and my part in it hammered off; that I passed through these phases of disease, I know of my own remembrance, and did in some sort know at the time.

—Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Painting: Amedeo Modigliani, Little Girl in Blue (1918)

A Simple Algorithm

All of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.

I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons—a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth—how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn't read. And certainly couldn't read for pleasure.

It's not one to one: you can't say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations. And I think some of those correlations, the simplest, come from something very simple. Literate people read fiction.

Fiction has two uses. First, it's a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it's hard, because someone's in trouble and you have to know how it's all going to end . . . that's a very real drive.

And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, you're on the road to reading everything. And reading is key.

* * *

Words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. . . .

The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read.

* * *

I was in China in 2007, at the first party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one point I took a top official aside and asked him—Why? Science fiction had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed?

It's simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.

—Neil Gaiman

Painting: Henri-Jean Guillaume Martin (1860 - 1943) French impressionist painter

In the Beginning

THE YEARS OF WHICH I HAVE SPOKEN TO YOU, when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this.

It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life.

Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then.

—Carl Jung, 1957

Illustration: Carl Jung, The Red Book

A Matter of Great Regret

Letter to a publisher in response to the rejection of a manuscript

To John Murray,

29 July 1824

My Dear Sir,

Until I received your note this morning I had flattered myself that my indiscretion had been forgotten.

It is to me a matter of great regret that, as appears by your letter, any more trouble should be given respecting this unfortunate MS., which will, most probably, be considered too crude a production for the public, and which, if it is even imagined to possess any interest, is certainly too late for this Season, and will be obsolete in the next.

I think, therefore, that the sooner it be put behind the fire the better, and as you have some small experience in burning MSS., you will perhaps be so kind as to consign it to the flames.

Once more apologising for all the trouble I have given you, I remain ever, my dear Sir,

Yours very faithfully,

B. Disraeli

—Benjamin Disraeli; Letter to John Murray; The Oxford Book of Letters

Painting: Gerard ter Borch, Dutch Master (1617 – 1681)

The Fates We Have Ordained

I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen "King Lear," never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. . . .

Whatever revolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them.

Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical.

We would prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen.

— Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Painting: Pierre Auguste Renoir, Dance at Bougival

The Art of Reading

A Personal Account of an Ongoing Relationship With Words

I've always been fond of dictionaries for as long as I can remember. As a teenager, one Christmas, I asked a relative for a dictionary as my holiday present. It was a Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, an edition in hard cover with red cloth.

Words have a life and a history, and just as with people their best attributes can be hidden in nuance. Writers, whose stock-in-trade is words, recognize the importance of giving words their full due. The best writers can make reading a satisfying, delightful and an almost delicious experience, all because of words.

The high school I attended assigned Victorian Era books like Oliver Twist. This was thrown in among other more readable books or what I then considered more “normal” fare. At the time, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter seemed to me like an excellent choice to kill a young person’s interest in reading and literature.

Some years ago, at a cocktail party, I ran into someone who, as it turned out, was a high school English teacher. Our conversation led me to wonder out loud the point of assigning The Scarlet Letter to teenagers who don’t have the vocabulary to understand, let alone appreciate, the work. Her reply was something to the effect that the students understood the issues raised by the book and showed great interest in discussing them.

I simply nodded in agreement and left the conversation there. When I was in high school, it was only because of the book’s Monarch Notes, I was able to pick up—nothing distinct mind you, just—faint hints and clues as to what the book was about and the important questions it supposedly addressed.

I’ve now read The Scarlet Letter three times and I’ve formed a deep appreciation for its literary merit. I am also more convinced than ever that assigning it to the average high school freshman class is a disservice to the students.

At some point in college, I decided I wouldn’t let a single word pass me by if I didn’t have a ready definition for it on the tip of my tongue. This is a different standard than having a vague idea what a word means. For a period of what may have been two years, I carried a Little Oxford English Dictionary with me everywhere I went. It had a hard cover and was smaller than an average paperback. It contained the great majority of the words I looked up.

I was looking up words all the time. It’s a wonder I ever finished reading anything. Eventually, looking up so many words must have had some positive effect because I stopped relying on my Little Oxford. It was sometime after this, I had occasion to visit one of my university professors in his office. I was working on a paper and we needed to discuss its progress.

As I remember now, years later, it was a decent-sized office. The only other thing I remember about it is that in the office, up on a stand—or maybe it was an improvised lectern—sat a huge unabridged dictionary. It is the kind of dictionary you only see in the reference section of libraries, always opened somewhere in the middle as if a book like that isn’t meant to remain closed. It is the kind of book that has perhaps a four inch spine and if you had to venture a guess, you might say it easily weighs between 15 and 20 pounds.

Later on, after leaving the professor’s office—and the impression of the over-sized dictionary having settled in—I remember thinking to myself, “So this is how the pros do it.”

I have never owned an unabridged dictionary but I can certainly appreciate its value. I have never lost my fondness for words and their meaning. The habit of constantly looking up words still haunts me and to this day it slows me down when I read.

Ereaders have brought the art of reading to the information age. Today, the definition of 99 percent of all words is only one touch away when we read. You don’t need to lug around a Little Oxford and the Oxford English Dictionary is no longer published in printed editions.

Painting: Henri Matisse (1869 – 1954)

Do you have a special relationship to books, words and reading?

Spiritual Bankruptcy

Who knew what the real truth was? No one. That's who. In the sweet sounding world of Sugardale nothing was ever what it seemed, and no one was ever who they pretended to be, including me.

Life in Sugardale reminded me of the house of mirrors I visited whenever the fair came to town. There was a different mirror for each kind of person you wanted to be. If you wanted to be skinny or fat, short or tall, round-faced or long-chinned, all you had to do was look in the right mirror.

That's what we did everyday of our lives—Frank, Momma and me. Across the threshold of our front door stood an invisible mirror. Every morning, we lined up in front of it and decided who we needed to be that day—dutiful wife, loving stepdaughter, family man, hard working, church going, pillars of the community. Once we determined what our role for the day should be, we stepped through the mirror and voila! We became that person. At the end of the day, we simply stepped back through the mirror of make-believe and reverted into our real selves.

But the mirror demanded all who used its life-transforming magic pay a fee. Every day, when we stepped back through the mirror, we were required to leave behind a small piece of ourselves, a token of integrity or sliver of truth that we no longer had a right to claim. How long could such payments continue before spiritual bankruptcy occurred? Who knew? Not me.

—Deborah Epperson, Breaking Twig

Painting: Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas, The Maids of Honor (1656)

Writing for the Love of Writing

I have many friends who are artists, painters for the most part. For them, art seems to be a way of life. They sketch, draw and paint because it is second nature and they love what they do. It seems as though there is nothing else they would rather be doing.

Many writers also love what they do. No one is paying us for all the blog posts we write. For many of us, the reward is the opportunity to share our ideas and talents and to simply belong to our wonderful community of fellow writers. As an added benefit, we also build a following and hope folks remember us.

Reading Is Part of the Job Description
One of the ways that writers develop their voice, prod their imagination and become more agile with language is to read, read again, and then read some more. One of my recent Life List commitments is to read two contemporary novels a month. So far, I’ve been keeping up and right now, I’m ahead of schedule.

My ongoing search to find worthwhile books to read inspired this blog post.

Choice Is a Luxury
I am mostly interested in mysteries and thrillers and my Ipad is filling up with them. Just recently, I stocked my electronic library with an additional ten new titles that warrant a second look. Many of them, I will end up reading sooner or later.

The Value of a Good Read
An important point is the cost of these books and how I find them. I use a very simple method and pay nothing for the books. I find new titles by searching twitter approximately three times a week for “free mystery” and “free thriller.” Among a handful of twitter results, I choose books on Amazon with four and five-star ratings that have well-written and convincing reviews.

During the past two months, I read two novels that are of very high literary quality and two others that were excellent and enjoyable reads. If this experience is any indication, I’ll be able to keep reading quality novels indefinitely and at no charge.

What This Means for Novelists
What does a proliferation of high-quality, free ebooks mean for authors who aspire to write fiction for a living? In my opinion it means you have to be talented and prolific.

Most of the recently-minted, “famous” authors we read about published at least ten books before they achieved their fame. If you are serious about writing for a living, at some point in your career, you may have to publish one or more books a year. You can also get lucky. The book you are working on can become a best-seller that lands you a movie deal. While this is great if it happens, this is not a plan you can take to the bank.

I Don’t Run Into Low-Quality Ebooks
Another observation of mine over this test period is that I didn’t encounter the “lots-of-bad-ebooks-out-there” experience that I keep reading about. Don’t get me wrong, I know they’re out there. The point is: I don’t run into them.

Here is a thought exercise. Do you constantly run into websites and blogs in which you have little or no interest, sites that feature low quality content filled with grammatical errors? Chances are, you solved that problem a long time ago. You’d probably have to pause for a moment if you had to find such a site on short notice.

If you find yourself investing too much time reading bad-quality ebooks, consider modifying how you decide which ones to read.

What’s your reading regimen like? How do you choose which books to read?

Painting: Ivan Olinksy (1878 - 1962)

More Beautiful Than Direct Sunlight

I learned early in my career as a painter that limited or filtered light is inherently more interesting and beautiful than direct sunlight.

I learned that people are irresistibly drawn to depictions of dappled sun on a wooded path, morning light sifted through mist or clouds, lamplight piercing the gloom of dusk.

Filtered light is soft and gentle. It feels safe and comforting rather than harsh or glaring. And it still does its job of brightening and illuminating the world.

— Thomas Kinkade

Painting: Llewelyn Lloyd (1879 - 1949)

My Ideas, Take Them or Leave Them

I am far luckier than most men, for I have been able since boyhood to make a good living doing precisely what I have wanted to do—what I would have done for nothing, and very gladly, if there had been no reward for it. Not many men, I believe, are so fortunate. Millions of them have to make their livings at tasks which really do not interest them.

As for me, I have had an extraordinarily pleasant life, despite the fact that I have had the usual share of woes. For in the midst of these woes I still enjoyed the immense satisfaction which goes with free activity. I have done, in the main, exactly what I wanted to do. Its possible effects on other people have interested me very little.

I have not written and published to please other people, but to satisfy myself, just as a cow gives milk, not to profit the dairyman, but to satisfy herself. I like to think that most of my ideas have been sound ones, but I really don’t care. The world may take them or leave them. I have had my fun hatching them.

—H.L. Mencken, Letter to Will Durant

Painting: Salvador Dali (1904 - 1989), Apparition of the Visage of Aphrodite

Standing at the Crossroads by Jess Witkins

It’s been a week of life lessons. I’m hoping Gary won’t mind my commandeering of his blog to share one of them with you. But you shouldn't miss the eloquence of what I imagine to be his soothing baritone voice. You can find him safe and sound talking about wizards and magicians at Jenny Hansen's blog. It’s another edition of the Life List Club and we’re hoping you’ll join us on our tales of inspiration and honest mistakes. Share with us your own, we all love hanging out in the comment boxes, so please feel free to chat and know you’ve got support from us!

This past week I’ve been on the last of my remaining vacation days for the fiscal calendar. I had hoped the time off would result in incredibly productive writing time. I mean I intended 8 hour days of writing non-stop, complete chapters coming to fruition! Well, if I wanted that to happen, I shouldn’t have gone home.

What I should’ve done is found a little corner in the library and hid out with my laptop, a can of Pringles, a water bottle, and my gloves with rubber on the fingers so I can type and still keep warm when they turn the heat off for the night!

Shhh!  I’m doing research!

Instead, my time was otherwise spent with family activities. And you know what, I don’t often see my family, so I think it’s ok. I attended my 3 year old niece’s princess-themed birthday party, Church service with my dad, helped babysit my niece for a day, took mom out for coffee and a movie, and forgive me, used my spare time to take a bath. I LOVE BATHS! And at my house, I live with all boys, so I will not set a TOE in that tub!

Ok, back to the life lessons! I promise I learned more than what a properly clean bathroom looks like. Honestly, I feel like this whole week has been one of those times when life sends you sign after sign after sign alerting you to the direction and path your life is on. First, it was dealing with my newly damaged car and rearranging when I can take it in to the garage to get it fixed, cause I had to drive it home first and it felt like a long 3 hours with no cruise control and all the bigger cars sloshing muddy snow in my windshield. Then it was the pastor’s lesson in Church with my Dad, on how can we demonstrate audacious faith in times of difficulty? Then it was watching a toddler for a day, which was fun, but completely wiped me out. And I took the drives around town with my parents as a chance to ask them what the hardest things they had overcome in their lives were. The main message I kept hearing was this: crossroads. Everyone has them, and it’s not always easy to know the next step.

Whether it’s looking at your finances with eyes of disbelief, or finding yourself craving something more in life but unsure of how to proceed, or teaching a toddler good manners from bad, or hearing for the first time how the harsh realities of a marriage, a parent dying, and an illness can all alter your life. Yes, I was learning a lot.

I haven’t yet shaped all these lessons into a resulting answer for my life, but I can feel it coming. I am at a crossroads. I have sat idle too long waiting for life to happen, and pretty soon I’ll be making tough, but necessary decisions about the direction my life should head.

What have you learned this week? What crossroads are you facing in your life right now? I know this year would be even more difficult for me without the encouraging voices of the LLC members cheering me on. Who’s keeping you accountable? Are you like me and realize you need help? Then I’ll see you in the comments, friend!

Bio: Jess Witkins claims the title Perseverance Expert. She grew up in a small Wisconsin town as the much younger youngest sibling of four, she’s witnessed the paranormal, jumped out of a plane, worked in retail, traveled to exotic locations like Italy, Ireland, and Shipshewana, Indiana, and she’s eaten bologna and lived to tell about it! She deals with it all and writes about it! Come along on her midwest adventures; Witkins promises to keep it honest and entertaining. Go ahead, SUBSCRIBE, you know you want to. 
Follow Jess Witkins on Twitter: @jesswitkins

Unselfish and Self-Sacrificing Love

From my infancy I was noted for the docility and humanity of my disposition. My tenderness of heart was even so conspicuous as to make me the jest of my companions. I was especially fond of animals, and was indulged by my parents with a great variety of pets. With these I spent most of my time, and never was so happy as when feeding and caressing them.

This peculiarity of character grew with my growth, and in my manhood, I derived from it one of my principal sources of pleasure. To those who have cherished an affection for a faithful and sagacious dog, I need hardly be at the trouble of explaining the nature or the intensity of the gratification thus derivable. There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.

Edgar Allan Poe, The Black Cat

Poster: Théophile Alexandre Steinlen (1859–1923)

Gossamer: adj; flimsy, insubstantial, like the texture of cobwebs

I Stood in Ignorance on the Shore

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!

Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Painting: John William Waterhouse, Ophelia (1910)

Unfathomable: adj; 1) Too deep to be measured; 2) Impossible to understand for being mysterious or complicated.

My Love Grip on the Comma

In early texts there was no punctuation, just letters, one after another . . .

If I lived a past life, I’m certain that, in it, I was one of those readers of early texts busy inserting my own punctuation wherever I felt it enhanced the telling of the story.

I still do it. Worse, most times I am completely unaware of the number of commas on my own written page. They hide from me, chameleon-like, knowing if I can’t see them, I can’t remove them.

Even when I try to limit the use of my precious commas, I still over-insert them. Forget “word count” devices, someone needs to invent “comma count” software for the dramatic reader in all of us—okay, in me—who thrives on pregnant pauses.

Love those, as often as possible.

So, I ask you, if I relinquish my love grip on the comma, what will happen to me? Will I find myself making goo-goo eyes at the semi-colon (oh, please, no) or suddenly writing very short, plain sentences (anything but that) or…?

As you can see, I can’t change my punctuating ways—the risk of the unknown is far too great.

Here, in this moment, I publicly declare that I shall continue my love affair with that magic, breath-stopping, transformational little mark, the comma.

And, together, we will live happily ever after on the e-pages of romantic thrillers on Kindles, Nooks, iBooks, Kobo, Smashwords, iPads, PCs, and smart phone screens everywhere.

—Ashley Barron, Comma Chameleon

Painting: William Adolphe Bouguereau, The Difficult Lesson (1884)

What Makes London so Magical

It's very hard to explain what you miss about London, until you're in this particular position, like I am, counting down the hours to return. When I'm there, sometimes I wonder why I'm bothering; I obviously can't afford to keep up with London, I mean next to nothing in the eyes of the big city, and, as a lot of my friends have found out, even if I did work full time I would still not really have enough money to enjoy life here. I've been thinking for a long time about the practical choices, and am facing them now, and am filled with heartache at the idea of quitting the city.

What makes London so magical is, in a way, it's overwhelming humanity despite the harshness. The fact that some of the greatest minds in the world flock to it. The fact that you can pay a fiver to go upstairs in a pub and witness some of the finest storytelling of your life. The ability to go see some of the most important artifcacts in the world for free in the museums. The walks, oh God, the walks. Nothing for me beats getting lost in London. Turning the corner into what seems like another world. The only thing that excludes me is money, but I don't feel that as harshly as when I return home.

Rae Leaver, Returning to London

Painting: William Lionel Wyllie, Houses of Parliament (1901)