HUFFLEPUFF: “I don’t know who came here before me, who conditioned you to think you had to apologize or feel obtuse. But not here. Dream so big it’s silly. Laugh so hard it’s obnoxious. Love so much it’s impossible. […] Grow. It’s a big world. There’s room. You fit. I promise.” –Owen Lindley
Grief, I’ve learned, is really love. It’s all the love you want to give but cannot give. The more you loved someone, the more you grieve. All of that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes and in that part of your chest that gets empty and hollow feeling. The happiness of love turns to sadness when unspent. Grief is just love with no place to go.
HUFFLEPUFF: “I threw myself to the wolves, only to learn of the tenderness in their howl, and the loyalty in their blood.” –Isra Al-Thibeh (The Wolves)
Book of the day: The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
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One ought not to judge her: All children are heartless. They have not grown a heart yet, which is why they can climb tall trees and say shocking things and leap so very high that grown-up hearts flutter in terror.
That’s how you get the future: You mix up everything you did today with everything you did yesterday and all the days before and everything anyone you ever met did and anyone they ever met, too.
(via zuiol)
As a writer you eventually figure out the kinds of stories and shapes and characters that you want to spend time with—as a reader, too. The more honest you are with yourself about the particular, peculiar-to-you kinds of things that you enjoy, or that you have an interesting quarrel with, the easier it is to reach for them as you work.
If Einstein had not written down E=mc2, another scientist would one day have done so…but no one else could have written Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
Consume art widely. Experiment with genres, markets, and forms might usually avoid. Build a rich internal life for yourself, one without borders or limits.
Courtney Alameda is the Bram Stoker Award-nominated author of Shutter, and the forthcoming novel Pitch Dark (June 2017). A veteran bookseller and librarian, she now writes full-time and lives in Utah with her husband.
Writer’s Care Packages from Camp NaNoWriMo and We Need Diverse Books.
(via nanowrimo)
starry-eyed 