BOOKS – WRITING – HUMOR – ABSURD
Day 15 Miss Sedative & Co /absurdist comedy/ The four of us were sitting outside on the pool terrace, with a mojito in hand, desperately trying to find a common topic for conversation. “Arcadio, where did you learn to create such a high wave of sexual latitudes? It was quite incredible,” Martha asked, testing my reaction or perhaps out of idle curiosity. “Just following the wind, sweetheart,” he grinned. ...
Day 14 One percent /absurdist comedy/ I sat at the maple table and listened to the conversations at the bar. Despite the increasing attention and distrust of the saloon’s regulars, I found out that roughly 1 percent of Gunung Kinabalu owned 92 percent of the Kingdom’s wealth. The gap between the high-tech quarter and the rest of the land widened last year. Constant taxes, erosion of farmers’ rights, cost-cutting, and...
Screw Quarter Day 13 /absurdist comedy/ I welcomed the first rays of sun with enthusiastic cheer. After a long trip – full of obstacles, spiritual slumber, and excessive heat – I felt like a bear, awake and moving in the direction of the dawning light. We arrived at the east riverbank of Gunung Kinabalu, closer to the lunch. Three cars, one of which was a beautiful Bentley R-Type Continental from...
Day 11 No Answers /absurdist comedy/ (I’m jumping over day 10, called ‘The Dream,’ because of the adult content in that chapter. It will be added to the book.) Two hours of sleeping passed swiftly – I woke up full of boundless radiant energy. I felt like one of Tolkien’s heroes, stuck in a fantasy land thousands of miles from home with a war approaching. I stretched out, then stepped...
Congratulations on your beautiful new book, “Nobody Will Like This Book”. Could you tell us a little about the idea behind it and about your writing journey; how it started out, whether it changed much along the way? Thank you for calling it beautiful! I was having fun creating my book “The Dancing Fish” (poems and drawings), and I wanted to do something similar as the next project. I had...
I recently received a package of books (through the post), and I was instantly in awe at what delicately tumbled out – an old green cover with a picture of the boat with a red roof: A House-Boat on the Styx, written by John Kendrick Bangs. It was published in 1895 by Harper & Brothers. There’s also a stamp with the name there, perhaps from the library: Jean Ross Bennett,...
#Keytakeaways from the book “BECOMING a WRITER” by Dorothea Brande (first published in 1934, currently republished) Dorothea Brande was teaching a creative writing course. Her focus was: a) the imaginative power of the writer’s mind; b) the belief that “genius can be taught.” PART II #1 On Imitation You can imitate but you should not adopt the philosophies, the ideas, the dramatic notions of other writers. Always go back to...
#takeaway keys from the book “BECOMING a WRITER” by Dorothea Brande (first published in 1934, currently republished) Dorothea Brande was teaching a creative writing course. Her focus was: a) the imaginative power of the writer’s mind; b) the belief that “genius can be taught.” John Gardner wrote a foreword for this book. I used his humorous phrase as the title for this post. PART I #1 The Four Difficulties No...