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Quote of the Day

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Although Gabriel García Márquez passed in 2014, we are fortunate to still have his words and works with us. Winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature, he was named “the greatest Colombian who ever lived” by the Nobel Peace Prize-winning and current President of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos.

While writing my previous post, I thought about the notion of commitment in a far-ranging way, and while Márquez is probably most famous internationally for his novels One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, he was also a respected journalist who knew a thing or two about the trade.

This quote of his below not only sums up one of the big problems with today’s presidential election in the U.S., but is solid advice to heed for fiction writers.

“In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That’s the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it”

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On Commitment

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Commitment can be looked at in a number of ways, from being committed to your spouse and to a regular exercise routine to remaining committed to your faith or a looming deadline.

In a piece called “What happens when you take full responsibility of your life,” Benjamin P. Hardy starts by drawing a line in the sand of sorts, explaining:

Four realities exist:

  1. Indecision is potentially your greatest threat.
  2. Most people are “drifting,” which means they haven’t taken command of their mind or their life. Drifting is when you let external circumstances determine where you go in life.
  3. Just before any substantial breakthroughs, you will experience darkness and defeat.
  4. When you take control of your mind, you realize the quality of your thinking reflects your current potential.

What starts off as a little preachy, however, soon bears more fruit in the practical, day-to-day stuff that everyone can relate to:

Research has found that when people commit to something, their desire to be seen as “consistent” drives them to act according to the commitment they’ve made. Commitment has been defined as the “[p]ledging or binding of an individual to behavioral acts.” For example, one study found that people who made a public commitment to recycle were far more likely to do so than those who didn’t make a public commitment.

Personally, I think about this concept on a daily basis, most notably because I’m self-employed and will self-immolate if I don’t pressure myself to honour professional commitments to the very best of my ability. But I’m not perfect and, like most people, can always stand to become more committed to commitment.

Which is why I like how Hardy ends this piece:

[C]reate conditions that make the achievement of your commitment inevitable. Leave yourself “no outlet.” Make it a habit, your deepest devotion, to respond to your conscious voice immediately. Never drown it out.

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Quote of the Day

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In honour of the NHL’s Heritage Classic yesterday afternoon between the Edmonton Oilers and the Winnipeg Jets, the Quote of the Day must necessarily come from The Great One, Wayne Gretzky.

“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

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Quote of the Day

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“Whenever you read a good book, it’s like the author is right there, in the room, talking to you, which is why I don’t like to read good books.”

Sometimes the day calls for an oldie but a goodie to kickstart things on the right note. If you grew up on a healthy dose of Saturday Night Live in the 1990s, then you’re definitely familiar with the name Jack Handey. Between ’91 and ’98, Phil Hartman would start off the relaxation video-like segment by declaring in that soothing voice of his, “And now, Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey…” after which Mr. Handey himself would read one of his deep thoughts, which went beyond the satirical and outrageous, yet still managed to make people laugh so hard they’d be peeing from their eyes. Yeah, you thought it was rain!

So who was this Jack of all trades, Handey of none? Actually, he’s a real guy (still alive), and yes his name is in fact Jack Handey. If you want to see a complete list of these Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey, click here. Otherwise, here are a few more to contemplate on a deep, profound level.

“Children need encouragement.  So if a kid gets an answer right, tell him it was a lucky guess.  That way, he develops a good, lucky feeling.”

“One day one of my little nephews came up to me and asked me if the equator was a real line that went around the Earth, or just an imaginary one.  I had to laugh.  Laugh and laugh.  Because I didn’t know, and I thought that maybe by laughing he would forget what he asked me.”

“One thing kids like is to be tricked.  For instance, I was going to take my little nephew to Disneyland, but instead I drove him to an old burned-out warehouse.  “Oh, no,” I said, “Disneyland burned down.”  He cried and cried, but I think that deep down, he thought it was a pretty good joke.  I started to drive over to the real Disneyland, but it was getting pretty late.”

Finally, one last one that seems quite apropos because of what’s going on today throughout North America. (I still can’t believe this has led to McDonald’s pulling Ronald McDonald from their starting line up! )

“To me, clowns aren’t funny.  In fact, they’re kinda scary.  I’ve wondered where this started, and I think it goes back to the time I went to the circus and a clown killed my dad.”

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CBC Short Story Contest

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Could you use $6,000? A national readership? Fame and glory beyond your wildest imagination? Okay, as long as the first two do it for you, then you should click here to learn more about the 2017 CBC Short Story Prize.

Deadline is October 31, 2016 at 11:59 p.m. EST. Stories (including titles) must be between 1,200 and 1,800 words. You don’t even have to live in Canada. All you do need is one of them awesome blue passports proving you’re a Canuck through and through.

Go for gold, all you short storyists (my word, not theirs)!

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Quote of the Day

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Not only does Vietnam rank among my favourite places in the world, but one of my most enduring memories of the country is how you can purchase a photocopied version of Graham Green’s The Quiet American (1955) anywhere you go, though truth be told The End of the Affair will always remain his true masterpiece in my mind. From Hanoi all the way down to Saigon (HCMC), you’re bound to find a copy of this “quiet” classic in its plastic casing and impossible-to-find-on-the-Internet green cover that is unique only (to my knowledge) to Vietnamese photocopiers.

Considered one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, Greene was the author of more than 25 novels during his lifetime. He was also one of the rare cases of someone who could mesmerize you as much with his prose as with his storyline. Case in point, this shot-to-the-heart, poignant sentence from The Quiet American, which I’m convinced was the impetus behind Dame A.S. Byatt’s beautiful (and Booker Prize-winning) novel, Possession(1990), the same woman who would then go on to help propel the career of a young man named David Mitchell after reading the ARC for number9dream (2003) on a transatlantic flight more than a decade ago. But back to Mr. Greene and The Quiet American

“The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation.”

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The Hockey of Literature

Image result for william faulkner  +   Image result for gordie howe

David Davis wrote an awesome piece in the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) called “The Puck Stops Here: A Hockey Lit Survey.” If you thought man’s greatest pastime (reading) couldn’t join forces with our greatest sport (hockey, no, not the field variety), then think again.

The strange (fascinating?) thing about this is has to do with the principal character in this LARB piece, William Faulkner, the good old Southern boy who was more interested in war and riding horses than anything to do with a rubber puck and a bunch of Canadians skating around an ice surface in between beating each other up.

But all that changed, apparently, when a little-known magazine at the time, Sports Illustrated, sent Faulkner to a Rangers-Canadiens game at MSG in the winter of 1955. As Faulkner would later write:

“[The game] seemed discorded and inconsequent, bizarre and paradoxical like the frantic darting of the weightless bugs which run on the surface of stagnant pools. Then it would break, coalesce through a kind of kaleidoscopic whirl like a child’s toy, into a pattern, a design almost beautiful, as if an inspired choreographer had drilled a willing and patient and hard-working troupe of dancers — a pattern, design which was trying to tell him something, say something to him urgent and important and true in that second before, already bulging with the motion and the speed, it began to disintegrate and dissolve.”

From Faulkner’s impressions of players who “would not emerge like the sweating barehanded behemoths from the troglodyte mass of football, but instead as fluid and fast and effortless as rapier thrusts or lightning ” to the children’s classic, The Hockey Sweater, to the sport’s Golden Age, Summit Series, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo – this article has it all!

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Quote of the Day

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I’ve read Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha (1922) three times, and each time I do – or even come across one of its golden nuggets of wisdom as seen below – I sit back and smile.

According to my two good friends, Mr. Wiki and Ms. Pedia, “The word Siddhartha is made up of two words in the Sanskrit language, siddha (achieved) + artha (what was searched for), which together means ‘he who has found meaning (of existence), or he [or she] who has attained his goals’.”

Here’s today’s morsel of wisdom:

“Once he said to her: ‘You are like me; you are different from other people. You are Kamala and no one else, and within you there is a stillness and sanctuary to which you can retreat any time and be yourself, just as I can. Few people have that capacity and yet everyone could have it.”  

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Quote of the Day

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Today’s sage words come from what may very well be the most prolific fiction writer in the English language, His Majesty Stephen King. From his treatise on the craft that launched him to stratospheric heights, On Writing, ironically enough this quote comes from page 101.

“Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.”

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Short Story Contest

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The good folks over at ScreenCraft are having a short story/flash fiction/novella contest for stories that demonstrate “special cinematic potential.” The contest is open to people of any nationality, and there’s no limit to how many stories you can submit. It’s $29 per entry, with a word count limit of 20,000 words. Winner takes home $1,000 plus a few other goodies. Deadline is December 19, 2016.

For more information and details about rules and eligibility, click here.

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