Via Neil Gaiman: a blog devoted entirely to pictures of misused quotation marks. Just yesterday we find gems such as alleged candy and what are they scooping. Good stuff.
While I’m using friends from Bard as excuses to link to Neil Gaiman’s blog, here are a couple of bits for Adrianne. It seems that no matter how long you’ve been writing for a living, or how long the lines are at your book signings, some chapters:
There’s an odd point in writing, when you reach a bit that you’ve known was going to happen for years. Years and years. And then it doesn’t happen like you thought it would…
It’s as if there’s a ghost-story behind the text and nobody knows it’s there but me.
Still on Chapter Seven of The Graveyard Book, but I’m well into the last half of the chapter, and it no longer feels like I’m walking towards the horizon, with the horizon retreating as I advance… I’ve written about eleven easy pages today, and cannot wait to get back to it. If I’m still awake and writing I may pull an all-nighter.
It barely feels like I’m writing it. Mostly it feels like I’m the first one reading it.
are better than others:
The Graveyard Book is back on track, I think, and the thorny and evil thicket that was Chapter Six has been traversed and, I am told, does not sound like I was making it up as I went along, but sounds as if I knew what it was about the whole time. This makes me happy, because it was miserable writing it.
March 4th, 2008 at 6:07 am
Not a misused quotation mark thing, but an I-don’t-actually-know-what-this-word-means thing:
When I was a grad student, I stopped by the coffeehouse for lunch and beheld the following sign: “In lieu of our best efforts, the cappuccino machine isn’t working.”