Status Updates From The View from the Cheap Sea...

"Outrageous Tales was an offensive comic. Its purpose was to shock, to point out that the Bible contained material that was outrageously unpleasant and to bring that out in the open to let it be talked about seen (...) Gerard Biard, editor of Charlie Hebdo concludes his speech. 'Growing up to be a citizen is to learn that some ideas can be shocking. Being shocked is a part of democratic debate. Being shot is not.'"

"I saved the document on the computer, and I realized I'd finished writing a book. I wondered what I'd learned, and found myself remembering something Gene Wolfe had told me, six months earlier 'You never learn how to write a novel,' he said. 'You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.'"

"It's good to be a child again, for a little while, and to fear - not governments, not regulations, not infidelities or accountants or distant wars, but ghosts and such things that do not exist, and even if they do, they can do nothing to hurt us."

"Stories had been a way of learning about life without experiencing it, or perhaps of experiencing it as an eighteenth-century poisoner dealt with poisons, taking them in tiny doses, such that the prisoner could cope with ingesting things that would kill someone who was not inured to them. Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it."

"As we get older, each thing we do, each thing we write reminds us of something else we've done. Events rhyme. Nothing quite happens for the first time anymore."