Barrett > Recent Status Updates

“
The bottle only lasted an hour. But others were easy to find, as one night of drinking became two, then three.

Reading aloud to Squid

A musician needs to be heard; a writer needs to be read. I want to move people’s hearts. I want my books in stores all over the world. I couldn’t stand to be like Mom and Rory, living their little and self-contained lives, with no great projects or prospects to propel them from one chapter to the next. I want the world to wait with bated breath for what I will say next

“
Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic. Writing is creating something out of nothing, is opening doors to other lands. Writing gives you power to shape your own world when the real one hurts too much. To stop writing would kill me.
“
^ little heavy-handed June

Most authors will confess they hear an “inner editor,” an internal naysayer that nitpicks and hampers their attempts at first drafts…

Too trite. Too formulaic…

The rhythm’s off. That imagery doesn’t work. Seriously? Another em dash

I had the half-baked idea that if I couldn’t make it as a writer then at least I’d have a steady income as a programmer, until I realized that the programming market is also quickly becoming too saturated for anyone who isn’t a natural talent

There’s no need to dress it up. We are all vultures, and some of us—and I mean Athena, here—are simply better at finding the juiciest morsels of a story, at ripping through bone and gristle to the tender bleeding heart and putting all the gore on display.

There’s only a growing sense of dread and disappointment, until the bitterness becomes too much, until you start to feel stupid for believing that you could be an author at all.

“Writing is such a solitary activity. You have no assurance that what you’re creating has any value, and any indication that you’re behind in the rat race sends you spiraling into the pits of despair.”

^ ^ ^

you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior.

That killed me. Her middle name is Josephine, for God's sake, not Weatherfield. She doesn't like it, though. Every time I see her she's got a new middle name for herself.

In the first place, I'm sort of an atheist. I like Jesus and all, but I don't care too much for most of the other stuff in the Bible. Take the Disciples, for instance. They annoy the hell out of me, if you want to know the truth. They were all right after Jesus was dead and all, but while He was alive, they were about as much use to Him as a hole in the head.

“I don’t exactly know what I mean by that, but I mean it.”

I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It's awful. If I'm on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I'm going, I'm liable to say I'm going to the opera. It's terrible

“The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that’s the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star …”

“Horrific as it was, the present dark, I was afraid to leave it for the other, permanent dark”

“
Viewed from a distance, his character projected an impression of solidity and wholeness which was in fact as insubstantial as a hologram; up close, he was all motes and light, you could pass your hand right through him.
“

“a terrible place, a cursed place,” he said dreamily—cities and cities buried beneath each other, cities torn down, cities burnt and their bricks melted to glass … a terrible place, he said absently, a cursed place

“I slept all day, face down in the pillow, a comfortable dead-man’s float only remotely disturbed by a chill undertow of reality—talk, footsteps, slamming doors—which threaded fitfully through the dark, blood-warm waters of dream.”

Re-reading aloud with Sydni :-)

“…we’d done our errands, not to mention an awful lot of cocaine in the parking lot of Burger King…”