Musings of a Chocoholic Romance Author: What Do You Mean?

Thursday, January 24, 2008

What Do You Mean?

...
Anyone else have those "What do you mean?" conversations with your children? Yanno, they often start out something like this:

"Please wash your hair tonight when you shower."

Kid: "What do you mean? With shampoo?"

Picture perplexed mother here. :-s "Um, yeah. Isn't that the general method?"

Kid: "So you mean you want me to wash my hair with shampoo tonight."

It's enough to make you wanna whip out the ol' dry erase board and make a flow chart to fully illustrate the concept.

"Yes. That's what I mean."

"Okay, so I'm washing my hair with shampoo tonight."

ARG! YES! YES! Please! Or wait! No! I have an idear! We'll be rich! We'll just find some way to harvest the oil off the kid's hair and face to make an alternate fuel source for vehicles!

"Yes. You are. Thank you. No, the answer isn't changing, don't rephrase it again."

Kid casts a wicked glance your direction, then retires to his room to gloat that he nailed your blood pressure---dinged the bell, as it were. It's okay. The blood pressure will return to normal... just as soon as you're done writing yourself a sticky note to smell the kid's head after shower, for the telltale scent of shampoo.

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Quotes About Writing

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word. ~Catherine Drinker Bowen

Forget all the rules. Forget about being published. Write for yourself and celebrate writing. ~Melinda Haynes

My purpose is to entertain myself first and other people secondly. ~John D. MacDonald

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else. ~Gloria Steinem

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. ~Thomas Mann

Easy reading is damned hard writing. ~Anonymous

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to. ~Somerset Maugham

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. ~E. L. Doctorow

The secret of becoming a writer is to write, write and keep on writing. ~Ken MacLeod\

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards. ~Robert A. Heinlein

Never throw up on an editor. ~Ellen Datlow

If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write. ~Stephen King

There are no rules in writing. There are useful principles. Throw them away when they're not useful. But always know what you're throwing away. ~Will Shetterly

Books are never finished, They are merely abandoned. ~Oscar Wilde

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. ~Jack London

If you wait for inspiration, you're not a writer, but a waiter. ~Anonymous

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master. ~Ernest Hemingway

You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing. ~Gene Wolfe