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I always think the Feast of All Saints is the perfect day to start NaNoWriMo. Because saints are the guys who’ve arrived, the ones who started just like everyone else and made it big. They’re the ones to look to for inspiration, whose fellowship it is the goal to join.
| Isaac Asimov of the Sense of Wonder, | inspire us |
| Arthur C. Clarke of Hopeful Futures, | inspire us |
| Robert A. Heinlein of the Self-Reliant Heroes, | inspire us |
| Ursula K. Le Guin of the Quiet Truths, | inspire us |
| Roger Zelazny of the Myth Made Real, | inspire us |
| H.P. Lovecraft of the Lurking Dread, | inspire us |
| Neil Gaiman, whose gods walk among us, | inspire us |
(And tomorrow is the Feast of All Souls, the day to meditate upon readers.)
Dia de Todos los Santos. Time to send the monsters back to sleep.
Here I am in the lobby of a downtown Boulder hotel, playing host to a midnight write-in that an amazing 20+ people attended on a Monday night. I just finished my first scene, putting me at about 2300 words before November is two hours in -- woo-hoo! Then, safely ahead of schedule, I checked Twitter and saw this post.
This is beautiful. You turned a ritual from my Catholic childhood into something freshly meaningful to me today, even more so 'cause I'm freshly home from World Fantasy and still feeling that warm fuzzy feeling of SF/F as community. And there you go, totally making me tear up in front of the whole night-owl contingent of the Boulder region.
Thank you.
(@NaNoBoulder is me, by the way, in my capacity as Boulder ML.)
Walter M. Miller, help us to be patient with this fallen world.
Terry Carr, give us insight when we read.
James White, pray for us.
Pratchett, be clever and smart, and remind us that writing is fun. Inspire us.
J R R Tolkien, teach us to build worlds out of words.
Tanith Lee, teach us to blaze them ib stained light.
Eric Frank Russell, teach us to ply our pens lightly.
Patricia McKillip, teach us the severity of craft and bounty of spirit that is the portion of poets.
Philip K. Dick, teach us to hallucinate.
John Brunner, remind us of the truth behind the story.
Elizabeth Zimmermann, remind us that, like garter stitch, even the plainest writing can be art.
Me @ 5: Spillchucker, teach me tw read twice before posting.
E.R. Eddison, teach us not to be afraid to go over the top, not just from time to time but for whole books.
rea #9, surely that should be "John Norman, lead us to Tarnation"?
Lois McMaster Bujold, teach us that love is important, but not the only thing.
#1 ::: Teresa Nielsen Hayden :
If the sleep of reason engenders monsters, what does the sleep of monsters engender?
Gray Woodland: "teach us to blaze them in stained light" is a phrase of beauty and truth.
Lois McMaster Bujold, teach us to fill our worlds, not just with characters, but with people.
Nancy Lebovitz@14: I'm going to say "rhyme".
Nancy Lebovitz @ 14: Reason - until with strange aeons, dead dreamers rise again.
I can't get this into the format, but Heinlein knew that the world was full of interesting details, and that those details gave clues about more than themselves. May this inspire us.
Jane Yolen, patron of young wonder, inspire us.
Ray Bradbury of the lyrical prose, inspire us
Clifford Simak, for being what I expected him to be from his stories...
Steven Brust, help me make my protagonist sympathetic, no matter how big a jerk he is.
Lois McMaster Bujold, remind us that everyone in the universe has to be making a living somehow.
Connie Willis, for still being excited when she's awarded yet another Hugo.
Olaf Stapledon, teach us to fill the biggest canvases.
Robert Sheckley, guide us through absurdity to truth.
Jack Williamson, inspire us to reinvent our work to remain fresh as the world changes.
Barry Hughart, show us how to find new stories outside our own traditions.
Guy Gavriel Kay, help me to weave the disparate strands of my stories into a solid emotional core
Jo Walton, teach me better to inclue
By the way, just as not all saints are known to Rome, so are not all great writers known to the New York Times bestseller list. What we become when we are our truest selves, as saints or as writers, may not involve stained glass windows or Hugos.
Robert Kirkman, write stories of superheroes with things actually at stake.
Steven Moffat, make time wibble and wobble, turn causation on its head, and complicate things just enough.
Connie Willis, teach us that no level of accomplishment justifies looking down on others, and that at the core of wisdom there is humor, and at the core of humor there is wisdom.
Samuel R. Delany, world-shaper with detail, inspire us.
(I am loving this thread.)
Peter S. Beagle, master of gentle wonder and magical creatures, teach me to follow my unicorn no matter what shape she takes.
Neal Stephenson to remind us that we stand on the shoulders of giants.
Norton Juster, master of all things linear and circular, inspire us
Alan Lomax of Folkloric Tradition, remind us.
@Teresa @1: You knew just what I needed to hear, today. For reasons of my own, I thank you.
H.P. Lovecraft, master of eldritch horror, help us to remember that less is more.
Steven King, master of mass-produced horror, help us to remember that less is ALWAYS more.
Zenna Henderson of the Love of all People, Whatever Their Origins, inspire us.
Larry Niven, of the Everyman, and how his story can be more fascinating than that of princes, inspire us.
I have a dear friend in Lawrence who did himself up proper yesterday for his classes. He teaches science fiction and creative writing.
http://mckitterick.livejournal.com/693391.html
wonderous inspiration
Diane Duane, teach us to write prose that sings using only ordinary words.
Jack Kerouac of the manic typing session, inspire us
Nancy Lebowitz at #14:
Hobgoblins of little minds.
Andre Norton, gather your children at your feet.
Suzette Haden Elgin, bring the wisdom of the mountain folk to us.
Joanna Russ, never let us forget the strength and grace that is our common heritage.
Alice Sheldon, show us ourselves in the mirror of other creatures.
Jack Vance, show us that the journey is the thing itself.
Lloyd Alexander, who taught us that lying bards are the truest friends, that there is glory in horseshoes, pride in pig-keeping, and grief in kingship, inspire us.
Anonymous writers, bards and scribes, who shared stories not for their own glory, but because the stories themselves mattered most, inspire us.
Tim Powers, of faith in the fantastic, possessor of the strongest research-fu, inspire us.
John Myers Myers guide us to drink from the Hippocrene.
I would have come up with something more like:
Roger Zelazny, who mercilessly dissected human nature, protect us from those who would emulate your protagonists...
(I'm not sure "myth made real" would have occured to me, though I think I see where it's coming from. That's really interesting. I wonder if it would change my read on any of his books.)
Harlan and Barry N., both who stole the sun to light the night inspire us
Kirby of the Power Cosmic, inspire us.
John M. Ford, master of the line that led down a rabbit hole of reference and inference, teach us to find le mot juste...just when we need it most.
Inspire us.
Harper Lee and Gertrude Friedberg, who showed us that even a writer with just one novel in them should definitely just write it ... inspire us.
Poul Anderson, of chivalry among the stars, inspire us
Madeleine L'Engle, of the power of love against evil, inspire us
Spider Robinson, of shared joy and grief, inspire us
John Varley, who knoweth that people are people regardless of their form or gender, inspire us
Katherine Kurtz, who knoweth that faith lends strength to the actions that are meaningful, inspire us
Diana Wynne Jones, who knoweth that magic surrounds us, do we but look, inspire us
Kim Stanley Robinson, who knoweth that Man must grow and change, yet remains ever human, inspire us
Is anyone else hearing the plainchant in their heads?
Hal Clement, who showed us the wonders of worlds inspire us
B. Durbin, of course!
William Moulton Marston, who gently mythologized a different sexuality, inspire us
Alan Moore, who took a puzzle's pieces and built an entirely new - and better - picture, inspire us
Gary Gygax, who gave us rules to tell each other stories with, inspire us
Edward Everett Smith, whose plotlines grew beyond the universe, inspire us
oh dear. I hope I didn't kill the chant.
--Dave
William Morris, bring us bolshiness and beauty.
Lord Dunsany, bring us to the fields we never knew.
Hope Mirrlees, bring them home to us.
James Horner, whose music made the Enterprise boldly go once more, inspire us.
John Williams, who captured a universe in sound, inspire us.
Tom Smith, who can parody anything in 20 seconds or less, inspire us.
David DeLaney @59, I think you have conflated E(dward). E(lmer). Smith with Edward Everett Horton. A strange idea to think of him narrating Fractured Fairy Tales....
Raymond Chandler, walk the mean streets without being mean, and inspire us.
Rod Serling, from the dimension of mind, inspire us.
Jo Clayton, of the Souls of the Worlds, inspire us.
A new tool for breaking writer's block: It rewards you with a kitten picture for every 100 words.
Professor Quinn's ship was a trim blue small-crew freighter. The name, according to the computer at the docking gate, was Expression of Gratitude to the Capital City of My Homeland.
"Expression of Gratitude to the Capital City of My Homeland?" said Lyndy. "The name's larger than the ship is!"
"There's a story there," said Professor Quinn. "But I'm not going to tell you if you're going to be like that about it."
"Oh, go on," said Lyndy. "With a name like that, this is clearly a NaNoWriMo draft. Lengthy anecdotes are a cheap way to bump up the word count."
***
(I'm not doing NaNoWriMo this year. But if my brain is going to keep handing me ship names like that, maybe I should.)
Paul, I always wanted to write a story where there are two ships called the Newton and the Maxwell. Ultimately it turns out that the Newton is really the Newton's Apple, and the main character guesses that the Maxwell is the Maxwell's Equation.
"Oh, no," replies his counterpart. "It's the Maxwell's Silver Hammer."
Instead of Equation, yeah.
David Harmon, that is certainly nicer than Write or Die. I was afraid it might translate your text into LOLcat, but it doesn't.
Paul A. #67: Actually, that ship name sounds like a machine translation, from a language where the original name was two words.
David @ #72:
A perceptive comment; it did actually begin as two words, before I decided that was too bald and started monkeying with it.
(I was half-asleep at the time, which goes some way to explaining not only why it turned out like it did, but why I apparently failed to recall that the ship in question has a perfectly good name already.)
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