No Longer A Place for Second Thoughts.Forward!

When you're a writer, you are basically a retailer of ideas.
Ideas are your stock. The writing is your product. So, your inventory costs are very low.
Used to be, you needed a typewriter, paper, some envelopes and some stamps. Now, you need a computer and a decent internet connection.
And lots and lots and lots of time. Which is always expensive in anyone's accounting. But for writers--even though you can sneak in a paragraph in the morning before taking the kids to school, or change a word before you go to bed at night--it takes an astonishing amount of time to whittle words into sharp little points that drive your idea home. Even the worst, most prolific novelist really makes pennies per hour when all is taken into account.
But even years are not always enough time to make a good writer into a great one. Ideas--however good--sometimes moulder away in the mind's warehouse--slouched over in dull, lumpy shapes on musty couches, taking up space.
You have all those second thoughts as you go over them--maybe you can make something of them yet, if you just went at it again, brushed them up a bit, moved them around, maybe looked at them from a different angle. Maybe.
But I had this other idea. I'm selling actual stuff. Big stuff that takes up space and costs real money. Lots of money.
Soon, I'll be moving this blog to my online retail site--Hippique-Hippik. I'll have second thoughts about 19th century French sidesaddles and silver stirrup cups.
I don't have time for Second Thoughts anymore. It's forward over the wall!

Comments

The Lost Designer of the 80's

Claude Barthelemy seems to have been one of those if-you-needed-to-ask-you-didn't-need-to-know designers. In the '80's, he was listed as a young, hot couturier alongside go-the-distance blue chips like Karl Lagerfeld and Lanvin with his oversized sweaters, minis, leggings and fur-trimmed stoles. Exclusive stores carried his soft-edged jackets to shoppers in the know. And then what happened? His pleated skirts, intarsia sweaters, and naughty, zippered wool catsuits still fetch high prices in vintage world and any dealer with his elegantly simple, Gallic tag on her racks raises a flutter in second-hand seekers. He designed for Barbie, for heaven's sake! But the designer himself, who seems to have cut a meteoric swath across the runways and then...? So what's the story with this wasp-waisted pleated skirt? I wondered what else this woman could have dropped off on her Goodwill drive-by--a Chanel original? A couture Pucci? Surely someone this linked in wouldn't just

Change Your Tone!!

I know I have a "unique voice." But I can count on one hand how many people I know who can stand listening to their own voice. (That is not saying there aren't those guys who seem to love talking just to hear the sound of their own voice; but if you literally played it back to them --they'd cringe and crawl under the sofa.) When I was in the 3rd grade, I was chosen to be in some experimental speech/voice therapy at our school. They tried for many weeks to raise the pitch of my voice by having me go up and down the do-re-mi scales until I hit one that they thought sounded pleasing. I had a deep, true contralto voice somewhere a few notes below "do." With the sort of rasping, old-chain-smoker undertones of a freckled Billie Holiday. The experimenters settled on "fa." For 20 minutes three times a week, I got to leave Ms. Foster's third grade classroom and go to the convent living room where I would sing "do-re-mi-fa" and say

E is for Ephemera--The Beauty of the Impermanent #A2ZChallenge

Ephemera Vulgata (garden variety Mayfly) Ephemera: From the Greek: Ephemeron --a short-lived insect. Members of the family Ephemeridae include dragon and damsel flies as well as may flies in the genus Ephemera. For the rest of us: the detritus of our lives: concert tickets, bus tokens, valentine's day cards, matchbooks, packaging, coupons: objects meant to be useful for a brief period of time. And then what? Advocates of simplicity say it should be thrown away. I have tried. But I don't think they're looking close enough. Simply because it is not meant to be durable doesn't mean much of it isn't a tiny window into some artist's mind. I am not ashamed to say I buy many things based on the cleverness or beauty of its packaging. I consider this a way of supporting the arts--manufacturers paid someone to design the structure, the image, the lettering. It may not be as grand and sweeping as an operatic performance, but the opera itself is ephe

Second Hand, Second Thoughts

Search This Blog