"Though it has been a tumultuous year, crime didn't take a break," Charles Fleming said to the Interpol staff. "With that being said, you all have done a fantastic job, but there's one detective who truly went above what was needed. ... Detective Iris Augusta ..."
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When you are reading a book, there is nothing worse than finding misspelled words and grammatical errors. That is where I come in. I have done proofreading for many years for businesses and authors.Seeing yourself as a writer, objectively, can be tough. There are periods when everything flows and you experience euphoria. Other times, I get trapped in my memories, or on a spectrum of emotions ranging from positive to “is this really happening to me?” I always pray that on any given day I can find time to write, and that my imagination is working. A defiant, uncooperative, or half-aslep muse can take a week or two off your life, if not longer.
Before tackling these challenges, every so often I ask myself why I write. Over a fifty year career of publishing fiction and non-fiction, writing screenplays, and making films, the why can vary significantly. Creativity has many motivations. If you want to focus on one particular genre, or are fixated by characters that must appear in every book you write, great. If you want to explore multiple genres, terrific. When you are engrossed by different subjects as the world—and your world, too—changes, readers want to read what you have to say. If you chase fame and money and Instagram followers, you will likely comprise the integrity of the majority of novelists today. I wrote my first short story at fifteen or sixteen, to escape the standard adolescent turmoil. Reading, music, and sports were helpful but only scratched the surface of discovery. Creating characters who could be my friends, who pulled me into their world to teach me things, brought me happiness that I found nowhere else. I had no ambition to show my writing to anyone. My work space in my bedroom was off limits. I taped a “no trespassing” sign to my typewriter. In college, my why changed again. I wanted to read and learn from every great writer, including some peers in my creative writing classes. Arthur Miller, Joseph Conrad and William Burroughs were my favorites (a generational thing). When I compared my own writing with the super talented, I developed an anxiety that wouldn’t let me look in a mirror more than once a day. Time passed. Married, with two wonderful kids, my wife and I took jobs as real estate agents, yet my muse was like a termite that kept burrowing deeper, looking for something. I wanted to give myself another chance at writing. By age 32, stealing time whenever possible, I managed to write and publish three novels. Two were reviewed in The New York Times, and one was made into a TV series. I thought of quitting my real estate job. ReplyForward 0 Comments
"Poems usually come to me when I feel deeply moved by the beauty or pain of life. I hear a phrase and it stays with me until I write it down. Sometimes I don’t understand the phrase, but I sense that it has intelligence and power. Once I write it down, the phrase becomes a skeleton key that opens doors into my psyche. I allow the words to flow in the moment and then usually revise, expand, and contract the poem over a period of months or years. Sometimes a poem arrives whole and complete, but that’s the exception rather than the rule. It’s important to me that each word and sentence in my poems convey soul essence."
—Luisa Elena Kolker
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