Art in Entropy

March 30, 2010
By Ryan


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I recently spent a wonderful morning picking avocados in an aunt’s backyard, under a tree humming with bees. The moment was so full of life, but some of the more weather-worn and, well, dying items rusting or flaking around her property caught my eye.
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The same thing happened on a January trip to the beach. I was surrounded by motion and life, but the hole-riddled, sanded-down bits of flotsam drew my attention.
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Floriography

January 19, 2010
By Ryan

Of the two-dozen stories I penned while in my Ficly frenzy of Aught-Nine, this may be the one of which I was the most pleased. I’ve long had a somewhat vague curiosity regarding Victorian flower language, so I researched it and this dark little bit of fiction was the result.

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The Street Sweepers

September 7, 2009
By Ryan

I recently penned this short story at ficly.com, and it managed to attract some attention. It seems like a good jumping off point for me for a collection of urban fantasy short stories:

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Recent Crayon Drawings

July 22, 2009
By Bret

While waiting for the arrival of a new baby, I've been spending a lot of time keep my two-year-old daughter amused so that my wife can rest. One thing we've been doing from time to time is drawing with crayons. It's been a long time since I've done that (or any sort of drawing, really), but I've been having fun.

Here are a couple of my recent creations...click the thumbnails below to see full images:

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Me Too Me Too

June 24, 2009
By Bret

After Ryan posted (and told me) about Ficly, and how it had opened the creative floodgates for him, 1024 characters at a time, I considered joining.

At first, I didn't, but then I realized that I had a story I wanted to write.  I had tried writing it as 55 Fiction once, but it didn't quite fit.  It works much better within the 1024 character constraint, though, and it's now live on the site.  I'll be posting, as additional ideas come to fruition, under the name 'halfpenny'.

My story, titled Survival, is after the jump.

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QUOTES

Humility in the wrong place

"What we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed....

...the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether."

–G.K. Chesterton, from Orthodoxy

Make No Little Plans

"Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans. Aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us."
–Daniel Burnham, architect of Chicago, quoted in Charles Moore, Daniel H. Burnham: Planner of Cities, II:147. (via Christ is Deeper Still)

Borges on Short Stories


“It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books – setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.”
–Jorge Luis Borges, from the preface to Ficciones

Strickler on Top Ten Lists

See full post for Yancey Strickler’s 2005 taxonomy of top ten music lists, as cited here.

Berry on Writing Poetry


“Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.”
–Wendell Berry, from How to be a Poet

Twain (?) on History


“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
—Attributed to Mark Twain

Lewis on God's Glory


“A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.”
–C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Merwin on Writing


“I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t
you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write”
—W.S. Merwin, Opening the Hand