The First Line

March 6, 2011
By Ryan
cornfield

The first line is everything.

The first line leads to the second line, and so on, until there are no lines left to read.

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The Sting

September 25, 2010
By Ryan
bee

Earlier this year, I submitted a story to the inaugural issue of 48HR Magazine, which invited writers to craft stories based on a theme in about 24 hours. Editors and designers took the accepted submissions and put together a magazine in another 24 hours.

My 1,200-word story made the cut, though that theme—cut—continued into the publication, in which the piece appeared sans about 900 words.

I was still thrilled to be published, and to be featured on the magazine’s website. Still, I wanted people to be able to read the full story, which follows.

P.S.—I successfully submitted a piece to the magazine’s second issue as well. Though my feature isn’t online, check out Longshot and grab a copy.

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Art in Entropy

March 30, 2010
By Ryan

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.

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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QUOTES

Baudelaire on Genius

"Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will."
--Charles Baudelaire, from The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays

P.D. James on Modernity and Tradition

"We live in an age notable for a kind of fashionable silliness and imbued with a restless desire for change.

It sometimes seems that nothing old, nothing well-established, nothing which has evolved through centuries of experience and loving use escapes our urge to diminish, revise or abolish it.

Above all every organisation has to be relevant—a very fashionable word—to the needs of modern life, as if human beings in the twenty-first century are somehow fundamentally different in their needs and aspirations from all previous generations.

A country which ceases to value and learn from its history, neglects its language and literature, despises its traditions and is unified only by a common frenetic drive for getting and spending and for material wealth, will lose more than its nationhood; it will lose its soul."

--P.D. James, from “Through All the Changes Scenes of Life: Living with the Prayer Book”

Later Wittgenstein on Philosophy

"When we do philosophy we are like savages, primitive people, who hear the expressions of civilized men, put a false interpretation on them, and then draw the queerest conclusions from it."
--Ludwig Wittgenstein (via Fors Clavigera)

Dare Greatly

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

--Theodore Roosevelt, from his speech "Citizenship In A Republic"

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