I mentioned Bo’s Café Life in a previous post. Today’s newsletter from Wayne E. Pollard on the thrill of sending off a query made me smile, what with my own history of making 650 submissions and knowing that many other writers have been querying away with fingers crossed:
The trend for reading in small chunks continues, as there’s now a site aimed at those who like to read while perched on the porcelain throne. Poop Fiction promises you ‘stuff to read in your time of need.’
At last! I’ve finally found a market for my short stories and poems – and they’re sitting targets! (I said sitting….)
‘Bo’s Café Life’ is a series of comic cartoons created by Wayne E. Pollard. They take the simple form of coffee cups representing the thoughts and comments of their various writer drinkers.
https://boscafelife.wordpress.com/
Pollard is a writer and cartoonist, and his site was voted one of the best 101 websites for writers in 2013. I subscribe to his daily cartoon, and though it can be a bit hit-and-miss, he sometimes really nails the dilemmas that we writers face. I find myself smiling wryly at cartoons like this:
My old cat Pushkin (after the Russian poet, playwright and novelist) used to love laying on my laptop keyboard, more for the warmth, I think, than attention-seeking.
Former Booker Prize Chairman Professor John Sutherland has come up with a novel idea – condensing the nation’s 25 favourite beach reads into 140 characters for the Twitter generation.
Whoops! We’ve all had to bite our tongues sometimes….
http://www.adweek.com/galleycat/when-not-to-correct-peoples-grammar-video-goes-viral/107817
We knew this already, but apparently, the rest of the world needs to know—book lovers are good lovers.
It’s all true—isn’t it?
I’ve been following the work of Gavin Aung Than, who is a freelance cartoonist based in Melbourne, Australia.
His Zen Pencils cartoon blog adapts inspirational quotes into comic stories and is well worth a look.
Try these two stories for inspiration in your work as an artist:
http://zenpencils.com/comic/calling/
http://zenpencils.com/comic/kevinsmith/
My friend in New Zealand wrote to me recently, saying that she was looking forward to doing something in the ‘arvo.’ I had no idea what she meant, briefly wondering if an arvo was a make of car that I hadn’t heard of before.
She’s lived and worked in Australia a lot, so I’ve become used to hearing of ‘barbies’ for barbeques, and arvo turned out to mean afternoon. One of the funniest Australian abbreviations, to my mind anyway, is that their outlaw biker gang members are known as ‘bikies’ – which make them sound like cuddly toys.
I knew an Australian woman who married a Cornishman and settled here. She was wildly amused by the expression ‘have a root around in my drawers’, meaning to search for an item, as to root means something considerably ruder in Oz.
If any of you are thinking of creating an Australian character, you could get some good tips from this video.
Mistinguett, French singer (1875-1956)