Miffed Muses

My muse found me last night. She came in to the living room and stood there, hands on hips, and gave me a look as if to say, ‘Well?‘

Oh dear! I’m in the doghouse, or somewhere! I tried to explain I’ve been busy and that I am going on holiday. She didn’t take one word of it as an excuse. Looks like I need to take my scribbles book with me to keep her happy, if not, amused.

Sigh!

TV Fall Schedule

So, after looking through the new Fall lineup on TV, here’s the only shows I’m interested in watching:

ABC
Sunday 8pm – Once Upon A Time
Monday 10pm – Castle
Thursday 9pm – Grey’s Anatomy
Thursday 10pm – Scandal

NBC
Friday 9pm – Grimm

CBS
Sunday 9pm – The Good Wife

Which begs the question: is that enough to warrant renewing my cable subscription? Me thinks I might not bother. After all, I can always buy the DVDs and therefore, skip the ads.

What say you, good people?

Of Writing & Writers

In order to write you must have the following:

1. Talent
2. A god-given talent
3. Discipline
4. Imagination
5. Creativity

The rest is just punctuation and grammar, anyone can learn those.

Plagiarism & Twain

You’ve got to love Mark Twain…he stated that, “All ideas are second-hand” when discussing his thoughts on plagiarism and originality in a letter to Hellen Keller back in 1903:

“Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that ‘plagiarism’ farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily use by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. When a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men — but we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his. But not enough to signify. It is merely a Waterloo. It is Wellington’s battle, in some degree, and we call it his; but there are others that contributed. It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a telephone or any other important thing — and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite — that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.”

– Mark Twain

[stumbled across when surfing the wobbly wobbly web. apologies for a lack of proper accreditation to the source.]