Adam Renn Olenn

“Oh, damn it to hell, anyway. Damn everybody and everything. And damn me especially because i made her happy for half a day and put her in a spot where living was nice and it was hard to die.”

From “My Gun is Quick” by Mickey Spillane

(Special thanks to Mike Marano for wising me up to this)

I think the thing that’s so heartbreaking and wonderful about The Great Gatsby is that Gatsby is an analog for the elemental bittersweet of the human condition.  

His love for Daisy is so powerful and complete and untenable that it rings with mortality.  It’s like life: you love it, you want to preserve it, you want to cradle its sweet moments forever, but they are all, all, destined to slip inexorably from your grasp.

Ouch.

-Adam

JJ Grey & Mofro - I Believe from Hop on Vimeo.

From The Great Gatsby, end of chapter 4:

The modesty of the demand shook me. He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths — so that he could “come over” some afternoon to a stranger’s garden.

When Fitzgerald connects, he takes the ball deep.

Thanks to Chuck Wendig’s 250 Things You Should Know About Writing, I am now a 9th-dan black belt in using the highlight function of my Kindle. It’s a passed platter of intellectual hors d’oevres – scallops of insight wrapped in unicorn bacon.

There are many wonderful nuggets of concision in here, all swaddled in punk-rock-space-pirate swagger.

If you need to teach writing, you can steal from this book like it was an unattended Circle K after a Hurricane.  And given that you can buy it for your Kindle for $0.99, I’d say it’s worth hucking a buck to Chuck.

This book is a great guide to body language and other behavioral cues that tell you how to interpret what someone is really saying.

I know that my characters often look away, or scratch a chin, etc.  But with this book as a guide, I can make those gestures more specific, more meaningful, and more true to life.  And thus I recommend it to you as well.

You Can Read Anyone, by David J. Lieberman

It seems like a really smart way to engage the book-buying public, and to create a real community of readers at the same time.

Come on Boston, we can be the Joe Louis of LitPunch.

I have been declared a genius.

Yes, it was by my five-year-old daughter.

Yes, that makes it doubly awesome.

And yes, it’s pronounced “geenie-yus.”

Naturally, temperance ruled the day and I only took a couple I scooped as many as my greedy, digitized arms could carry and ran away cackling.

To get the goods, go here.

I just found out about this awesomeness, but if you want to take advantage you’d better click quick.  The ‘sale’ ends today.

Like the tsetse, the barfly is fundamentally parasitic by nature.

cigar and crickets
full moon on a summer’s eve
just like the old days

Read it at the source.