Salut/Rencontres

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.” – Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths you Can’t Avoid

“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.”  – Oscar Wilde

“We should have a great fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what the are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.

– John Locke

“Language forces us to perceive the world as man presents it to us.”

– Julia Penelope

 

 

Salut/Rencontres

Antoine comes to the café

Each morning

A magazine in hand

Periodicals about small boats

Or great ships

The sea courses

Through his veins

Antoine skims le journal (newspaper)

Drinks his café

Diving deeper into

His nautical world

Pausing to acknowledge

Friends

Today he shows me

A new book “Milk Cows”

U boats of WWII – hardback

En anglais

In turn, I produce my

Latest paperback of French poems

On parting we raise les livres

And laugh

Bisous,

Léa

Affair with Hemingway

“I didn’t want to kiss you goodbye – that was the trouble – I wanted to kiss you good night – and there’s a lot of difference.”  –  Ernest Hemingway

“They love me like a pack of wolves.”   – Ernest Hemingway

“Love is forever. Lust is for the moment. Got a moment?” –  Michael Gorman

 

Affair with Hemingway

 

Remote corners du café

Closerie des Lilas

Summer evenings beneath stars

Sidewalk tables and stories

Late at night – mon chambre

I take you to my bed

Crawl deep inside your stories

I have my way with you

You reach out through time

Together, we do Paris

Huddled in corners

Sipping wine and champagne

Dark Smokey tables shared

Avec Fitzgerald, Ezra et

Ford Madox Ford

War stories, the bulls

Nights at Bricktops

Josephine’s rocking the joint

Gertrude’s salon

Champagne et art du jour

Picasso, Modigliani

Breathless with anticipation

I surrender and plead for more

It is the life – it is life

Bereft, insatiable, pleading for more

C’est magnifique!

 

Bisous,

Léa

Deep in the jaws of a pandemic – If

At times like this, I seek knowledge, wisdom and some comfort from some of those who have lighted the way for many in the past. Instead of the usual quotes, I hope I give you much more today.

 

If               

If you can keep your head when all about you,

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good or talk too wise:

 

If you can dream and not make dreams your master;

If you can think and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear the words you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:

 

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breath a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

 

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And-which is more- you’ll be a man, my son!

 

– Rudyard Kipling 1865 – 1936

I do hope you take his words to heart and perhaps listen to what he is telling us and perhaps you? Despite this poem being a century old, it resonates as if told today for the first time. 

Bisous,

Léa

Wednesday’s Words to Ponder…

                             “It’s no good going on living in the ashes of a dead happiness.”                                          – Nevile Shute, A Town Called Alice

“She looked at him in wonder. “Do people think of me like that? I only did what anybody could have.” “That’s as it may be,” he replied. “The fact is, that you did it.”  – Nevile Shut, A Town Called Alice

“Like some infernal monster, a war can go on killing people  for a long time after it’s all over.”  – Nevile Shut

–

Mike Kirby, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69376924

 

Nevil Shute, born Nevil Shute Norway on 17 January, 1899 in a suburb of London. He was an aeronautical engineer, aviator and a writer. He spent the later part of his life in Australia where he died on 12 January 1960.

Graduating from Oxford in 1922, he attended the Woolwich Royal Military Academy, but was prevented from joining the Royal Flying Corps due to stuttering. However, he did serve as an infantryman in WWI.

In 1931, he set up his own company, Aircraft Construction Company (Airspeed Ltd.) The most famous production of his company was the horsa glider, Horsa. It was one of the battle horses of the Normandy Landing.

By 1944, he was already an established author. Due to this, he sent as a war correspondent during the Normandy landings and again in Burma. By 1948 he flew his own plane to Australia. On his return he looked around himself and felt that the United Kindom was in a decline. A decision was made to emigrate and he moved his family to a farm in Australia. He died there in 1960. 

Many of his novels have been adapted into films. I am hoping to find a film based on the one I just finished reading, Pied Piper, as it has the potential to be an excellent film.  

The actress, Geraldine Fitzgerald (1913 – 2005), was a cousin of Mr. Shute.

 

–

Bisous,

Léa

Happy National Book Lovers Day — bluebird of bitterness

Yes! I can so relate to this post. I couldn’t resist a reblog. HAPPY BOOK LOVERS DAY!

via Happy National Book Lovers Day — bluebird of bitterness

Platform: Self-Publishing

Carrot Ranch Literary Community

How to Build a Readership with Blogging
and Prepare for Publishing by Debby Gies

As writers who choose to self-publish, we must understand that we’ve chosen to be not only writers but publishers, marketers, and promoters of our work because these components are all essential parts of running a business. Yes, your business! If we intend to sell books, it’s in our best interests to learn about these things as well as building an author platform. If we don’t put in the time to promote our work, our books will surely sit and collect dust on the virtual shelves, lost in a sea of hundreds of thousands of other books.

Although we may be publishing in a digital world, our business is no different than if we opened our own brick and mortar store. We wouldn’t leave our doors unlocked and wares left unattended, would we? So, let’s get into…

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Free books or the price of ignorance…

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”  – Haruki Murakami 

“You don’t have to burn books to destoy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”     – Ray Bradbury

For Jack Eason and the other authors who keep us in stories despite the struggle. Please visit Jack at his blog: https://havewehadhelp.wordpress.com/ and do all you can to support our independent authors, presses and publishers.  I owe so much to the books in my life as well as the neighbor’s daughters that taught a three year-old how to read. It saved me.

Free books or the price of ignorance…

The author says nobody wants to buy

Real books, waiting for kindle

Or what they can get for free

Long ago I learned that

Precious little is free

Waiting to see the strings attached

Or what might appear

From behind someone’s back

I will admit to a “free” book

But I did have to exchange one

Of my own precious volumes

The price to be paid

Yet Jack is right

The author deserves his compensation

When one writes, much of who we are

What we believe is invested in each word

Writing is not merely work, a job

It is opening veins and pouring

Out your blood, opening oneself

To the acid tongues of the critics,

Those judging not only your work

But your life, who you are

Fiction’s DNA, the authors reality

To take what is produced

Without re-numeration, theft

 

 

–

Remember, purchasing a good book is a gift you give yourself. It needs no batteries nor electricity and is easily shared. 

 

Bisous, 

Léa

 

 

Amazon exclusive? or NO THANK YOU!

Ever wondered how to remove a book from the reading public’s gaze? Simple. Publish it exclusively on Amazon! The company’s CEO Jeff Bezos only cares about profit. When he realised he was losing money by paying royalties to each and every author who make their book available only through his company, he put a stop […]

via Bezos’ book graveyard — Have We Had Help?

9 Tips For Using Fiction Techniques When Writing Memoir…

Can fiction techniques help you writing that memoir?

Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog

By Michael Mohr  on The Creative Penn:

Memoir is much more than just writing down an aspect of your life story. 

Intro by Joanna Penn:

In fact, if you do that, it’s unlikely that anyone will read it. Because people want a character they can empathize with and a narrative arc that follows a transformation, as well as immersive setting and emotion that help them live within the story.

All aspects of writing fiction. 

In today’s article, Michael Mohr explains some tips for using fiction techniques in your memoir.

Memoir should be written very much like a novel

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The Marathon of Novel-Writing