I Would Rather Be Dead Than Not

What I Find To Be Very Bad Advice Is The Snappy Little Sentence, 'write What You Know.' It Is The Most Tiresome And Stupid Advice That Could Possibly Be Given. If We Write Simply About What We Know We Never Grow. We Don't Develop Any Facility For Languages, Or An Interest In Others, Or A Desire To Travel And Explore And Face Experience Head-on. We Just Coil Tighter And Tighter Into Our Boring Little Selves. What One Should Write About Is What Interests One.

But The Only Rhyme He Could Summon For 'out' Was 'sauerkraut,' Which Lacked Poetic Glory. He Let It Go. The Right Line Would Come In Time. That Was The Thing About Poetry. It Crept Up Through The Draws And Coulees Of The Brain.

Develop Craftsmanship Through Years Of Wide Reading.

Walking On The Land Or Digging In The Fine Soil I Am Intensely Aware That Time Quivers Slightly, Changes Occurring In Imperceptible And Minute Ways, Accumulating So Subtly That They Seem Not To Exist. Yet The Tiny Shifts In Everything--cell Replication, The Rain Of Dust Motes, Lengthening Hair, Wind-pushed Rocks--press Inexorably On And On.

I Rarely Use The Internet For Research, As I Find The Process Cumbersome And Detestable. The Information Gained Is Often Untrustworthy And Couched In Execrable Prose. It Is Unpleasant To Sit In Front Of A Twitching Screen Suffering Assault By Virus, Power Outage, Sluggish Searches, System Crashes And The Lack Of Direct Human Discourse.