Sunday Quotes

What I'm reading: Without Fail, by Lee Child

Tonight's the last night of Hanukkah, which means we'll open the rest of our presents. Although I thought hubby and I had agreed not to do anything special for each other, last night he pulled two small boxes from the array. They were wrapped in gold paper, and I'd pegged them as Godiva, even though he'd already given me a box of truffles. I was wrong. As the commercial says, "He went to Jared." Now he's got lots of hubby points and I'm feeling guilty at the tokens I got for him.

Here are a couple of quotes from my Quote of the Day list:

The relationship between the fiction writer and the reader is, in some ways, tantamount to a seduction: the writer, via the plot, awakens a desire within the reader, and the longer the desire remains unsatisfied, the more intensely it burns. You aim to immediately introduce a source of tension and fan its flames until the conflict is finally resolved. You want your readers aching to know if Atticus wins the trial, if Elizabeth Bennet will marry Mr. Darcy. You want them to race through the pages, gobbling up every word... ~Bret Anthony Johnston The Writer, Dec 2008
I have mixed feelings about this one -- while I love to love the characters and worry about them, if a book hooks me, then when I get near the end, along with wanting to get to the end to see everything resolved, I want to go slowly and savor it because once I reach the last page, it'll be over. Maybe that's why I enjoy reading series author's back lists -- because I can keep going and find out what happens next.

To me, the secret to writing is knowing your own mind and the way it works. As far as advice goes: Get it down, as much and as quickly as you can, and fix it up later. Write every day. When you can't write every day, read as much as you can and take notes of the things that work in the novels of others. ~Sheridan Hay The Writer, Dec 2008
I've been negligent in my actual writing (the edit/revision phase does that). I'll confess to spending most of the last week simply reading for pleasure, But once you've started writing, you'l never be able to read the same way again. I'm looking at Lee Child and John Sandford, both of whom write protagonists with serious character flaws, and marveling at the way they can make them sympathetic, so I care about them.