SHE NEVER SLEEPS
Home · Archive · RSS · Ask · Lizzy. 28. Cat lady. Reader. Couch Potato. Fan Girl. Movie Enthusiast. Twitterer. Insomniac. Gadabout.“I’ve continued to write short stories over the years, partly because the ideas still come from time to time—beautifully compressed ideas that cry out for three thousand words, maybe nine thousand, fifteen thousand at the very most—and partly because it’s the way I affirm, at least to myself, the fact that I haven’t sold out, no matter what the more unkind critics may think. Short stories are still piecework, the equivalent of those one-of-a-kind items you can buy in an artisan’s shop. If, that is, you are willing to be patient and wait while it’s made by hand in the back room.”
Stephen King, in the introduction of his shot stories, Everything’s Eventual
“..We are a race of tradition-lovers in a new land, of king-reverers in a Republic, of hero worshipers in a society of mundane get-and-spend…yet it is only one side of us, and we are cynical and envious too. As one half of our nature seeks to create hero worship, the other must ceaselessly attempt to cast them down and discover evidence of feet of clay, in order to label them as mere lucky fellows, or as villains-were-the-facts-but-known, and the eminent and great are ground between milestones of envy, and reduced again to common size.”
from the Journals of Henry Holmes Goodpasture, from Oakley Hall’s Warlock
“So good to meet you. Hello, I’m Junot,” Junot Diaz says to us, as we walk up to him and introduce ourselves. We laugh a little bit and tell him we know. “Well, custom dictates that one introduces one’s self,” he adds. He smiles, warmly, sweetly. To welcome him, Phil and I hand him a bag full of local goodies: Cafe de Lipa’s Barako blend, some chicharong laman from Lapid’s, some sumang latik and some kutsinta. “That’s such a wonderful thing to do!” Junot says happily and kisses me on both cheeks. I freak out a little because I still have a bad cold. The last thing I want to do is pass my damn germs on to one of my favorite authors. We chat a bit more, mostly about movies. When he gets home, he says, first thing he’ll do is watch Lars von Trier’s Melancholia and Tarsem Singh’s Immortals. “I’m a film obsessive,” he says. We know that too. Anyone who could write a book like The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao would have to be obsessive and a true blue nerd.
