Writers' rooms

A neat series of photographs and stories is being done by The Guardian titled, “Writer’s rooms” (though they’ve also recently included rooms of illustrators and composers). The series offers a little peak into the world of these writers’ and artists’, both dead and living, and the spaces in which they create(d) and hone(d) their craft.

Rudyard Kipling (The Jungle Book, “The White Man’s Burden”)

Roald Dahl (James and the Giant Peach, Matilda)

More things I'd rather be doing

I carry a little notebook around with me to jot down terms or phrases I hear or read that I like. These include, “to button-hole someone”, which means to accost someone in a conversation, or if you are “showing the flag” for your friend, you are showing them your support.

Recently, providing the sudden inspiration, I’ve also been taking note of ideas and sentences that have popped into my head to incorporate in my little foray into creative writing. I’ve given short stories a go before, but never poetry. It just seemed a difficult task to truncate any thought or story into such a bit of space, while remaining a semblance of, well, poetry. I’m definitely not aspiring towards the greatness of Ezra Pound or Edna St. Vincent Millay. It’s kind of fun and I’m enjoying this new creative outlet. For now.

I’m also digging this new layout that I spent quite a bit of time tweaking. That clock is something else.

Neat!

This article I had written several months ago with my partners in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia is going to be published. The article is being published by an NGO that promotes mutual understanding and as well as peaceful conflict resolution, and the article is about the motivations of suicide bombers and the importance of understanding those motivations in conflict resolution (the hell do I know, right?).

To be honest, I think the article is crap—I am not too proud of it. We didn’t dedicate as much time and research to it as we would have liked and ended up slapping it together in the end to submit before the deadline. We really didn’t think anyone would pick it up for publication (and kind of didn’t care towards the end), but lo and behold someone out there was looking for filler and found us.

At least I can add it to my CV.

It feels real

In this dizzying time of the Internet, it seems that much of what is written and captured of our human existence exists in this strange, impersonal and intangible way in ‘cyberspace’ where things will eventually be deleted. So I’ve been meticulously hoarding away physical fragments of my current life—in the form of photographs, journal entries and various trinkets—so that I have something solid and real of my own and of my making and that I can look at one day and reflect that I did indeed lead an interesting life.