“Alone!!! I Am Alone, I Am Always Alone, No Matter What.”

𝒜𝓃𝓉𝒾𝓆𝓊𝑒 𝒫𝑒𝓇𝒻𝓊𝓂𝑒 𝐵𝑜𝓉𝓉𝓁𝑒𝓈 * ❀.ೃ࿔*

“ Apprehensible, yet invisible (that is, nothing), blue shares something with olfaction […] In about 1700, before Novalis and his blue flower, before Goethe and [Werther’s] blue-coat-yellow-vest, Bernard Perrot made a blue-glass scent bottle in the shape of a deeply moulded scallop shell. Its metal stopper is connected by a silvery chain. The back of the bottle is flat with a moulded design of a sun(flower). A paradox of blue: the bottle is both the shell from below, from the deep blue sea and as the sun from above in the clear blue sky […] a Janus head of sorts.” (Carol Mavor, “A Foggy Lullaby”, Blue Mythologies)

Bernard Perrot, Blue Glass Perfume Bottle, c. 1700, Orléans

-Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

Apparently a lot of people get dialogue punctuation wrong despite having an otherwise solid grasp of grammar, possibly because they’re used to writing essays rather than prose. I don’t wanna be the asshole who complains about writing errors and then doesn’t offer to help, so here are the basics summarized as simply as I could manage on my phone (“dialogue tag” just refers to phrases like “he said,” “she whispered,” “they asked”):

“For most dialogue, use a comma after the sentence and don’t capitalize the next word after the quotation mark,” she said.

“But what if you’re using a question mark rather than a period?” they asked.

“When using a dialogue tag, you never capitalize the word after the quotation mark unless it’s a proper noun!” she snapped.

“When breaking up a single sentence with a dialogue tag,” she said, “use commas.”

“This is a single sentence,” she said. “Now, this is a second stand-alone sentence, so there’s no comma after ‘she said.’”

“There’s no dialogue tag after this sentence, so end it with a period rather than a comma.” She frowned, suddenly concerned that the entire post was as unasked for as it was sanctimonious.

Bedtime Stories. Juila Banas photographed by Stefano Galuzzi for The Edit, March 9, 2017.

Idk if u write, but what would u recommend to a young writer who’s not yet found her own ‘tone’ / voice or character in writing. What I mean is, I love writing… every time I read a certain author I then adopt their pen’s character, I write like them. If I read Plath I’ll go write like her bc I’m inspired. If I read Dostoevsky I’ll go write like him. Idk if it’s necessarily bad bc I think it’s pretty cool to achieve such voices (if they r achieved indeed) or should I just try to find mine? & How?

Hi anon, yes I write but only for myself. It's a sort of therapy for me, I'm definitely not a good writer. So maybe I'm not the right person to answer this question. Anyway, in your message you mentioned Plath and Dostoevsky, I think it's pretty normal to mistake the big impact that this artists can have on you and on your soul with your conviction that you are "copying" them. You already have your voice, it's the way you see the world, the way you perceive things, the way you talk in your head ― the language you speak to yourself everyday.

Sylvia Plath, from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

she called herself "unimaginative". She tormented herself with this thoughts. It's just impossible to believe for us, but she was just like you, just like us.

Don't give up🤍

— Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

LIVING THROUGH MEMORIES.

thomas campbell // suzanne collins, gregor and the code of claw // czesław miłosz, the issa valley // vladimir nabokov // antonio porchia // l.m. montgomery, the story girl