If you are a regular visitor to The Rock, you will know that in November 2014, I had a stab at my first blogging challenge, during the course of which, I met my best blogging buddies Mary-Anne up there in Canada 'Breathing Life' and Judy over in England at 'Edwina's Episodes'.
Well, Judy is something of a crazy blog-aholic; she'll chug-a-lug down any writing challenge as if it was a tepid cup of tea.
The last challenge she passed on to Mary-Anne and me was to write at least a paragraph without using the letter e. This time it's to post three quotations that mean something to us over the next three days.
So I'm going to start with an extract from the novel I go to whenever I want to be inspired. Or moved. Or to remind myself that I'm not a writer's bootlace: Tim Winton's Cloudstreet.
Will you look at
us by the river! The whole restless mob of us on spread blankets in the dreamy
briny sunshine skylarking and chiacking about for one day, one clear, clean,
sweet day in a good world in the midst of our living. Yachts run before an
unfelt gust with bagnecked pelicans riding above them, the city their twitching
backdrop, all blocks and points of mirror light down to the water's edge.
Genius.
His shameless Australian diction.
His unique ability to use the wrong adjective to create an exact image, or to invent the perfect word where none existed before.
How he breaks the rules of punctuation so carefully that all meaning is possible and positions a word as an unfamiliar part of speech to build a sentence that sings. Or cries.
Art with words.
Poetry in prose.
Tim Winton is my hero.
What would Cortazar say that reveals about me?
