The Sunday Salon

I am not sure how to add the Sunday Salon logo to my side bar – wordpress idiosynchrasies still play havoc – and although I realise that there are instructions on the host website for copying and pasting, my attempts have failed.  Also, having signed up to the Sunday Salon, I actually have no idea whether I am supposed to link my postings somehow or other to the host and if so, how to do that.

Never mind, I happily join this group of bloggers as I usually provide comments on my reading on Sundays anyway and this is a nice way of keeping in touch on progress with everyone else.

Today is one of those unusually hot days in England, with temperatures soaring to mid 20s and we now have had half a week of this weather.  So, I wrote most of this while enjoying the sunshine in my garden and I’m afraid that there is not much serious reading going on today, apart from scouring the newspapers.    I have, however, dug up all the weed from a side patch of the garden and have planted shrubs and flowers.  Hopefully they grow and the patch does not deteriorate once more into a weed covered mass because there are only so many things I can keep up with during the week.

I have been doing some reading though this week and parallel to James Wood I have been reading through Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’.  The latter needs to be read alongside the little style guide by Strunk and White Elements of Style.  Stephen King swears by the advice offered in this little handbook and I must say that even if it all seems a matter of fact, it is actually indispensible, as King suggests.  It’s the use of adverbs (or rather, the non-use of adverbs), the usage of the ‘which’ and ‘that’ the many silly little errors an aspiring writer can make and that can ruin an otherwise well written piece and may be the difference betwen a successful and well-written story and a badly written one.  Don’t I know it: the same style guidance of course applies to the writing of reports, as I do in the day job.  How easy it is however to forget all this common sense and resort to difficult constructins and imporant sounding words and phrases only because you want it to sound so much more important and interesting and ‘professional’.  A big mistake of course and re-reading the style book helps you stay on the straight and narrow.

This week I’ve also started another book from the Neustadt list, I am hooked by these authors.  I intended to read Octavio Paz but so far I have not been able to lay my hands on a copy so I picked up David Malouf’s colection of short stories ‘Every Move You Make’.  A wonderful find, again, as not only are these stories fantastically well written, the book can also go towards my short story challenge for this year.  I’ll review these stories once I’ve read them all.  So far, I’ve read the first two and I think they are really impressive.  I wish I could write with this seeming ease and such perfect use of language.

And then I have submitted my short story for the writing course – not a bad week after all. 

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