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Geoffroy Tory was a French Renaissance humanist who is best known as a theorist of--yes--roman capital letters. His Champfleury (1529) spells out how letters should be formed and introduces accents, the bane of all beginning learners of French. For the curious, accents did not appear consistently in French until well until the late 17th and early 18th century.
When I am not teaching, I am often hard at work putting my own letters on the page. Fortunately, I usually write my articles and books in English so I don't have to worry about circumflexes, grave or acute accents, and cedillas!
A few resources continued to be wonderfully inspirational as I put my writing time in. Highly recommended!
Dr. Wicked's Write or Die: A dream come true for the masochist writer (hey, wait, aren't most writers masochist anyway?) A great way to get your word quota in on days when inspiration is flagging.
Paul J. Silvia's How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing This small book is a well of common sense. Just get your derriere in the chair and stop making excuses! I always end up giving my copy away to a writing friend, so I bought 10 copies in my last Amazon order.
Joan Bolker's Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day: I wish that I had known about this book when I was doing my Ph.D. But it still has a lot of great suggestions for the post-doctoral among us.
And then there's Elizabeth Gilbert's interview on TED about why we should shake the notion of creative genius as an internal force. Quotable quote: "The hell with it, I'm going to keep writing anyway, because that's my job. And I would like the record to reflect today that I showed up for my part of the job."
Finally, there are my marvelous beta-readers. I have two primary ones who read and reread every word I write plus two or three more who read the smoother drafts. And somehow, in the process, some magical things happen.
What are your writing resources? I'm always looking for new inspiration!
I loved Chris Baty's "No Plot? No problem!" about the National Novel Writing Month method. The point is that if you just write what comes and not let your inner editor sabotage it, you can write a novel in a month. Well, 50K word novella, but still. You can always edit later if you write SOMETHING.
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