GREENWICH PEN WOMEN - Arts, Letters, Music, Creativity

                       “Make people believe in your story first and foremost.”  ~~ Gabriel Garcia

  Inside of rummaging through your pocketbook to find your COVID vaccination card   and   your photo ID. take a picture of them together on your smart-phone. This way you save time and most times you know where your cell phone is.

  “Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other people. Nothing that happens to a writer --- how happy, however tragic—is ever wasted.”    ~~ P.D. James

  “Don't try to anticipate an ideal reader or any reader. He/she might exist but is reading someone else.” ~~ Carol Joyce Oates

  “ Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.” ~~ Margaret Atwood

                           “ Write slowly and by hand only about subjects that interest you.”   ~~ Annie Proulx

September 11, 2001 dawned with a glorious royal blue sky without a single cloud to soften the brilliance. Typical of early fall in southern New England, the temperature was comfortably warm while the humidity level was low. A picture-perfect day. The addition of a slight breeze was enough to convince one that summer was hanging on and all was right with the world.  "Twin Towers, New York"   by  Guillaume Cattiaux  is licensed under  CC BY-SA 2.0 School was back in session; it was the first full week of the new year ripe with the promise of new learning and new friends. As the School Psychologist assigned to two elementary schools in Greenwich, Cos Cob and New Lebanon, my job was to support the psychological well-being of close to 700 children between the ages of four and a half and twelve.  I was working at ‘New Leb’ that morning, arranging my schedule, meeting new students, and comforting the few reticent 4 & 5-year old kindergarten children who missed...

  “Don't romanticize your “vocation." You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no “writer's lifestyle." All that matters is what you leave on the page.”   ~~ Zadie Smith

  “The first sentence can be written only after the last sentence has been written. FIRST DRAFTS ARE HELL. FINAL DRAFTS, PARADISE.”   ~~ Joyce Carol Oates

                              "Don’t wait for inspiration. It comes while one is working.”  — Henri Matisse

  May 2021: “Trust your reader. Not everything needs to be explained. If you really know something, and breathe life into it, they’ll know it too.”   ~~ Esther Freud

  “Don’t panic. Midway through writing a novel, I have regularly experienced moments of bowel-curdling terror, as I contemplate the drivel on the screen before me and see beyond it, in quick succession, the derisive reviews, the friends’ embarrassment, the failing career, the dwindling income, the repossessed house, the divorce . . . Working doggedly on through crises like these, however has always got me there in the end.  . .”  ~~ Sarah Waters

Your take-out food containers can be recycled as handy storage places for your tubes of paint. Label each container have its own color range, i.e., reds, greens, etc.

When buying a new tube of paint: Open the tube and lubricate the grooves by putting a little petroleum jelly on them. Twist cap back and forth a couple of times. No more sticking caps.

  Susan and I played tennis every evening after our commute to New Canaan, CT from New York City. We were poor players, but we loved the game. Life was good – until we became greedy for more time on the courts. One evening, Susan said that she had found an indoor game on Saturday nights. We could increase our playing time by four hours a week at this party she saw advertised in the “General Interest” section of the local newspaper. We signed up for our first session. It turned out to be Susan’s last time on a tennis court.    As I drove us to the Shippan Tennis Club, she looked at the newspaper once more...and gasped. This event was also listed in the singles' section! We were on our way to a meat market in our short skirts! Neither of us had been to a singles’ party, bar or other excuse for a pick-up parlor, and we did not want to start now. After all, we were dignified women. Susan was a lawyer with a big New York law firm, and I was an institutional portfolio manager. ...

  “In the planning stage of a book, don’t plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.”  ~~ Rose Tremain

  “You have to get to a very quiet place inside yourself. And that doesn’t mean that you can’t have noise outside. I know some people who put jazz on, loudly, to write. I think each writer has her or his secret path to the muse.”   ~ ~ Maya Angelou

  “Be your own artist, and always be confident in what you’re doing. If you’re not going to be confident, you might as well not be doing it.”    ~ ~ Aretha Franklin

  Did you know that your great-grandfather single-handedly brought the end to WWII? Well, he had a little help from the Hershey candy company.   Victory in Japan, or V-J Day, was 75 years ago. Grea t-grandfather was one of the youngest men in the U.S. Marines on that day of September 2, 1945. He joined the Marine Corps because of their reputation for tough training, and he knew that the experience would protect him in battle. He was too young, however, to experience active warfare; the fighting was over by the time he reached Pearl Harbor, Iwo Jima and Japan.   He fought a different battle; the fight to secure the peace. His weapon was Hershey bars.   Mike Weir, USMC, 1945   Great grandpa was one of the first Americans in Nagasaki, Japan after the explosion of the second, more powerful, atomic bomb. It not only destroyed buildings but contaminated the food and water. The few surviving, and starving, Japanese feared that they would be tortured by the Americans, a...

  Always carry a notebook. and I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.   ~~ Will Self