Why I write: #47

Because I want to fight the good fight against Nicholas Sparks.

In a recent interview with USA Today, Nicholas Sparks criticized Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Ernest Hemingway, and romance novelists in general for essentially writing the same story over and over:

"(Romances) are all essentially the same story: You've got a woman, she's down on her luck, she meets the handsome stranger who falls desperately in love with her, but he's got these quirks, she must change him, and they have their conflicts, and then they end up happily ever after."

But he claims that he is not a romance novelist. He is a fiction writer who writes love stories.

"You read a romance because you know what to expect. You read a love story because you don't know what to expect."

Really Nicholas Sparks? Really?

Why I don't eat meat: #27

"Down in the blood pit the say that the smell of blood makes you aggressive. And it does. You get an attitude that if that hog kicks at me, I'm going to get even. You're already going to kill the hog, but that's not enough. It has to suffer...You go in hard, push hard, blow the windpipe, make it drown in its own blood. Split its nose. A live hog would be running around the pit. It would just be looking up at me and I'd be sticking, and I would just take my knife and--eerk--cut its eye out while it was just sitting there. And this hog would just scream. One time I took my knife--it's sharp enough--and I sliced off the end of a hog's nose, just like a piece of bologna. The hog went crazy for a few seconds. Then it just sat there looking kind of stupid. So I took a handful of salt brine and ground it into his nose. Now that hog really went nuts, pushing its nose all over the place. I still had a bunch of salt left on my hand--I was wearing a rubber glove--and I stuck the salt right up the hog's ass. The poor hog didn't know whether to shit or go blind...I wasn't the only guy doing this kind of stuff. One guy I work with actually chases hogs into the scalding tank. And everybody--hog drivers, shacklers, utility men--uses lead pipes on the hogs. Everybody knows it, all of it."

--From Gail Eisnitz's Slaughterhouse (as quoted in JSF's Eating Animals)

Why I write: #34

"The artist's job is to expose us to what is hidden, what is 'imperfect', what popular culture might not be ready to hear."

---Elizabeth Merrick (from the introduction to This is Not Chick Lit)