I'm thinking of writing a story about a man who grew old and died waiting in a line. He was too determined to wait all it took to see the task he set forth to do was done. The end is tragic but I want the story to be funny, even hilarious. Can you suggest funny things that happened while waiting in line for something? Thanks.

If you can treat the same, each face you meet
No matter their colour nor creed they seek
If you can trust all can be sincere
And Ignore the media in your ear
If you can hope and not get tired of hoping
Or not be swayed when criticised (read more)

When I have hard time choosing which non-fiction book to buy or borrow it always helps me to read the "Acknowledgments" section at the end in order to make up my mind. A very short and dry thanks to my wife and kids usually doesn't do it for me. A very long list of names doesn't do it either. Between a short and a long list I usually prefer the long one unless the short one is very inspiring. (read more)

Dawn has yet to crack
my tired body still
my midnight mind is racing
events and ideas colliding
their fusion creates thoughts
nature plus nurture...
combine with human instincts
concepts swirling constantly,
subconsciously forming how i think (read more)

This woman chose to go to jail because she did not want to pay $7.45! This is incredible. Can it be true? Why don't they mention the reason she refused to pay in the article, there must be a reason. Is this a piece of fake news or bad journalism?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081021/ap_on_fe_st/odd_waffle_bill

Some authors publish blogs about their books in order to promote their work and get feedback from readers. Very few of them, however, post all references online. It would be very helpful if for every book there was a list of links were all references were available to click and read (bibliography, articles, manuscripts etc). Book publishers can make it a requirement that to publish any work in print the author has to make available online all references.

What prompted me to this question was thinking about authors whose books are fiction and auto-psychoanalytical. The themes are always personal obsessions they have which urge them to write about them. The work is never auto-biographical. They write esoteric fiction that reads as very real. They write compulsively, locked in their private space for hours. I wonder if these authors went through therapy and talked about their obsessions whether they might lose the urge to write about them. I'm thinking that if therapy won't diminish an author's urge to write, how it might affect his choice of themes and literary style going forward.

John Lennon once stated life is what happens when your making other plans a profound enough statement but then again open to much interpretation and in this bright sparks eyes it kinda fell short of the mark.

For you see to me life is what we forget about when we are making other plans or at least the really important aspects of it. Plans ladies and gentlemen, Plans are merely a life times distraction to keep our minds from wondering and pondering on those most profound and terrifying truths about life, the truth being we have no idea what the truth is and most probably could not come close to comprehending it if we did (read more)

For someone who reads a lot of books and is talented in terms of putting different parts together, is it unethical to put together a book that takes stories and passages from the works of different authors and combines them into a new work of fiction that is brilliant and totally different from the sum of its parts? Copying and pasting whole passages from another author's work is plagiarism and you can be sued for it. But what if the final product of such plagiarism is a fine piece of art the public likes? What if you have read so many books and found the perfect way to weave together parts of each book into a brilliant new story you can now call your own even though it's essentially written by others? Why is all work of plagiarism unacceptable? If it was proved beyond doubt that one of Shakespeare's playwrights was a work of the kind of plagiarism I described, would you suddenly rate it any less? I challenge you to think about the word hypocrisy and how it applies to you if you happen to like Shakespeare's works, yet you are eager to answer yes to the last question.

I make it a point to read magazines back to front because if there was ever an order publishers and advertisers would want me to follow when I read their content, front to back would be the one. I'm aware that a magazine is not a book but a bunch of articles and ads put together, therefore, you can read it in any order you prefer. But if most people read them front to back because that's the natural, intuitive, utterly habitual way to do it, I'm convinced the editors and publishers take this habit into consideration when they decide how to order content for their readers. (read more)