May 09, 2010

Best Way to Choose

As those of you who follow me here know, I have a book coming out entitled (Re)Making Love: A Sex After Sixty Story. New Cover soon by the fabulous Zaara who is now doing heart-opening work for a children's hospital! You will see the new cover here and at my publisher's site: 3ones, Inc.. I am a writer interested in the bemusing eBook marketplace and will talk more about that soon on a blog that is not live yet but that the imaginative, innovative Kelly Abbott, CEO of 3ones, Inc., will make live soon. And I'll review eBooks on that site and discuss the state of publishing from a writer's point of view.

I have written an intro for that part of my writing life and want to let my followers know about that among other things that will unfold both there and here.

I care about the willed word. What is the best way to choose? Here’s my answer:

Choose implies alternative. Think about it and we’re right there with Adam and Eve choosing to eat or not to eat that apple. There we are right into the questions of everything we do. We know they shouldn’t have: Every time we choose we’re stuck with them in shoulda, woulda, coulda.

And it all begins with a word.

Shakespeare never lets us forget how powerful the word is. His fool in Twelfth Night, Feste the jester when accused by Maria, Olivia’s lady-in-waiting: My lady will hang thee for thy absence, answers, Let her hang me. He that is well-hanged … . The fool, who is anything but, shows us what a word can do: end your life or flaunt your power.

Emerson says the “word, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance. Right means straight, wrong means twisted … The whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.”

Should we choose to speak, to love, to eat or not to eat, to be or not to be—the words we choose define us.

I argue that that every word is a metaphor—and all we mean or wish to mean.

So choose carefully.

I will too.