Welcome

Welcome
John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

On writing


The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” – Mark Twain

“Brevity is the soul of wit.” – Shakespeare

 “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” - Thomas Mann

 “A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.” – Franz Kafka

“Yes, it takes longer to write a shorter sentence, but it’s worth it.” – Scott Gillum

“Not everything has to have a point. Some things just are. ” – Judy Blume

“The true enemy of man is generalization.” - Czesław Miłosz in Testimony to the Invisible: Essays on Swedenborg

 “You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “Not a wasted word. This has been a main point to my literary thinking all my life.” – Hunter S. Thompson

 “An artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s.” – J.D. Salinger

 “To write is human, to edit is divine.” – Stephen King

“It takes a heap of sense to write good nonsense” – Mark Twain

 “If you wind up boring yourself, you can pretty much bank on the fact that you’re going to bore your reader.” – Ann Patchett






Good article, worth reading

 The Life of a Foster Child






Groan if you must


I MUST have one of these


Is this really the best answer to a national problem?


More than 1,400 people have been executed in the United States since the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty was constitutional in 1976.

The Writers Life


Kid takes best Oval office picture ever


I’m old and getting older.


I can’t go back to yesterday - because I was a different person then. - Lewis Carroll

I’m old and getting older. I’ll be sixty in January. I feel about the same as I did ten years ago, or even thirty years ago, really. I thought that when I was this age I would be this whole other person but I’m not. Maybe we don’t change as much as we think we do as we get older.
I don’t feel like I’ve changed, well, dramatically anyway. At my core I’m pretty much the same person that I was when I a child. However we do change in some ways because change is healthy and it’s inevitable. We mature. We become wiser, but generally, as I said we remain the same at our core.  I think we simply become a more defined and clear version of ourselves. A sleeker version of you. As an example I no longer have the energy or time for meaningless friendships, interactions I don’t want to have or conversations that waste my time and bore me. That happens because when day, all of sudden, you realize how many things don’t require your commitment or your comment.  
But, again, we do change and one of the things about us that changes is our measurement of happiness. As we age our definition of happiness evolves. It has too. We can’t maintain the same level happiness as a sixty year old as we did when we were 6 or even 16
Social psychologists describe it this way; when we are younger have promotion motivation -- seeing our goals in terms of what we can gain, or how we can be better off. Eventually we shift to prevention motivation -- seeing our goals in terms of avoiding loss and leaving peacefully.
As we age, what we consider happy is drawn more and more from peaceful, relaxing experiences. That doesn’t mean the happiness we experience later in life is less joyful than it was as, say, a teenager. …. And I still get excited thinking about what lies ahead of me tomorrow, but more and more my happiness is found in what sits directly in front of me today.  It’s the same level of happiness but it’s different and that’s the best way I can describe it to you. It’s the natural progression of things.  






Wow....read this, this is good writing

 “Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there… Where is there a place for you to be? No place… Nothing outside you can give you any place… In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.”  Flannery O’Connor



Hang in there

 What does it take to write for a living?  It takes a lot. You have to love your craft as much as you love anything else on this earth. You have to want it, you have to want the freedom to write and you have to be willing to pay the price for it.
 And the price is time.
You have to learn your craft and that takes time.
While you’re waiting for that to kick in, you’ll have to put up with hundreds of rejections, disappointments, setbacks and turn around's. But it’s all for the best because eventually….if you don’t give up ….you’ll come to understand that rejections don’t matter because usually it’s just some Bozos wrong opinion. You’ll see that disappointments don’t last, set back help you to regear and turn around work both ways.      
Hang in there. 



Change things

Everything is everything. I am he and you are he and you are me. (know that line?) 

God is in everything especially you and me. So don’t pray that things change. 

Rather, understand that when we pray it, prayer, changes us and we change things.  God is in us, God is in prayer.


Here, look at this dog, he'll crack you up....




Someone’s opinion of you is just an opinion

Someone’s opinion of you is just an opinion, and a bad one at that. It’s not real so don’t make it real. Their poor judge of character does not have to become your reality. 



here...look at this, its funny.come on, be happy


Aren't we all?

 “I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions.” Augusten Burroughs, Magical Thinking: True Stories 


Stop criticizing yourself.

Stop criticizing yourself. It doesn’t work anyway does it? Approve of yourself. That works. Love yourself. That works. I know it does because when I was a kid in foster care I learned to love myself  because when I was about ten years old,  I realized that nobody was going to do it for me.

Here, look at this, it'll make you smile and you should be smiling.......



“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby


...and proud of it.


There will come a time when

There will come a time when someone will see you as a paragraph in their story while you see them as your whole book and your heart will get broken when you realize what’s going on.  

When that happens remember this; you’re not alone. The same thing has happened to me and a lot of other people too. As tough as it’s going to be at the moment, remember, hurt doesn’t last. You’re going to be okay. Things change. Circumstances change.


Lastly, don’t even give that person who treated you that way a second thought. Just because they can’t see all the great things in you that someone else will see someday doesn’t amount to a hill of bills. 

and remember to be happy, here, smile at this;


Groan at will (I thought it was clever)


Thank God for my fellow Nutmeger Mark Twain