Book Reviews and Writing Tips

Book Reviews and Writing Tips

Thursday, February 27, 2014

A short porcupine story and a useful writing resource


Some of you may have seen these things and others might not have.  The porcupine story a writer friend of mine sent me from my old writing group in CA.  This story has a nice moral and is a good reminder for all of us who encounter people in life who are hard to agree with.

The other link is a useful resource I stumbled across on a Linked In thread a few days ago.  This link is especially useful if you write historical fiction.  I wish we had a source like this for US history, but I haven’t checked into it.  We may have.

Moral of the Porcupine

I never knew porcupines were so cute as babies.  Good story with a great message.

Have you ever seen a baby porcupine?



Fable of the porcupine

It was the coldest winter ever.  Many animals died because of the cold.

The porcupines, realizing the situation, decided to group together to keep warm.  This way they covered and protected themselves; but the quills of each one wounded its closest companions.

After awhile, they decided to distance themselves one from the other and they began to die, alone and frozen.  So they had to make a choice: either accept the quills of their companions or disappear from the Earth.

Wisely, they decided to go back to being together.  They learned to live with the little wounds caused by the close relationship with their companions in order to receive the heat that came from the others.  This way they were able to survive.

The best relationship is not the one that brings together perfect people, but when each individual learns to live with the imperfections of others and can admire the other person’s good qualities.



The moral of the story is - Just learn to live with the Pricks in your life!

At times, this is still a learning curve for me.



Now here’s the writing resource I mentioned earlier.  I can only imagine stepping inside a place like this, the smell of old newspapers immediately enveloping me.  This would be almost as good as going into an old library filled with thousands of old books.  Oh my gosh!  I would be in heaven.  Just give me a blanket and check on me in a week or so.

Anyway, if you need to do research of history for your current WIP, this would be the place as long as it wasn’t before 1800 and your work had something to do with Great Britain.  They archive old newspapers back that far in London.  Some of this info is available free by signing up for an account.  To have more access, you can get a paid registration.  To read this article and sign up to research old newspapers, please see Susan Nolen’s blog here:  British Library Newspaper Archives

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