Today’s day two of the 3 Day Quote Challenge. Thanks again to Erin Burns for nominating me! Go read her blog, especially if you’re looking for recommendations for fun genre books.
You can find out about the rules in my first post here.
On to today’s quote!
This quote is in my debut novel, LEX TALIONIS. In it, my young heroine Lex has lost her memory after a brutal attack that ended her life. Brought back on a hospital table by a mute alien, she embarks on a mission to find out who she was and who killed her. Revenge is her goal, but what she doesn’t know is that someone has learned that she survived the attack. And they are intent on finishing the job.
Obviously, Lex’s past is the key to who she is and what happened to her. The quote comes halfway through the book, when she’s remembered who she is and we step backward in time to see how she came to be dead in a hospital. Once we see where Lex came from, however, we know immediately that her future has been irrevocably changed by what happened to her. Literally, as we study her past, we will know her future.
I love this quote because it speaks to history, one of my favorite hobbies. It’s a lot like: ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’ (George Santayana). In essence, society must do its best to learn from its past, in order to avoid a future filled with old mistakes. If you want to know where society is going, you have know where we’ve come from. You can’t chart a course with a blank map.
It’s personal too. If you want a better life and a better you, you must make a study of who, and where, you are in order to figure out who, and where, you want to be. A starting point can be anywhere, but you must know what got you to that point if you want to keep moving forward instead of going in circles.
And now I nominate:
- Mike Douton, a great friend and a writer who muses on writing and life over at Stuff and/or Junk.
- Marlene Dotterer, a writer of romantic fantasy and science fiction who happens to be a great friend and who blogs on writing, vacationing, gardening, food and even pregnancy issues over at her blog. You’ll won’t be bored if you stop by!
- Darke Conteur, a writer (yes, I have a lot of writer friends, why do you ask?) who does interviews and lots of posts on the craft of writing, food, paranormal fiction and wiccan and pagan life. There’s a lot to learn and explore here, and book recommendations too.
That’s it for today. Tomorrow, I’ll have a special Saturday post as I wrap up this fun quote week.
Stay thirsty, my friends, and see you then.
R.S.A. Garcia 
I’m cheating again in the comments because I’m on my phone and not the laptop. It totally counts, right? =D
“Come on now, it’s all realistic
I’m not dumb, I’m just optimistic.”
-Tub Ring “Optimistic” from the album Secret Handshakes (2010)
I was leaning towards one of my favorite NoFx quotes because there is a lot of punk influence in my current writing, but in the end I went with my favorite Tub Ring line. They’re an experimental rock band I first spun on the radio when I was a college DJ on WKNH.
I take a lot of cues in my writing from music. More so than most, I think, due to my background in film school. I listened to Tub Ring almost exclusively in my car for two years while I was writing Amity. The album was the unofficial soundtrack to the book and this song was Bernadette’s theme song. I seriously had a whole music video storyboarded out as a cinematic trailer for that book. I even had Bernadette say that line when she was prepping for the climatic starship hijacking.
The irony here is that Amity didn’t sell.
I blogged about it back when I trunked it for good. Spent years on it. Over 20 agent rejections. No one told me the problems with it, though after all the time has passed, I can guess.
It’s very relevant to my current mind set. I loathe my job with the fury of a thousand suns. I want to write books. That’s it. But I got bills to pay and mouths to feed and ain’t nothing in this world is free. (Hey! Another quote! Bonus points if you know it) I read Scalzi and Hurley and Buckell and Hines… those authors who will talk honestly about realistic expectations when it comes to getting paid. I can count on one hand the number of SF authors I know who don’t have day jobs or a spouse with a good one. I live in a very expensive part of the US. There’s a reason 3 of those 4 authors I mentioned above live in Ohio. The average advance for a noob in SF wouldn’t pay my bills for a month. I struggle with getting enough oomph to be remotely productive. Most days I don’t feel like I have a clue if what I’m doing is any good. But enough people seem to see potential that I keep slogging against the odds. It’s what I want to do with my life.
I’m not dumb. I’m just optimistic.