A Nice Stories Christmas Party (standard:adventure, 611 words)
Author: Brian Newman	Added: Dec 01 2004	Views/Reads: 3552/0	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
A Christmas Party for authors from this Site!

A Nice Stories Christmas Party! 

The Fourth Annual Nice Stories Christmas Party was held Dec 18th at the
Cock and Bull pub in New York City. As readership of the Site grows 
attendance at this event does as well. The location changes yearly, in 
an ever failing attempt to find a location near to all. If you missed 
this event, please try and get to next year's Party. It is a special 
treat to meet authors you admire and friends whom you have  never met. 

My day job involves journalism. So I have the perks of being under paid,
over worked and the frustration of having people recognize my name, yet 
never remembering what the story was about. This year I received a new 
perk, a tiny digital recording device to help out my 'interview' 
skills. The packaging of these modern items is often more interesting 
than the item itself, and as I was looking through things I spotted the 
leatherette case with the double sided adhesive tape. The instructions 
told me this was for 'private' recording. So, rather than write up my 
own cock and bull story of the Party, I got to the pub early and 
discretely placed my new recorder under a table, and turned it on. My 
hope was to catch interesting conversations from the night, and them 
post them at this forum. If you are proud of your words, you can claim 
them. If you feel sheepish, well, blame those words on someone else. 
The recorder, by the way, claims to be voice activated. It is not. Any 
sound turns it on. So I had to shift through seven hours of mostly bad 
Christmas music to recover these gems.  You can judge if my labor was 
worthwhile: 

"If we don't imagine it, how are we to become it?" 

"Do I have a kind of ambiguous morality?" 

"How do I work with myself if I am denied the extras?" 

"Every human being who tells a story does so in their own way." 

"We can change the past by discovering new meanings to events!" 

"Words, again and again, divide us." 

"We're constantly looking for symbolic people." 

"To work one's imagination on someone else is evil." 

"I was not made privy to the story!" 

"A culture always has a mythology about evil." 

"Sometimes to imagine is to discover oneself!" 

"Soul is an ingredient of talent." 

"No one is obliged to be a genius." 

"Everyone needs someone to look down on." 

"I cannot love you anymore. It's over!" 

"All of the old gods are gone. We are now in the vacuum of waiting." 

"Every new myth emerges from a heroic journey." 

"What kind of world would you like to change us into?" 

"Do you still believe that there is an underlying truth? No, I believe
in truth, but I don't believe in Truth." 

"What is the source of evil?" 

"Can you escape all that ties you to your past?" 

"Writers are always rebels against imagination!" 

"In a sense, your story does not belong to you." 

"The truly great artists are people who are appreciated after they are
dead!" 

"The seed is there in the act." 

"So fate is sometimes full of happy accidents?" 

"In a screenplay things only develop by accident." 

"Your memories change as your values change." 

"I fear only one thing: the shipwreck of old age." 

It is fitting that a great summing up comment is right at the end of my
recording. The conversations, as you can see, were varied and of high 
interest. I'll post one more comment, as I wish everyone a Merry 
Christmas! 

"The dignity of my life is the telling of my story." 


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