Women and Men

As some of you know, I semi-retired from blogging to pursue fiction writing.  I have learned much about the craft of storytelling in the past two years, and unfortunately, it was after I wrote my stories, so I have been busy revisiting them.  I am at the tail end of rewriting my first novel, which has been a long time in the making.  After putting that to bed, I have a trio of novellas to edit, and then I plan on converting another novella into a full-length novel.

I do a lot of reading about writing, and in my meanderings, I came across a funny piece of wisdom written by a professional writer named Chuck Wendig.  This is good for various reasons, but principally because it states a truth in a novel and entertaining way.  I also admire how he avoided using vulgar terms.

Ever told someone to "grow a pair?"  After reading this excerpt from Chuck Wendig's talk on overcoming the fear of failure, you'll never hear the phrase in the same way again:

You: You’re saying I should grow a pair of balls and get it done.

Me: Balls are actually notoriously weak, far as parts of the body go. I mean, I could catch a wiffle ball in the crotch and double over in misery. The testicles are very sensitive and about as strong as a couple of raw quail eggs rolling around in a set of fishnet stockings. You wanna be hardcore, dang, grow a vagina. Those things are built Ford tough, man. The vagina is like the Incredible Hulk of the human form. It does all the heavy lifting. You ever see a woman give birth to a child? You see that, you’re like, “That thing could lift a burning car if it had to.” If anything, the entire scope of masculine history has been an epic attempt at trying to convince the world that the vagina is tissue paper and our balls are titanium. It’s a huge and ugly ruse.
-- Chuck Wendig, Terrible Minds