Light Bulb Jokes for Writers
Q: How many copy editors does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: I can’t tell whether you mean ‘change a light bulb’ or ‘have sex in a light bulb.’ Can we reword it to remove the ambiguity?
Q: How many editors does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Only one. But first they have to rewire the entire building.
Q: How many managing editors does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: You were supposed to have changed that light bulb last week!
Q: How many art directors does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Does it HAVE to be a light bulb?
Q: How many copy editors does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: The last time this question was asked, it involved art directors. Is the difference intentional? Should one or the other instance be changed? It seems inconsistent.
Q: How many marketing directors does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: It isn’t too late to make this neon instead, is it?
Q: How many proofreaders does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Proofreaders aren’t supposed to change light bulbs. They should just query them.
Q: How many writers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: But why do we have to CHANGE it?
Q: How many publishers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Three. One to screw it in, and two to hold down the author.
Q: How many booksellers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Only one, and they’ll be glad to do it too, except no one shipped them any.
Q: How many editors does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: You’ve already screwed in too many light bulbs. Repetition!
Q: How many writers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: One, and they like to give it a good twist at the end.
Q: How many writers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Just one, but the light bulb has to endure a series of conflicts and challenges before it finally changes.
Q: How many reviewers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: None. They just stand back and critique while you do it.
Q: How many netgilantes does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: Did he use an English word? Must be a writer! Let’s lynch him!!!!
Q: How many reviewers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Only one, but first they have to tell you why they didn’t like how you did it.
Q: How many Kindleboards authors does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: One, followed by a 12-page, passionately-argued thread about how much the light bulb should cost.
Q: How many forum users does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: One, but in the following ten-page discussion, someone will invoke a comparison to Nazis.
Q: How many authors does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Only one but you also need an editor, proof reader, cover artist, and an agent to be there at the same time.
Originally reblogged from Tyson Adams
Source for Image
Posted on Writers Write
The 10 Best-Selling Authors Of 2012
- E.L James
- Suzanne Collins
- Jeff Kinney
- George R.R. Martin
- David Williams
- Sylvia Day
- Jamie Oliver
- Stieg Larsson
- James Patterson
- Dave Meyers
EL James’ Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy sold 10,509,988 copies in the year to December 2012, above the 2,113,017 for another trilogy, Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games.
Find out which books made the top 100 bestsellers’ list in 2012 by visiting the Top 100 bestselling books of 2012
From Writers Write
Literary Birthday - 2 October
Happy Birthday, Graham Greene, born 2 October 1904, died 3 April 1991
Graham Greene: 14 Quotes On Life, Love & Writing
- It’s a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.
- My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.
- Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation
- A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
- The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You’re there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.
- Pain is easy to write. In pain we’re all happily individual. But what can one write about happiness?
- There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
- One can’t love humanity. One can only love people.
- I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil.
- A man kept his character even when he was insane.
- One has no talent. I have no talent. It’s just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.
- The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn’t thought about. At that moment he’s alive and you leave it to him.
- Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast.
- All good novelists have bad memories.
Graham Greene was an English author, playwright and literary critic. Greene suffered from bipolar disorder. After several suicide attempts as a schoolboy, he was sent to analyst, Kenneth Richmond, who encouraged him to write and introduced him to his circle of literary friends.
Greene was one of the few authors who managed to combine serious literary acclaim with widespread popularity. His financial success enabled him to live comfortably and he associated with many famous figures including T.S. Eliot, Herbert Read, Evelyn Waugh, Alexander Korda, Ian Fleming, Noel Coward.
His novels include: The Power and the Glory, The End of the Affair, The Third Man, The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana.
William Golding described Greene as “the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man’s consciousness and anxiety.”
From Writers Write
Photos of Famous Authors and Their Bicycles
Henry Miller
Arthur Conan Doyle and his wife
H.G. Wells and his wife
Leo Tolstoy
Ray Bradbury
Sylvia Plath
(Source: flavorwire.com)
Lois Lowry, age five, and her elder sister, on the first day of kindergarten and second grade, respectively, 1942.
Authors as Adjectives
(Haruki) Murakamiesque
Marked by dream-like surreality and communal alienation. Also, containing many cats.
(Michael) Chabonish
The quality of pondering Jewish fatherhood and one’s own deep nostalgia.
(Junot) Díazian
Containing a copious amount of creative Spanglish.
(Sheila) Hetian
1. Of unclear or fluid basis in reality, and/or commentary on such.
2. Of or pertaining to graphic blowjob scenes.
(Gary) Shteyngartian
As pertaining to schlubby, awkward, and often self-deprecating dudes.
(George R.R.) Martinesque
1. The quality of anyone being able to die at any time.
2. Characterized by long stretches of narrative wandering.
(Jonathan) Franzenian
1. Sprawling and complex, usually as pertains to a family epic.
2. Characterized by a dislike for modern technology and/or general peevishness
(Mark Z.) Danielewskian
Characterized by inconsistencies and experimental presentation.
(Margaret) Atwoodish
Pertaining to speculative fiction, and absolutely not to science fiction, because there are no spaceships.
(Bret Easton) Ellisian
1. Marked by the recounting of horrible things in utter deadpan.
2. Fueled by cocaine.
(Cormac) McCarthian
Marked by abject and crushing, but rather lyrical, bleakness.
(Suzanne) Collinsian
1. Having wildly colored hair and skin.
2. Marked by children killing each other.
(Karen) Russellesque
Of a twee and swampy disposition.
(Rajesh) Parameswaranish
Characterized by passionate jungle animals.
(Kelly) Linkian
Of or pertaining to events that seem impossibly strange and strangely normal at the same time.
(Teju) Colian
Marked by a lot of aimless wandering and thinking about things.
(Cheryl) Strayedian
Characterized by an almost painful openness.
(Salman) Rushdian
Likely to invoke nationwide death threats.
(J.K.) Rowlingesque
Rife with magical puns.
(Don) DeLilloian
Marked by a strong sense of nothingness, displacement, dislocation and disassociation.
(Philip) Rothian
Of or pertaining to American masturbation.
(Lydia) Davisian
Able to speak volumes in just a few words.
(Neil) Gaimanesque
Highly allusive, particularly in regards to fairy tales and fantasy.
(Augusten) Burroughsesque
Marked by a brutal sense of self-deprecation.
(Jeffrey) Eugenidesian
As pertaining to the distressed sexualities of teenagers.
Via Flavorwire
Original Vintage Advertisements for Classic Books
Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote, 1948.
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, 1926.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a 1925 Princetonian.
(Source: flavorwire.com)
Essentially: John Connolly
The Author? John Connolly
His Birthday? 31 May 1968
The Venue? African Pride Hotel, Melrose Arch, Johannesburg
The Date? 2 August 2012
The Book? The Wrath of Angels
The Interviewer? Ulrike Hill
Writers Write Interview with John Connolly
10. Leo Tolstoy
Author of literary mainstays War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy was known for creating deep and far-ranging plots, whose casts of characters — numbering in the hundreds — were largely a way for him to escape the inner struggles he experienced when trying to reconcile the more difficult questions of the human condition. Tolstoy suffered from increasingly serious, frequent and suffocating depressive episodes, and finally resolved to become a wandering ascetic during the eighty-third year of his long life. Tragically, he only made it as far as an isolated train station before collapsing and dying from pneumonia shortly afterwards.
9. Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift, the Anglo-Irish author of the classics Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal, amongst others, led a life which slowly dipped into insanity over a fairly long period. In fact, while Will Durant has written that “[d]efinite symptoms of madness appeared in 1738,” there is no real consensus on when he crossed the threshold. What is certain, however, is that by 1742 his psyche had far exceeded the bounds of rationality and stability. Durant describes, for example, how “five attendants had to restrain him from tearing out his eye,” which was inflamed, an episode after which he fell silent for an entire year.
8. Philip K. Dick
In late February of 1974, sci-fi writer and heavy amphetamine user Philip K. Dick, whilst resting in his home following the extraction of a wisdom tooth, experienced a set of powerful psychological visions. These continued throughout the following month — vivid geometric patterns intermingling with ecclesiastical imagery to create new and insightful interpretations of religious and literary history. “I experienced an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane,” Dick said of the episode’s onset; also claiming that he began to lead a double life, with one half of him a persecuted Christian from Ancient Rome. This period of Dick’s life inspired writings such as Radio Free Albemuth and the VALIS trilogy.
7. H.P. Lovecraft
Horror, fantasy and sci-fi writer H.P. Lovecraft’s mental state was conditioned by both internal and external influences. He suffered from a traumatic sleep disorder, thought now to be a rare variety of parasomnia, or night terrors. As well as experiencing these night-time destabilizations, his finances were mishandled, leading to a steep and sudden decline in his family’s standard of living. Lovecraft suffered from extreme depression — he was suicidal for some time and suffered what he described as a “nervous breakdown” — and this tortuous life spun even further into the void when he was diagnosed with intestinal cancer and Bright’s disease, determining the intense pain in which he would spend the rest of his life.
6. Jack Kerouac
When Jack Kerouac wrote his most famous work On the Road, it wasn’t a standard, ten-chaptered novel that he had in mind. What was produced was a continual stream of consciousness, typed on one continuous reel that runs the length of a large hall. This unique approach to literature is perhaps less surprising when you consider the fact that Kerouac was under the influence of a cocktail of mind-altering substances, among them alcohol, marijuana and the amphetamine Benzedrine. Honourably discharged from the US Navy on grounds of a “schizoid personality,” Kerouac embarked upon the American highway for a lifestyle fuelled by jazz and speed with the now-legendary Dean Moriarty.
5. Ernest Hemingway
One of the canonical figures of modern American literature, Ernest Hemingway’s psychological well-being was fraught with problems. He indulged in infamously heavy drinking for the large part of his life, which likely led to his mental deterioration, as it has to so many creators of great art. Commentators have outlined several other probable diagnoses, from bipolar disorder to traumatic brain injury to narcissistic personality traits. After undergoing as many as 15 bouts of electroconvulsive therapy during 1960-61, Hemingway awoke early one July morning, picked up his favourite shotgun and blew his brains out.
4. Marquis de Sade
The Marquis de Sade led an undoubtedly eccentric life. His cultural significance lies at the confluence of revolutionary ideas of total sexual and moral freedom, expounded on in many literary works exploring deviant, subversive themes of sexual domination — from which we bequeathed the term “sadism.” In 1803, not long after incarceration without trial on the order of Napoleon Bonaparte, he was declared insane and placed in Charenton asylum. However, ever the “libertine,” de Sade’s life in the asylum was not an uneventful period, as he was permitted to perform several plays and had numerous illicit sexual liaisons until his death in 1814.
3. Sylvia Plath
Author of the roman à clef The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath depicted the descent into mental instability in her work in ways that strongly paralleled the vicissitudes of her own life. Her clinical depression resulted in her undergoing the rather unrefined electroconvulsive therapy techniques being used at the time. After her first series of treatments, Plath experienced a breakdown and attempted suicide. This attempt failed, ushering in a great deal more psychiatric intervention. Then, after a series of further attempts to take her own life, the thirty-year-old Plath was found dead in her flat, her head lain cold on the bottom of her kitchen oven, with the gas still flowing.
2. Edgar Allan Poe
Known for elucidating the shadows of mankind with such macabre tales as “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Edgar Allan Poe’s work also parallels the demons he fought in his own mind. His self-declared tendencies toward insanity textured his life with an ominous refrain akin to that which we find in his most famous poem, “The Raven.” After his wife’s death, Poe declared: “I am constitutionally sensitive—nervous in a very unusual degree. I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.” In October 1849, found in a state of delirium on the streets of Baltimore, unable to articulate anything with much meaning or explain how he had ended up there, Poe died in a local hospital in the early hours of the next day.
1. Virginia Woolf
The scorching prose of Virginia Woolf foretells not just of a unique and creative spirit, but also of the tortuous spins and turns that her life underwent. Bereaved of her mother and half-sister Stella during her early teens, Woolf also faced subjection to sexual abuse by her half-brothers. Throughout her life she struggled with bouts of deep depression and several nervous breakdowns as her fate meandered through different hardships — famously, for example, losing her London home during the British Blitz of World War II. On 28 March 1941, packing her overcoat’s pockets with stones, she walked into the nearest river to her home and was lost to the world.
