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The Chestnuts, Guildford (Photos: The Writing Box)
An omnipresent legacy
This article is first published on January 14, 2014, which is 116 years after Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's death, aka “Lewis Carroll”, whose literary work after Shakespeare's and the Bible, is the most often cited in the occidental world, more especially Alice's adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872). How many innumerable references, visual or written, to the Cheshire cat or to the passage through the mirror! A noteworthy example is the movie The Matrix, in which we find a white rabbit – in tattoo form – that Neo will follow at the beginning of the story, and later on, Morpheus is offering Neo to experience the depth of the rabbit hole, in this famous scene where he's handing him the red and blue pills:
I imagine that right now you're feeling a bit like Alice, tumbling down the rabbit hole. (...) You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
If you're paying attention, you'll notice that not a day goes by without hearing or reading at least one reference to Lewis Carroll imaginary. Indeed, it seems Alice's universe forms a mythological framework well omnipresent in our modern world. Is it because the latter looks to us so senseless or that we have the intuition that something else is hiding behind the appearances and conventions? Anyway, I had a special experience with this amazing universe and its mysterious creator born in 1832. And it is totally by chance (or was it?) that I happened to visit the place where he spent the last days of his life, on the occasion of a short trip to England a few years ago.
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Image credit: lvnel / 123RF Stock Photo
What would we do without other people? My experience in the self-employed world illustrates well the reality of this fact: it's impossible to succeed alone. As I have written it in my presentation text, I never got to study translation. After finishing a Master Degree in Literature, I had no clear perspective as to what career was ahead for me, apart from my attraction for writing since childhood, but I didn't really question myself about that. Quite rapidly, I wanted to be an independent worker and create my own small business.
I had to learn my new profession as a home-based translator and editor by practicing it — but it's not by myself that I've been able to put in place my activities as a self-employed. Indeed, the help received from business networks has been a real treasure. And I didn't know yet about online social networks like Linkedin during the first years of The Writing Box, between 2000 and 2004. It was all about meeting people in person in the material world!
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Image credit: nexusplexus / 123RF Stock Photo
I'm glad to announce that 2014 will see the birth of a project I'm working on for a few years now. It's a literary community and platform for independent authors and publishers, called Write Stars. I will regularly post information on this website about how it is unfolding in the coming months. Here's a first preview of the project.
A highly interactive platform for the self-publishing world
So, what exactly is Write Stars? It will allow anyone to create a profile and become a member of this community and portal, either as a Reader or as a Writer. The Writers will also be Readers by default, and so both basic membership types will have access to the same interactive functionalities.
The Writing Box L'Écritoire Omnimana
