Jeffrey Alexander Martin

I feel like I need some fictional writing exercise to upskill and get the juices flowing, so I've decided to play with the opening of 'Replay' by Ken Grimwood, because I think it's a beautiful opening to a book. Maybe the best I've ever read. Last night I read through a small portion of the opening and wrote down sparse notes. This morning I attempted to reconstruct the original from my notes. This is a writing exercise I picked up from Benjamin Franklin. Let's see how I did. Here are my notes: on phone died never heard her heavy slammed chest phone fell cracked paperweight week before similar we need? pause not final sitting kitchen table breakfast nook formica table Here is my reconstruction: Jeff Winston was on the phone with his wife when he died... "We need..." she'd said, but he never heard the rest of what she was going to say. Something heavy slammed against his chest, crushing the breath out of him, making it difficult to breathe. The phon...

Part of the continual churn of death and destruction in human history is from the paradox of tolerance, which too few people are aware of. Frank Herbert has an excellent statement of it in his 1976 novel 'Children of Dune': "When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles." Babington Macaulay gives some good little examples of this type of error in volume 3 of his 1860 'Critical, Historical, and Miscellaneous Essays': "It would not be very wise to conclude that a beggar is full of Christian charity, because he assures you that God will reward you if you give him a penny; or that a soldier is humane, because he cries out lustily for quarter when a bayonet is at his throat. The doctrine which, from the very first origin of religious dissensions, has been held by all bigots of all sects, when condensed into a few wor...