Charles Wiegand - Author

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[Charles Wiegand - Author @CharlesWAuthor]

What should have been Bronson Dalton’s second chance turns into chaos when his new perfume causes wild side effects. Now he must fix the formula, stop the fallout, and survive the women complicating his life.
"Making Scents" - July 20, 2026
For more info: https://t.co/Z1GyWyh0ZR

[Charles Wiegand - Author @CharlesWAuthor]

produced this at speed, composed not to a word count or a line count but to an exact character count. The compression is not incidental. A sentence built to fit a slot has no room to hedge, which is part of why it still gets quoted sixty-five years on.

[Charles Wiegand - Author @CharlesWAuthor]

“Nonetheless, character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.”
--Joan Didion (1934–2021)
From "Self-respect: Its Source, Its Power," Vogue (1961)

#life #love #coffee #write #books #quotes #joandidion

[Charles Wiegand - Author @CharlesWAuthor]

that one likes oneself. The rest is her working out what is left standing once the flattering story is gone. Character is her word for what is left.

Worth knowing how it was written. Vogue needed something to fill a hole when another writer missed a deadline, and Didion

[Charles Wiegand - Author @CharlesWAuthor]

performing for people whose good opinion you cannot control anyway.

The essay opens with her failing to make Phi Beta Kappa at Berkeley and discovering that she was not, after all, exempt from cause and effect. Innocence ends, she writes, when one is stripped of the delusion

[Charles Wiegand - Author @CharlesWAuthor]

Didion is not offering encouragement. She is naming a price. Self-respect, she argues, has nothing to do with reputation or with the approval of others, both of which are deceived easily enough. It is a private ledger. What you get for keeping it honestly is release from

[Charles Wiegand - Author @CharlesWAuthor]

in a novel by a twenty-three-year-old. The line's a clever man's dismissal of achievement he has not attempted, which is what Fitzgerald built Amory to expose. It reads as wisdom standing alone. In context, it's also a symptom. That double edge is why it's outlasted the argument.

[Charles Wiegand - Author @CharlesWAuthor]

“A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.”
--Francis Scott Key (F. Scott) Fitzgerald (1896 - 1940)
Spoken by the character Amory Blaine, in “This Side of Paradise” (1920)
#life #authors #love #coffee #write #books #amwriting #quotes #fscottfitzgerold

[Charles Wiegand - Author @CharlesWAuthor]

and finds each one a representative rather than a force. Greatness, he decides, has become a full-time performance. Pressed on whether world heroes are finished, he allows them in history books but not in life.

Worth remembering it is a character speaking, and a young one,

[Charles Wiegand - Author @CharlesWAuthor]

She isn't being brave about aging or mournful about it, the two poses on offer. She names the arithmetic, gets a laugh from it, and moves on.

[Charles Wiegand - Author @CharlesWAuthor]

“The really frightening thing about middle age is the knowledge that you'll grow out of it.”
--Doris Day (born Doris Mary Anne Kappelhoff) (1922–2019)
As quoted in “Doris Day : Her Own Story” (1975)
as told to A. E. Hotchner
#life #authors #coffee #write #quotes #dorisday

[Charles Wiegand - Author @CharlesWAuthor]

What keeps it from reading as a gag writer's one-liner is where it turns up: a memoir in which Day set out to correct a public image of untroubled cheerfulness she had spent decades disowning. The wryness is earned rather than performed.

[Charles Wiegand - Author @CharlesWAuthor]

And that connects with the Joan Crawford quote:

“Learn to breathe, learn to speak, but first, learn to feel.”

Different people, different contexts, almost eighty years apart, but remarkably similar craft wisdom: technique can carry emotion, but it cannot manufacture it.

[Charles Wiegand - Author @CharlesWAuthor]

“You can't sweep other people off their feet, if you can't be swept off your own.”
--Clarence Shepherd Day, Jr. (1874–1935)
From “The Crow's Nest” (1921)

#writerslift #life #authors #love #art #coffee #diary #write #books #amwriting #quotes #clarenceshepherdday

[Charles Wiegand - Author @CharlesWAuthor]

A writer who has never been frightened will have difficulty writing genuine fear. A comedian who cannot be surprised may struggle to create genuine wonder. An actor who has never allowed himself to feel deeply may deliver technically perfect lines that still feel dead.