Pigs in a blanket.

To draw a forest so it's big enough you don't include the tops of the trees or any sky. Just very thick tree-trunks growing absolutely straight. ... In a proper painting of a forest everything is roughly the same colour, the moss, the tree-trunks and the branches of the fir trees, everything is soft and solemn, half-way between grey and brown and green but very little green. If you want you can add a princess, for example. She is always white and very tiny and has long yellow hair. Sculptor's daughter by Tove Jansson.

Dream of the Yellow Chrysanthemum from Dialogues in Paradise by Can Xue. I was hiding behind the window aiming my air gun at a squirrel on a roof in the distance. I had been taking aim for two hours. But when I finally shot, full of confidence, the steel pellet zinged right into Old Jiang's arm. God knows why I lost my mind at the crucial moment, I was born with the impulsive personality. Immediately he jumped up and dashed into the room, shouting, "Murder! Murder!" I was totally embarrassed.

Mark Twain (1835–1910) In the 1870s and ’80s, the Twain family spent their summers at Quarry Farm in New York, about two hundred miles west of their Hartford, Connecticut, home. Twain found those summers the most productive time for his literary work, especially after 1874, when the farm owners built him a small private study on the property. That same summer, Twain began writing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. His routine was simple: he would go to the study in the morning after a hearty breakfast and stay there until dinner at about 5:00. Since he skipped lunch, and since his family would not venture near the study—they would blow a horn if they needed him—he could usually work uninterruptedly for several hours. “On hot days,” he wrote to a friend, “I spread the study wide open, anchor my papers down with brickbats, and write in the midst of the hurricane, clothed in the same thin linen we make shirts of.” Whether or not he was working, he smoked cigars constantly. One of his closest friends, the writer William Dean Howells, recalled that after a visit from Twain, “the whole house had to be aired, for he smoked all over it from breakfast to bedtime.” - From Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey “Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.” ― Mark Twain #dailyrituals #inktober #MarkTwain @masoncurrey