Grant Barrett said:
Writers will appreciate this quotation from Burton Roscoe: "What no wife of a writer can understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of a window."
That quote may apply to anyone with a creative bent. When I am contemplating my (even experimental) research, few would probably think I was working. However, I have learned that a computer in my lap sometimes lets me think and also lets me appear to work.
Emmett
Grant Barrett said:
Writers always seem to come up with brilliant quotes about writing, and why shouldn't they? Douglas Adams has noted, "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
That reminded me of a quote about another sort of writing. When a young composer asked Rossini for advice on when to compose an overture, he replied:
Wait until the evening before opening night. Nothing primes inspiration more than necessity, whether it be the presence of a copyist waiting for your work or the prodding of an impresario tearing his hair out. In my time, all the impresarios in Italy were bald at thirty.... I composed the overture to Otello in a little room in the Barbaja Palace where the baldest and fiercest of directors had forcibly locked me up with a lone plate of spaghetti and the threat that I would not be allowed to leave the room alive until I had written the last note
As for a synonym of cheeky I would use on the sly to describe that type of person. Someone who stirs up trouble with the intention of humor, or being argumentative just to loosen someone up, someone trying to break up the seriousness or strict, traditional nature of something by daring an oddball feat to mix things up, I would describe as on the sly..
As for twee, perhaps ultra-feminine?
As for the sticking point, as someone who took Archery in college, there's a point at which you draw back a simple/recurve bow to the point where you're not straining to pull it back as much as you did for the rest of the draw, and there is a little point that you can just sense is just far enough and it seemingly sticks in place, feeling like the proper point to stop drawing back that you can feel in a tactile sense. As far as "screwing up" your courage "to the sticking point," seems to me as to provoke or gather up your courage to the point at which it carries its own momentum and results in action upon it, almost akin to the point at which you stop drinking and find yourself suitably drunk, or the point at which you find yourself in such dire straits that you're willing to accept any job at all, discarding your previous standards against burger flipping or washing dishes. Baldrick, the character from the British show Blackadder, in the holiday special known as Blackadder's Christmas Carol (an interesting comedic take on the classic tale) suggests at one point that he and Blackadder "screw up their eyes" hard to wish for something..
When I'm at a family wedding my nephews never fail to come to me and, before asking if they can play a game on my phone, ask me to order them a Grenade Juice. A custom I taught them years ago to pack a punch into the otherwise girly Shirley Temple.
Re: humblebrag
The term "humblebrag" doesn't work for me.
I have the same issue the (telephone) listener did; there isn't anything humble about this type of comment, so humblebrag doesn't seem like a fitting name to describe it.
Where I come from, we call these "bragplaints".