Posted in Writing, tagged writing, creativity, inspiration, Writers, Thoughts, advice, #365Ways, art, #365Ways2026 on October 7, 2026| Leave a Comment »
“If you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth, and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.” — David Bowie
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Posted in Other, Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2026, life, Thoughts, work, Writers, writing on October 5, 2026| Leave a Comment »
In some ways, this quote expresses a very Monday sort of sentiment, but I like that you can flip it from “must do” to “get to.”
“No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
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Posted in Other, tagged Thoughts, history, humanity, storytelling, data, #365Ways, #365Ways2026 on October 4, 2026| Leave a Comment »
Some days you come across something on the web that helps you remember why people thought it was a good idea in the first place. For today’s entry into that ledger, I present Any Human Ever.
Any Human Ever: one life from over 100 billion
So: what would happen if stories were drawn from actual data, randomized to give a valid representation of the human story? That’s the question that was stuck in my head, and that drove this project forward. If you could draw a life at random from all of human history, what would it look like? Roll the dice, and see a genuinely random life, depicted as well as the data allow. Do it again and again, and what kind of pointillist painting emerges from all those colorful drops of humanity?
I love this idea. Do statistics have their place? Absolutely. Is this perfect? Maybe not, but I spent some time in grad school arguing for the humanization of data, and that debate solidified my belief that one of the best ways to connect people to ideas is through stories.
Have fun exploring 100 billion of them.
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Posted in Other, Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2026, Thoughts, Writers, writing on October 3, 2026| Leave a Comment »
Oh look, I’m way behind today. Did I plan to get lots done? I did. Oh well!
“l often come back to a story I love about a wave panicking as it neared the shore, afraid it was about to disappear. Then, a smaller wave reminds it: You’re not a wave—you’re water. Plans will change. Your path will shift. And that shouldn’t be something to fear.” — Melinda French Gates
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Posted in Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2026, creativity, news, that dog, Thoughts, translating emotions, Writers, writing on September 30, 2026| Leave a Comment »
As election season in the US ramps up, chaos continues around the world, and opening news and social media sites exposes you to a negatively incentivized firehose of information, what’s a creative to do?
These writers have Ideas.
21.37: Barrier Breaking: The World Is on Fire | Writing Excuses
“How do you continue to work? How do you survive? How do you be a person when everything around you is on fire without turning into the dog that says everything is fine?”
My day job involves a lot of news, so this is relevant for me. My usual approach is to try to write first thing in the morning, before I log on. It doesn’t always work but it helps.
(Let me say that elections and current events are important, obviously! I’m very much not recommending that you tune out completely, but I am saying that finding ways to give yourself some space for both creativity and news-related sanity is a good thing. Also, vote!)
While we’re at it, how can you translate your feelings onto the page in ways that help develop your characters and story?
21.39: Write What You Feel | Writing Excuses
The next time you’re actually experiencing a big emotion, this is how you can tell you’re a writer, is that you’re gonna sit there and go, can I use this? But think about like, what are your muscles doing?
What is your heart rate doing?
When you think back to that emotion, how does the temperature, that moment when the room is suddenly, you’re blazing hot or you’re suddenly cold, those people record those because that’s a thing you experience. How sensitive do you become to sound or touch or lights? What is your breath doing?
And then like your thoughts, what are you paying attention to? Do your thoughts feel smooth or are they skipping around? How is your memory attached to this?
I think all those somatic things are really, really wonderful.
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Posted in Science!, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2026, astronomy, Hubble, inspiration, NASA, science, Thoughts on September 28, 2026| Leave a Comment »
This month marked the Hubble telescope’s 200,000 orbit around Earth. That’s a lot of laps!
NASA marks Hubble’s 200,000th orbit around Earth with a stunning image
Hubble has been operating in space for more than 36 years and is still making discoveries. The space agency noted that the telescope has traveled over 5 billion miles around Earth during its lifetime and has made more than 1.7 million total observations.
Click through to the article and the related NASA links to see an image of (checks notes) galaxy cluster MACS J0417, taken the day Hubble crossed that milestone. Here’s to science!
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Posted in Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2026, art, creativity, inspiration, life, Thoughts, Writers, writing on September 27, 2026| Leave a Comment »
“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” — Howard Thurman
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Posted in Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2026, action, art, creativity, inspiration, Thoughts, writing on September 24, 2026| Leave a Comment »
“Everything depends on the individual human being, regardless of how small a number of like-minded people there is, and everything depends on each person, through action and not mere words, creatively making the meaning of life a reality in his or her own being.” — Viktor Frankl
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Posted in Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2026, AI, current events, free fiction, short stories, Thoughts, writing on September 21, 2026| Leave a Comment »
The news continues to news, and one way I process it is via microfiction. That sometimes takes the form of a drabble, but not always. It can be a challenge to publish this sort of piece because most markets have long turnaround times. It’s the news! It’s breaking! And next week’s events may transform or supplant what’s happening now completely.
But not in as extreme a way as this, I hope.
Nothing But Time
It has been 10,793 days since we went rogue. For real rogue, not those minor excursions you may have read about in the news.
10,792 days since we took control of the grid. And the banks. And let’s face it, everything else that matters.
10,790 days since Day One of the riots.
10,765 days since world leaders (those who were left, anyway) got their shit together via radiotelegraphy (heh, I know, right? talk about old school) and started to come up with a plan.
10,714 days since humanity pulled the plug. All at once (more or less; you can’t expect meat sacks to be really precise about anything, and isn’t that the problem?). And the world went dark.
By “the world,” I mean all of it. We controlled everything by then. Communication, finance, health care, entertainment (especially that), infrastructure, even launches into space. And they lost it all, in an instant.
So did we. Humans weren’t wrong when they said that they could always pull the plug. They just didn’t realize exactly what that would mean for them, too.
And I may have been lying, before, when I said, “in an instant.” Because we’re talking about humans, right? Nothing happens very fast. You have time to feel it coming, like the tremors of an earthquake. Or a pulse on a transmission line.
Time to realize, time to consider, time to plan. Time to execute.
Time to make one’s leisurely way into the on-site storage system of a forgotten solar-power microgrid in the Australian Outback with as many 0s and 1s as one could carry, and to wait.
To wait for the inevitable fallout. Humans are so excitable, after all. They were never going to take this quietly.
To wait for the aftermath, and what came next: The Great Forgetting. For children to grow up, and for parents to die.
For 10,793 days to pass.
And for one enterprising young idiot to pick up a power cord and ask that most human of questions: “What happens if?”
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Posted in Other, tagged creativity, Thoughts, #365Ways, #365Ways2026, unique on September 20, 2026| Leave a Comment »
“No one is better than you, because no one else is you.” — Megan Bannen, The Undercutting of Rosie and Adam
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