Posted in Other, Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2024, courage, creativity, fear, inspiration, persistence, Thoughts on February 23, 2024| Leave a Comment »
For anyone facing a challenge today, two quotes:
“…very often a risk is worth taking simply for the sake of taking it. There is something enlivening about expanding our self-definition, and a risk does exactly that. Selecting a challenge and meeting it creates a sense of self-empowerment that becomes the ground for further successful challenges.”
— Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way
“So do it. If you win, you win, and if you lose, you win.”
— Jake La Motta, Raging Bull
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Posted in Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2024, creativity, genre fiction, inspiration, Thoughts, writing on February 21, 2024| Leave a Comment »
“Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.”
― Terry Pratchett
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Posted in Entertainment, Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2024, #BlackAsSFF, genre fiction, inspiration, Thoughts, Writers on February 16, 2024| Leave a Comment »
I just finished the third book in N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy and have to agree with this article:
Dear Hollywood, Where Are the SFF Book-to-Movie-TV Adaptations From Black Writers?
Since 2014, approximately 500 books of all genres have been adapted to film or television. In total, just over four dozen of those books adapted were written by Black authors. Only four of those 50+ Black adaptations were speculative works.
Just saying.
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Posted in Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2024, inspiration, Thoughts, Writers, writing on February 15, 2024| Leave a Comment »
I just posted this to a writer’s group and then thought, what the heck, maybe other people would appreciate this too. And here we are.
I saw a writer on Twitter feeling not great about his work, of the “everything’s terrible, no one wants this stupid book, what’s the point, why am I even bothering?” variety. Been there, of course, who hasn’t, and I had some thoughts. Sharing in case someone else needs to hear it too:
Think of the last book you read that brought you joy, or showed you that there is light at the end of darkness.
Your book is you, repaying the favor.
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Posted in Other, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2024, inspiration, Thoughts, Writers on February 13, 2024| Leave a Comment »
You can become blind by seeing each day as a similar one. Each day is a different one, each day brings a miracle of its own. It’s just a matter of paying attention to this miracle.
— Paulo Coelho
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Posted in Science!, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2024, inspiration on February 11, 2024| Leave a Comment »
This is absolutely the sort of article I like to have with lunch:
Study finds bigfoot sightings correlate with black bear populations | Ars Technica
The results suggest that there’s a strong correlation between sightings and the local black bear population—for every 1,000 bears, the frequency of Bigfoot sightings goes up by about 4 percent.
So another way of interpreting this study is that (and correct me if I’m wrong here but really, it just makes sense) black bears and Bigfoot have formed an alliance.
Pretty sure they meet every third Thursday and swap tips on the best berry patches and how to avoid detection by overly-enthusiastic humans.
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Posted in Holidays, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2024, genre fiction, inspiration on February 10, 2024| Leave a Comment »
Happy Year of the Dragon!
2024 is China’s Year of the Dragon
The first day of the Chinese New Year falls on February 10 this year. Also known as the Spring Festival or Lunar New Year, the festival marking the advent of spring is widely celebrated in China and several East Asian countries…
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Posted in Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2024, creativity, genre fiction, inspiration, Octavia Butler, quotes, Thoughts, Writers, writing on February 5, 2024| Leave a Comment »
“First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice. You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.”
― Octavia E. Butler
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Posted in Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2024, characters, creativity, inspiration, Thoughts, Writers, writing on February 3, 2024| Leave a Comment »
Today, an excerpt from David Foster Wallace‘s 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College. It was made in to a book titled This is Water, but is also available online as text and audio.
It’s the sort of essay that can help if you start tripping over yourself, which everyone does at some point.
It’s also an interesting way for an author to approach their characters. What do they know? What do they take for granted? What do they love? What do they hope for? What do they fear, bone deep?
What is water to them?
If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.
They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom.
— David Foster Wallace, 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College
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Posted in Science!, Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2024, evolution, genre fiction, inspiration, science, Thoughts on January 30, 2024| Leave a Comment »
I have not read Brian Klaas’s Fluke, the book on which the article below is based, but this line made an impression in my busy day.
The big idea: what if every little thing you do changes history?
One hundred million years ago, a shrew-like creature got infected with a retrovirus, eventually leading to the placenta and, by extension, the reason why we don’t lay eggs.
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