“Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Posts Tagged ‘Writers’
Follow Your Own Path
Posted in Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2024, inspiration, Thoughts, Writers on May 25, 2024| Leave a Comment »
Help Wanted: Must Love Laser Sharks
Posted in Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2024, drabble, genre fiction, must love drabbles, Writers, writing on May 24, 2024| Leave a Comment »
I set out to write a post about climate fiction or reading the geophysical landscape or talking plants, but instead I detoured to write a drabble. Because some days are just like that.
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Help Wanted: Must Love Laser Sharks
The day dawned cold and dispirited. Nila gently set her coffee on the table to keep from screaming. Her mother had ejected her from The Lair exactly one year ago.
She scanned the classifieds out of habit. A new ad caught her eye:
Assistant needed. Must:
- understand the intricacies of shark breeding;
- be comfortable with most weaponry (prepare for mortal danger);
- be skilled in fire management (including molten lava).
Salary negotiable; you keep what you kill.
Yes, please. Six months, twelve max, and she’d take over this aging villain’s empire. Her mother wouldn’t know what hit her.
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Doesn’t Always Feel That Way, Though, Does It?
Posted in Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2024, back to work!, inspiration, Thoughts, Writers, writing on May 22, 2024| Leave a Comment »
So I wake up this morning with that age-old cliché in my head: You have as many hours in a day as [Leonardo da Vinci].
Fill in your own preferred goal setter.* Mine changes depending on my current mood and projects. Sometimes it even helps;)
Onward!
* Also, remember that if your exemplar is pre-20th century, your life expectancy is probably double theirs. Strike that, we’re all under enough pressure as it is.
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Stop Worrying
Posted in Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2024, confidence, creativity, Thoughts, Writers, writing on May 18, 2024| Leave a Comment »
“You probably wouldn’t worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do.”
— David Foster Wallace
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Legend Reads Legend
Posted in Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2024, alice-munro, Fiction, goals, inspiration, short stories, the greats, Writers, writing on May 17, 2024| Leave a Comment »
You may have seen that Canadian author and Nobel laureate Alice Munro passed away this week. A prolific titan of the short story genre, she published her first story in 1950 and continued to produce award-winning work in the many decades since. When asked how she got started in short stories, she said it was because that’s all she had time for.
She certainly made it work.
Here, award-winning Canadian author Margaret Atwood reads Dance of the Happy Shades by Alice Munro.
In this exclusive recording, The Handmaid’s Tale author reads the eponymous short story from the late Munro’s first collection in 1968.
If you’d like to read more of Munro’s work, here are 25 Alice Munro Stories You Can Read Online Right Now.
Enjoy!
“A story is not like a road to follow … it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.”
― Alice Munro, Selected Stories
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Better than Ever
Posted in Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2024, creativity, Motivation, Thoughts, Writers, writing on May 16, 2024| Leave a Comment »
“I don’t believe you have to be better than everybody else. I believe you have to be better than you ever thought you could be.”
— Ken Venturi
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Your Choice
Posted in Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2024, creativity, quoteandaprettypicture, Thoughts, Writers, writing on May 11, 2024| Leave a Comment »
The point is, if you want to be happy, let go of your wants. If you want to be effective, harness them.
— Hank Green
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Dispatch from The Story Mines
Posted in Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2024, genre fiction, Thoughts, Writers on May 8, 2024| Leave a Comment »
Field report on current story progress, the eighth day of May, 2024:
I have drafted three drabbles recently but sadly, have nothing yet to share.
- The first drabble is refusing to shrink to the appropriate length.
- The second drabble needs a twist, something spicy.
- And the third drabble is a tiny bit (way too) dark for these pages. (I mean, my nephews are mostly grown now but still, I try to keep it light.)
I plan to finish at least some of these projects soon, but no guarantees. One of the (many) ideas I started for last year’s Writers of the Future 24-hour story has been requesting my attention. And it’s hard to ignore a telepathic dirigible!
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What We Must Save
Posted in Other, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2024, quotes, Thoughts, Writers on May 7, 2024| Leave a Comment »
“We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.”
— Tennessee Williams
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The Art of Flying
Posted in Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2024, creativity, inspiration, Thoughts, Writers on May 5, 2024| Leave a Comment »
“The Guide says there is an art to flying”, said Ford, “or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.”
― Douglas Adams
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