• Tag Archives writing

  • Long, Long, Long Overdue Update

    This place isn’t dead. On the contrary, I have often thought over the past couple years that I have let it go too long without putting anything here. The same goes for the newsletter, but that is another matter entirely. Since it has been nearly two whole years, there is a lot of ground to cover. I’m going to keep this brief for now though.

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  • A Simple Mission

    Posted on by Skye Comment

    “Just a simple mission,” they’d said, like what they wanted wasn’t at all unusual.

    Another chance to serve my country by removing an obstacle to social progress. Despite the euphemisms, I knew exactly what they really wanted. They called it an execution. Told me it had been approved by the courts after a proper trial and everything.

    But what court doesn’t even tell someone they’re on trial? What execution involves slithering into someone’s house while they sleep?

    I shouldn’t have listened. Should have known better. About the guilt. About how from then on I would always see the blood on my hands no matter how often I washed them. If that was it, perhaps I could have gotten over it. Found a way to live with myself.

    Only it wasn’t.

    Now, barely a day goes by without that familiar prickle running down my spine when I least expect it. Sometimes its in the mirror. Sometimes out of the corner of my eye. Once, even at my daughter’s school.

    I’ll be minding my own business only to look over, and there he’ll be. Standing there. Watching. Smiling at me like he doesn’t mind the bullet hole in the middle of his forehead.


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  • 5 Tricks to Avoid Writer’s Block

    One thing I’ve noticed when writing, there are numerous sources about how to cope with and move past writer’s block. Not surprising. Anyone who’s sat down to write a story has reached a point where they simply do not know how to proceed. This doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t know what happens next (although that is common). It could be also be they are unsure of how to proceed, or simply lack the necessary motivation to continue.

    While I could give advice on how to overcome writer’s block, my experience has been that what works for one person very rarely works for another. This probably shouldn’t come as a surprise. Everyone’s creative process is different. Same for our strengths and weaknesses. Thus, I suspect, the exact problems every writer must contend with when facing writer’s block are also likely to be completely different.

    So instead of giving some advice that might be partly useful to one or two people in the world, I figured I would instead tackle the larger issue of how to avoid writer’s block entirely. In all honesty, I believe this can be applied to any endeavor where people feel like they are getting stuck, however my application has to do exclusively with writing. Also, as with overcoming writer’s block, I do not expect that works for me will also work for you. Instead, it is my hope that reading this will make you think about how you go about doing your own work, and identify the habits you have that ultimately sabotage you from making progress.

    I’m also going to give a shout out to the book The War of Art, which helped me immeasurably. I probably bring this up every time I talk about writer’s block or productivity. There is a reason for that.

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  • What Do Artists Owe Their Fans?

    I brought this up in my newsletter, but the fallout I have witnessed from the final season of Game of Thrones has been fairly interesting. This isn’t a show that I watched at all (I do not watch much television and my interest in the series had already been lost as a result of the slow release of the books), so I got to see this as a mostly peripheral observer. As I write stories myself, it should come as no surprise that what I see had given me quite a bit to think about.

    There is a LOT of ground to cover, and more I will leave uncovered, because this is already too long. I sort of rolled up most of the questions I ended up thinking about (concerning GoT) into a single post to keep this contained. Also decided to focus on the show in particular as much as possible.

    Woah boy. Better get started.

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  • By Duty Bound Book Launch Post Mortum

    In-depth looks at my writing are something I try to avoid here, as I want this blog to be about more than just the craft of writing, however, I’ve got this New Year’s Resolution to keep my blog up more than I have been and only a few ideas for content. Ended up asking around for topic ideas, and this one came up as something that may be interesting to people (or at the very least other writers in of anthro fiction). Continue reading → Post ID 1201

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  • Pens

    This is a post I’ve been wanting to make for a while, which feels really weird to say considering this is going to be all about pens. How long you ask? Well, instead of launching into a hyperbolic story I shall answer you with a single image:

     

    Those of you with keen eyes will notice that the Last Modified date for the post was in December of 2015, nearly 2 years ago. If you have bothered to look you will also notice that it was just a few months after I first launched my blog. I have sat on this for a couple of years, mostly because I wasn’t sure I should ramble on about what I like about pens.

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  • Adventures in Vertigo

    So just as I hoped I was getting over my illness, I got struck down by new (even worse) symptoms. Not sure if this was unrelated to the initial sickness or just a sign it had moved elsewhere in my body, but if I thought constant coughing, congestion, and sore throats were bad I was about to get shown something far worse: Vertigo. Initially very intense vertigo.

    At first I assumed it was just a sign I had stared at my computer screen too long (sometimes that can disorient me), but when I took a break things didn’t improve. Instead they got far, far worse. I was effectively unable to move. Literally. I was lying in bed, and even moving my arms or legs caused the sensation to intensify, regardless of if the rest of my body remained stationary.  All I could do was lay in bed and try to keep completely still while focusing on my breathing. An hour later the dizziness had subsided enough that I was able to get up and function, but I remained disoriented until that night.

    In the days that followed things were never quite that bad, but I kept having spells of dizziness and light-headedness. These got fewer and more mild as time went on, thankfully, but kept me more or less incapacitated until recently. Obviously certain activities made everything worse (basically anything that involves me looking up and down a lot, or has me turning quickly).

    That said, it has given me some ideas for how illness can play into a story. So often sicknesses are portrayed as the usual symptoms: coughing, sneezing, fever. All that is fine, but I can imagine how something like an inner ear infection could cause bad headaches and vertigo, which would lead to different challenges for a character beyond merely feeling bad.

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