I call this an "exercise" for two reasons: 1) It is outside the range of my normal creative comfort zone, and thus forced me to exercise both brain and muse, lol. Hopefully it will do the same for you, should you wish to give it a whirl yourself! 2) It was given to my current writing workshop with Deb Sturgess as "homework", which is then by default exercise, ha. Naturally, as such, I composed it right at the very last minute! Whoops. Read up on Odes here, if you wish. It's really quite a ... View Post
Bait, Fish, and Reel Report September 2013
Someone once said that to be a successful and productive writer, one had to do the equivalent of “cutting bait, fishing, and reeling ‘em in, all at the same time”! This translates to writing as working on projects-in-progress while at the same time submitting completed projects to potential markets and also continuing to cultivate new ideas for future projects. In case you missed my previous post on this subject, at the end of every month I compile a list of what I accomplished as far as ... View Post
Writing Prompt Wednesday: Defining "Loblolly"
Something a little different this week! This started as purely for random fun, when a friend of mine (agirlwhowrites, in fact) posted the Word of the Day on her Facebook page and offered Life Points for anyone who could come up with the best sentence using that word. At first, I wasn't going to attempt it. But when no one else seemed to seriously rise to challenge, I thought, "Well, why not give it a whirl?" In the end, I had so much fun coming up with a sentence for each definition ... View Post
Another Belated Writing Prompt Wednesday: "Starting from Chekhov", a writing exercise.
So I completely forgot that Wednesday was Wednesday this week. Just bear with me folks, I'll get my brain back in order one of these days! I meant to share this exercise a long time ago but then forgot about it, too, so now that I am remembering things again, I thought this would be as good a time as any to finally post it! The following is the result of a writing exercise done during the New Letters Writing Workshop at the University of Missouri- Kansas City. We were to take the ... View Post
The Story in a Bag: "A Lovely Day for a Parade"
To make up for my missed Writing Prompt Wednesday last week, I now present you with the short story I wrote over Memorial Day weekend for Kansas City, Missouri's ConQuesT 44 science fiction convention's Story in a Bag contest. What in the heck is a Story in a Bag!?!? you might be asking. Well, good question. The Story in a Bag contest involved the following: drawing five random prompts out of five different brown paper bags. Taking your five prompts and writing a story using all five prompts ... View Post
Writing Prompt Wednesday: A Venture into "Found Poetry"
Perhaps to my embarassment, I just recently discovered the awesomeness of "found poetry". For those of you who still may not know about it, I offer this definition from Wikipedia: Found poetry is a type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them as poetry by making changes in spacing and lines, or by adding or deleting text, thus imparting new meaning. The resulting poem can be defined as either treated: changed in a profound ... View Post
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