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To tide you over…

To tide you over…

to tide over my lovely followers, please enjoy this short story!  I continue to work on other projects, but the 50 Unexplainable Stories project I started with my friend Jill is one of the most consistent. and I happen to be rather fond of this little tale. 🙂

50unexplainablestories:

Hoover Hawg of Eden, by August Williams

The house wasn’t the same anymore.  Now the wind rattled impolitely at the windows, begging to let the dust in, a hollow replacement for the baby’s cries of hunger.  Artie sat on the edge of his cot and listened to the plaintive howl, his bloodshot eyes fixed on the peeling wallpaper.  He hugged his knees to his chest and tried to stop trembling.

In the other room, his mama stammered her plea: Arthur senior had to bring something home, anything to silence the spasms of her stomach.  Artie bit his lip and closed his eyes, his mama’s soft and wrinkled face rising into his mind.  She bore her Native American heritage proudly, though she rarely spoke of it.  He heard her whisper, the desert will be kind enough to take me—it is full of my ancestors.

Artie dashed the tears from his face with a grimy sleeve and pushed himself off the cot.  He ran past his parents, huddled over the dinner table, their hands entwined.  He stopped long enough to grab his noose stick from against the side of the house and fled into the dust…

(for the rest, click the link!)

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Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.

E.L. Doctorow (via AdviceToWriters)
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Writers don’t write from experience, though many are resistant to admit that they don’t. I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.

Nikki Giovanni (via amandaonwriting)
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The more serious you are as a writer, the more you feel yourself an outsider—that you’ll never be someone who is going to organize the world and transform it in a logical way; you’re never going to think in any kind of politically logical way, and you’re never going to really have any power.

William Kennedy (via amandaonwriting)
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Free Word Processor For Easily Distracted Writers!

Free Word Processor For Easily Distracted Writers!

coralnard:

Okay, so when I type on my computer, I get all sorts of distracted. There’s tumblr, and email, and stumbleupon. Sometimes it’s too quiet and sometimes it’s too loud. Sometimes I can’t find the right music to write to. Sometimes my screen’s too bright. 

With OmmWriter, all of that changes.

It’s a full-screen word processor with several text, background, and music options. I tried the free version for about an hour before I decided I wanted to buy the full, which is dirt cheap. Less than five bucks and so totally worth it.

I suggest at least checking it out if you’re anything like me.

Happy writing!

PS: The only problem I’ve had with it so far is it crashed once when I double-clicked on the text. So just steer clear from double-clicking. 

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Would you stand for someone talking this way to your children—for instance, telling them that they are not very talented at painting and shouldn’t even bother? Or that their poetry is not very interesting? Of course not. You’d want to go pay this person a little visit with your flamethrower.

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird (via i-dunno-yet)
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Making time

Heyyyy, all. I know it’s been far too long since I’ve posted here and that sucks. I’ve been severely neglecting my dream and that’s just not cool.

I’m still frequently looking at images for inspiration (as you can tell, I’ve not been entirely inactive on this blog), but in terms of writing I’ve really abandoned the project.

I have been working on other things, but when I’ve made promises…well.

So: please stay tuned, and I will be coming back to this shortly.  I’ve got a few more pressing projects coming down the pipe that need to be out of the way first, and then it’s back to A God Grown Old, because what I have could be great and I don’t want to lose it.

Thanks for sticking with me, friends.

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asthewhitecrowflies:

crumpled pages are the easiest to start on. they already have a built-in story, told in folds, ripples and creases. I can bat at the ideas in the air around me all night, demotivated to bother by the blank-eyed monitor beside me. but the wrinkled page invites me to move, to dance the tip of my pen over its lines, to rise and fall in cadence over the shapes of its imperfections.

it is easy to look at a beautiful thing and notice its flaws; it is much harder, but much more worthwhile, to look at something imperfect and see its potential for beauty. we are not all pretty, and we are certainly not all hot – but we can all be beautiful. there are certain types of beauty that are unavoidable, given the proper application of love, and these beauties often shine out of the tiredest, the saddest, the most blemished faces.

when we stare at our reflection in the tinted window, the belief we’d avoided all mirrors crumbling away like so much mental makeup, we look hard at what we wish was a flawless canvas and we paint on the ugliness. it drips from our self-loathing like acrylic, and we apply it liberally. if only we could gently hold forth what we are sure we must fix in ourselves, and let the light show us where the polish is not needed.

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Trouble trouble

For some reason I can’t seem to get started again.  I keep coming back to where I left off, and reading over it, it doesn’t seem like I’ve made a misstep…

Inspiration, I needja now.

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A spare moment

The general lack of updates from me has been thanks to a super crazy existence all of a sudden.  Seems like the sun comes out and so do the opportunities…

Among other things (I won’t discuss them here, as they aren’t relevant, but they mostly involve Jake’s Big Projects) I’ve been conversing with a local talent agency, who have a literary agent under their umbrella, and potentially I have representation for A God Grown Old. It’s certainly not for sure, and it may turn out that I’d rather represent myself especially if I go the e-publishing route only – but it’s really, really exciting.  And it’s a step towards fulfillment of my ultimate childhood dream (besides visiting Australia).

I managed to write just over 5k words on Sunday before deciding I should probably relax a bit, and though I haven’t written anything since, I’ve read over what I wrote (while under the influence of a beer and things) and it’s not terrible.  It is, at least, a start I’m proud enough of to press on.

I’m planning to write 1500 words per day, which at my current estimate will give me about 90 days to write this damn thing, and that’s if I don’t go over any days (or skip them, shhhhhh). A first draft in my hands by mid-August?  I can get excited for that.