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  1. Word Of The Day

    Today's word of the day is ZEN. I refound my Zen today. I didn't even know I lost it. I was mowing the lawn, giving it a scalp cut, 1st cut of the spring. This is where you cut it at the mower's lowest setting, trim off all the dead so it can grow back green for the spring. I was transfixed atop the riding mower doing a repetitive task, the drone of the engine, gentle breeze in my hair. I'm back in the groove again. A calm & peace came over me, & I was reminded of when I worked as...
    By BenevolentDemons · Mar 18, 2024 · 226
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  2. Temporary Blindness -True Tales

    SoberDate 8041 A couple nights ago a series of thunderstorms rolled thru our area at nighttime. Around 11pm I got up for a late night snack from the fridge (a cheese stick) when the power went out. I ate my cheese and went back to bed. Around midnight, my wife awoke to use the bathroom and the 1st thing she noticed was it was pitch black, no light from the clock, no nightlight from the bathroom, no light outside from the streetlight. Nothing, just total inky blackness. Now mind you,...
    By BenevolentDemons · Mar 18, 2024 · 213
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  3. Plot driven / Character driven, and a hybrid of the two

    Last night I was introduced to the idea that plot-driven and character-driven don't need to be a binary proposition, you can mix-and-match 'em, or hybridize 'em. That's the first time I recall seeing this idea, and it immediately struck me as true. Several times before I've made similar discoveries, that ideas writers often take as binary propositions actually work better on a sliding scale, a spectrum. Just as dark and light don't necessarily mean only intense blinding white light or...
    By Xoic · Jul 29, 2023 · 1.2K · 19
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  4. Honestly, It's Not for Everyone

    That’s Nebraska’s current tourism slogan, and it seems perfect to me. Most people from the state (at least among those I know) will freely admit there are no obviously sublime sights, no real mountains, no towering redwoods, no massive canyons, only one real waterfall (and it ain’t much by Niagara standards). But then they will say something like, “it’s got a lot of subtle beauty.” And so it does. I was born in ranch country, way out in the northwest corner of the state, in the shadow...
    By GrahamLewis · Mar 14, 2023 · 536
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  5. It's All Good

    My kid sister died about a month ago. I'm still processing it. I tried to capture it below, but I'm so close to it that I can't tell if it's worth reading, or it's TMI. I didn't want to post it in the workshop, because it's not meant as a project but as an effort to understand. I recently touched death, touched it when I held the icy-cold, blackened, hand of my dying kid sister and learned from her the art of dying right. Susan (not her real name) was diagnosed with cancer about four...
    By GrahamLewis · Oct 18, 2022 · 699 · 1
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  6. Writing From Life Experience

    Often when people hear you should write from your own life experience, they think of it on a very surface level—like if you played a lot of football you should write about football. In one sense this is what it means, or rather it's one aspect of it, but there's a much deeper, broader, and more universal aspect that this understanding misses. This is the aspect I want to write about—not the external things you've done (play some sport, live in a particular region or neighborhood, work on a...
    By Xoic · Feb 27, 2024 · 446 · 9
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  7. RL sucks

    Today was the first time in a while I have had the time to actually sit down and put words on the page. Between incompetence at shippers, and over blown expectations, I haven't had time for anything but thinking about scenes and plots. And even then I often can't slip my focus enough to do that properly. There are too many out there that do not understand these new fangled inventions like mirrors or turn signals. All to often I find my work a day thoughts focused on how to avoid someone...
    By w. bogart · Oct 19, 2023 · 260
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  8. Sneaking Suspicions- Meet The Protagonists!

    Hey everybody! Here with a [very late] protagonist introduction for Sneaking Suspicions. As some of you may already know, Sneaking Suspicions has three main characters, and here are their profiles: Protag #1: Wavepaw A lovable, mischievous, and ever-excitable sweetheart, Wavepaw has finally achieved her dream of becoming a medicine apprentice. She's been following her now-mentor, Ivyhawk, around since she could walk, and as such already possesses a remarkable amount of medicine knowledge and...
    By Dewey · Aug 17, 2023 · 394
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  9. In Praise of Imperfection

    In Praise of Imperfection Years ago, I read that, in some cultures, a vase that has been cracked and repaired is considered more beautiful than a perfect specimen. The imperfection tells a story of triumph. “I have suffered, but I have survived.” Battle scars are to be worn proudly. It’s the imperfection that adds depth to the piece. Imperfection is a lot more interesting than perfection. Otherwise, what would we gossip about? But seriously, what is perfectionism but an attempt to...
    By Louanne Learning · Feb 25, 2023 · 626 · 2
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  10. USA

    Too long for the Favorite Quotes thread, but classic PJ O'Rourke: “I was having dinner…in London…when eventually he got, as the Europeans always do, to the part about “Your country’s never been invaded.” And so I said, “Let me tell you who those bad guys are. They’re us. WE BE BAD. We’re the baddest-assed sons of bitches that ever jogged in Reeboks. We’re three-quarters grizzly bear and two-thirds car wreck and descended from a stock market crash on our mother’s side. You take your Germany,...
    By Earp · May 27, 2022 · 725 · 2
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  11. Examining the writing in Sail and The Man Who Liked Dogs

    These are my two favorite hardboiled stories I've run across so far, both of them in the same book—The Hard Boiled Omnibus, published in 1952 and edited by Joseph T Shaw. It's a collection of some of the best stories from Black Mask magazine. I've already linked to Sail twice, but I feel I should include links here for both stories: Sail by Lester Dent The Man Who Liked Dogs by Raymond Chandler I find the beginnings of both stories to be the strongest parts. With Sail the main body almost...
    By Xoic · Dec 28, 2023 · 486 · 7
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  12. The world as a character

    This is likely more of a genre item, for SciFi and Fantasy, but it is something worth considering. How much attention do we authors pay to crafting the worlds we write in? I ask this going beyond simple logical continuity. I occasionally run across works that the world itself is almost another character in the story the way it engages the reader. It is well fleshed out and engaging, in such a way that it has the reader wanting to learn more about the world itself. Granted this gets deeply...
    By w. bogart · Nov 23, 2023 · 241 · 1
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  13. Secondary characters

    I have been thinking about one of my secondary characters, lately. So far I have set him up as the stereotypical big dumb brute. But I wanted to explore him more for the readers. So I gave him a pov scene all his own. Due to his race, fantasy genre, he has a speech impediment, so I went completely internal dialogue for the scene. I went back into his memories, instead of an actual flashback, to show some of his past trauma, and establish more of his character arc, even though he is basically...
    By w. bogart · Nov 2, 2023 · 377 · 4
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