When you put yourself out ‘there’ as a writer, when you lasso the title of ‘writer,’ inevitably you are asked your opinion. You are also confronted by a litany of folks who make excuses. Now, I’m not adverse to the excuse bit. I hear and speak them daily. But what […]
Due to my participation in NaNoWriMo, I again beg your indulgence in allowing me to revisit a Gimbling that first ran in 2013. It’s been updated just a touch, but I kind of like it even now! Hope you do, as well. ~ * ~ * ~ In ancient times, […]
Being a writer isn’t always an easy gig. There are moments of struggle, of invented blocks that we use as an excuse to procrastinate and there is the thrilling, relieving seconds when a story is complete and we’ve finally wrote the two most beautiful words in the English language: The […]
Once, while at a slavery museum in my region, I saw a picture of a horribly abused man, a runaway slave, who’d been whipped so brutally that the skin on his back was pigmented into one massive grayish whelp. The image stuck with me, haunted me, but what reverberates in […]
In ancient times, there were nine muses (or four, or three, depending on the source), divine creatures that served as inspiration for knowledge of the arts. According to some, the word “muse” comes from the same root word as the Greek “Mnemosyne” from which comes “mind,” “mental” and “memory” and […]
The folks over at SharedWorlds give writers a little bit of inspiration. Some days you just need a little nudge… a simple reminder that you’re not alone on this path you’ve chosen. Maybe you want help getting out of a plot hole or breaking through a block or you simply […]
Need a little inspiration? Stuck in the creative process? This TED lecture is worth a look. Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses — and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person “being” a genius, all of us “have” a genius. […]
There are books we love. There are, of course, books that resonate with us. There are books that make us laugh, make us outraged, motivate us to effect change. And then, there are books with the transformative power to alter the paths of our lives, that speak to us so […]
From Letters of Note: Late-1938, eager to gain some feedback on her work, aspiring young author and Radcliffe sophomore Frances Turnbull sent a copy of her latest story to celebrated novelist and friend of the family, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Before long the feedback arrived, in the form of the somewhat […]
On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.