To Fellow Artists: Be a Seeker

 

         You don’t have to stunt your storytelling.

 

Career Guidance through Dreams! (Follow-Up to "Crystal Dude")

 

            All the details in our dreams are clues, all of them. Countless times in our lives, those details are simply part of the sub-conscious mind reflecting back to us what is going on in our brains. I appreciate those reflections for the sake of addressing my innermost darkness and resentment and incorrect beliefs, etc. Dreams are not always filled with subconscious stuff, though, so again, if you care about your own dreams, write down all of the details you can recall as soon as you wake up.

Poem: "Cards"

Though that is just the working title. I'm also considering, "Be the Eight of Cups".

 

3 Short Stories: Weird Fictional Deaths

 Here are three parts of a slowly ongoing writing exercise: "7 Weird, Stupid Ways to Die". More to come!

The Uncensored Library

           I'd like you to know that we have The Uncensored Library at our collective global (sanitized, socially distant) fingertips. I think that's so frickin' cool. Mind you, to access it, I personally would have to get my little godson to let me onto his Minecraft account, since the library's only available on that game, and simply having the bare bones version gives you access, but the fact that I’m still fairly young and already choose to be technologically out of touch is not as alarming as censorship and not as exciting as this resource! You see here, whippersnapper, this be impor’ant!

Puttin’ yourself on lockdown during a pandemic makes life more stressful, for damn sure. That said, a survival mindset typically means that you believe you're always lacking, whatever that lack means to you. It stems from an increase in the stress hormone cortisol, maybe even more adrenaline, which of course means more selfishness, anxiety, fear and greed. The more one might hoard toilet paper or baby formula or price gauge hand sanitizer, the more they are defeating their purpose of empowerment. They're giving their power away to stress. A more productive, less stressful way of managing hardship and a sense of isolation is to focus on a sense of community and of family, as well as personal growth.

           Recently on an episode of her "Better Together" podcast, Maria Menounos chatted with the fantastic psychic medium John Edward and said, “What do people do in prison? They work out, they read, get their Master’s degrees, they do all these things!”, which I think is an appropriate analogy.

Falsehood (a poem)

Here's a work in progress!

Extempore

A poem.

There are occasions when I am so sleepy, I should not be speaking to anyone. Y' know what I mean? I could try to comment or to make a joke and have it come out completely wrong. Maybe I'm short-tempered and bored.
Sometimes that leads to missteps.

----   ----   ----   ----   ----   ----   ----   ----   ----   ----

1963 - A Writing Exercise

Written just a few minutes ago, only edited by myself.
Inspired by the Birmingham children's march.

Adaptation (Fantasy Exit Strategy Creative Writing Exercise)

On 11/19/12, I wrote something inspired by a Thought Catalog piece. Here's my take:

1.    1.   Run away to Brooklyn for two months. Eat the best food while standing between redheaded sisters and a family of chic, noisy Muslim women. The man in front of you calls home to “Mama” in N’ Orl’ns, talking with his mouth full. Watch a diverse group of loud, confident neighborhood kids argue and tease each other and play basketball with the unspoken knowledge that all their families suffered from the hurricane, and took it in a fierce New York stride that you will never really relate to. Crash at a friend of a friend’s tiny apartment, falling asleep on the couch to the sound of a car chase. Try white peach bean paste bon bons. Take countless pictures. Go to a dance battle. Try not to feel too overwhelmed. Do shots with the bartender of the theme bar you like. Go on a few dates with a hardcore Yankees fan with gentle eyes and, as he’s taking you home on the 4, give a subtle nod of understanding to the girl at the other end of the train car – the one who just kissed the back of her boyfriend’s hand. New York has its own magic, and you two, as outsiders and mere mortals, are powerless against it.

2.    2. Two years later, you visit San Francisco.

-Dirty Dancing- 2017

Ooooookay, at five-something pm on May 24, 2017, my friend Sasha and I watched the new ABC rendition of Dirty Dancing. I wrote the following in real time and in present tense.

#TheBrlnWall

Clllllllllllliiiiiiiiiiick.

'Worth the Trouble' by Jamie Beck, a Book Review

Everything's okay. That's the summary of my reaction to this romance novel. Two good-looking, decent people struggle with their mutual attraction, have sex that is enjoyable without being explicit and eventually find a good middle ground with a happy ending. It's okay.

Stacey Ballis' Writing

          I'm having thoughts about a novel I read, Off the Menu.

Brief Commentary on Working For a Living

      So I set aside a few days to binge-watch Grace & Frankie;

"Gullet" - Writing Exercise

   After weeks of working at a dive bar, six months living in a dinky two-bedroom apartment with a chick who goes by Strawberry but is legally named Amanda, and days of alternating between vegetables and take-out, rum and top-shelf bourbon with my roommate’s blues band and a crappy wannabe-musician who works in insurance, I wake up on a Monday in April, feeling very sick with a line of dried drool winding from my mouth to my jaw.

Writing Action

I want to publish something again. Soon. It should be a short story. I'd love to have it be an action piece with gratuitous violence. How often do I write those?
Never.

Advice From a Writer: Wendi Aarons

A few months ago, I discovered the writer Wendi Aarons. Her humor grabbed me first, with her website, relatable tweets and always-funny Twitter profile picture, but I also had to appreciate how she keeps things simple in each blog post, choosing a topic and following it through in the ‘short but sweet’ way that I still have to work on. She makes a living based on her work, serves as coauthor of the parody Twitter account @PaulRyanGosling and just seems all-around cool. One day she published something about writer’s block and strangers disliking her style that made me think, ‘I should really ask this woman for a little advice! I want some of the things she has and she’s been in this field a lot longer than I have, so why not take a chance and come up with some questions?' I soon did just that, and – check this out, you guys – she responded! My work life has been eventful lately because I needed to change environments, y' know? It's time for a new adventure, so it was kind of a relief to read Mrs. Aarons' Wendi's answers since they made it clear that yeah, I’m dealing with the industry that Writer's Digest has been talking about. I wanted the combo of hard work, struggles and opportunities, competition, persistence and community, and this world has all that. It’s not like I’m trying to get a job keeping nuclear missiles secure. Writing (especially fiction) is definitely my thing. 

Below are the e-mails exchanged between clever celebrity blogger Wendi Aarons and myself! This has been a good dose of inspiration/reality for me.

July 7

Dear Wendi,

A Scene from My Nonexistent Movie Script

So picture this:

It's a movie - my movie, tentatively titled Drowsy Crown just because I like those words together, and in a kitchen scene, artists of different kinds are all going about their breakfast routines. Here's what I have figured out so far: There's a girl with long, wavy brown hair wearing blue skinny jeans and standing to the left, trying to get the guy in the middle of the room to remember that the white bins in the garage are meant for separating plastic and paper recyclables. She doesn’t have time to clean up after her roommates this week, because she has a test from Professor Lauren, her most challenging instructor. He's taking a break after working through the night on a play he's very cryptic about, what with his being a secret perfectionist, a "you can’t read it 'til it's finished" guy who’d be halfway through a burrito, find himself struck by an idea and forget to finish eating.
In the back right of the room (stage left) is a guy in a bathrobe, tube socks slouching around his ankles, a necklace hiding underneath the collar of his shirt. He has very short hair and is listening to the recyclables conversation, amused, tilting his chair back periodically, eating a bowl of cereal. He doesn't live in this house. His presence will be fleeting and carefully staged on the part of the director so that the audience can better see the shape of this artists' group. I'm afraid to call them a collective at this stage, but the friendships in this gaggle have to make sense. I don't want them to be ragtag. They don't need each other, they choose each other to lean on.

And I've decided that the bathrobe guy is Sam Pink. 

I Want to Make My Own Major

 

            I've surpassed a need for an honesty warning, right? Right.  

          So I'll unhappily admit that I am not an ideal student. For instance, I’m very intellectually curious but a terrible test-taker.I'll space out a lot during an exam and get very sleepy, which is entirely a psychological problem, but a reality all the same. I learn a lot and enjoy it and study only to end up with grades far below A, often around C; Just this past semester I got an 80% on my American History I midterm and requested high-fives from my parents. It's obvious that I'm one of those people who has to put in a hell of a lot of work to do well in most academic things. I'd need a study buddy, too. And the IED* my parents had set up for me years ago. But even with that obstacle, I've been trying to move forward as a passionate student of writing and the human experience.

How to Respectfully Follow That Writer Online

 

1.    Carefully, and with quiet, plodding steps…assuming that a person can plod quietly.

2.  Use a horrific impression of the Lone Ranger.

3.   You might draw a twelve-month calendar of seahorses by hand, at which that author you love might look back as he hurries away from you.

4.  Stuff your gullet with white chocolate baking chips.

5.   Read some Hemingway.

6.  Check out Rachel Cohn.

7.   Fall in love with the quality of a celebrity profile they once wrote and save their website to your browser’s favorites under the heading, “…got drunk and flirted with Chris Evans, a.k.a. My Heroine”