Hello all! I’m approaching the bitter end of my WIP and need all my time and energy to focus on finishing the damned thing. To that end, I will be taking a brief hiatus. I’ll be back next week, refreshed and ready to astound you all with new and excessively witty blog posts.
What we gonna write?
Courtesy of marriedtothesea.com
Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a
Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening
Dreams are one of life’s great mysteries. Freud saw them as the key to unlocking the unconscious mind and revealing the true desires of the Id. Psychics and mystics believe dreams can tell the future or reveal important truths about one’s life, and that lucid dreaming can be a gateway to astral projection. Creators of all types see dreams as tools for enriching the art or science they seek to create. Richard Feynman famously experimented with lucid dreaming to enable more creative problem solving; Salvador Dali used dream incubation techniques to inspire new works straight from his unconscious; Christopher Nolan’s personal dreamscape directly influenced his blockbuster film Inception.
Stephen King writes,
I’ve always used dreams the way you’d use mirrors to look at something you couldn’t see head-on, the way that you use a mirror to look at your hair in the back. To me that’s what dreams are supposed to do. I think that dreams are a way that people’s minds illustrate the nature of their problems. Or maybe even illustrate the answers to their problems in symbolic language.
I don’t usually like to write from prompts, but for some reason I’m having trouble coming up with a theme for today’s post. I could talk about how my husband sleep-talks like a robot (I know) and how I dreamed about taking a writing workshop with Neil Gaiman (and it was awesome) but all together that takes up like…yeah, one paragraph.
So, I toddled over to WordPress’ Daily Prompt section to see if they could offer me any brilliant ideas. Happily, I came across this little nugget:
Your home is on fire. Grab five items (assume all people and animals are safe). What did you grab?
*sad face*
On first glance this prompt seems quite banal. Saving five items from a burning house, yawn. But the more I thought about it, the more I liked it, and here’s why. Asking someone which five items they would rescue from their burning home is really just a roundabout way of asking someone, “What’s important to you, really?” People and pets are a given, and the question isn’t asking about them. It’s asking, “When you pare down your life to the barest of essentials, what really matters?”
Tomorrow is kind of a landmark: I’m going to be a whole quarter of a century old! So in lieu of my usual Friday book review, I thought I’d do something a little different.
I’ve been reflecting on what it means to grow older, and how I’ve changed and matured in the years that I’ve been a resident of Planet Earth. I thought I would share some of those insights with the internet in the hopes that they might amuse or delight.
So, with no further ado (and in no particular order), here are twenty-five things I learned in the twenty-five years that I’ve survived as a human being!
Well said, cat, well said.
Procrastination has always been a problem for me. In high school, homework was invariably completed the night before it was due. And as an IB student, I had a lot of homework. Suffice it to say, I pulled a lot of all-nighters as a teenager. I got a bit better in college, but not by much. I might start a term paper assigned at the beginning of the semester a week before it was due. And usually only if I was procrastinating on something else.
Now, as a writer, procrastination is something I struggle with on a daily basis. My chapters and stories and novels don’t have due dates, and there’s no professor or boss leaning over my shoulder and telling me to get a move on my work. There’s only me. Poor, distractible me.
Lots of writers–and other self-employed folks out there–have this problem. Hell, I’m sure even Shakespeare struggled with a bout or two of the procrasti-blues, and he didn’t even have Ye Olde Facebooke or Milord’s Bejeweled Plus to distract him. Laptops make it even harder, what with the constant barrage of readily available media and social networking working against us. So, I thought I’d share some of my tips and tricks to outwit procrastination.
Greetings, lovelies! Be you a stranger or a friend, a gentleman caller or a lunching lady, an angel or a demon, I am overjoyed that you have paused upon my small and meager blog-thing.
While this blog will mostly be devoted to the pursuit of literary excellency, transmigratory phantasmagoria, and bookish wanderings, I thought I would make my first post a sort of introduction. Many of you will know me well, and others will not. In an effort to remedy the latter, I thought I would compile a list of various and sundry facts pertaining to my person. Peruse it as you will! I hope it will lend you insight into my character and whet your appetite for future ramblings.