Writer Interviews: Rich Marcello

I’m starting the week with an exciting new feature: writer interviews. In this series I will conduct interviews with writers across the spectrum, from poets to fiction authors, self-published writers to the traditionally-published. I will ask them about their writing and publishing experiences, their advice to fellow writers, and their opinions on hot-button issues. For the first interview, author Rich Marcello has graciously taken time from his busy schedule to answer some questions via e-mail.

Rich Marcello: author, poet, creative writing teacher

Image retrieved from Amazon

You may remember Marcello from my review of his novel The Beauty of the Fall. In addition to The Beauty of the Fall, Marcello has penned two other novels (The Big Wide Calm and The Color of Home), writes poetry, teaches creative writing at Seven Bridges’ Writer Collaborative, and is an accomplished songwriter and musician. With a history in the technology industry, Rich Marcello is the perfect example of how you don’t need a literary or humanities background to write and tackle today’s biggest issues.

 

Let’s start with a question about your career background. The biography on your website says that you’re a poet, songwriter/musician, author, and creative writing teacher. However, you were also previously a technology executive who managed several businesses for Fortune 500 companies. Why and how did you make the leap from technology and management to writing and teaching?

When I was in college, my humanities professor told me I wrote well and offered to teach me how to write novels.  I was broke at the time, and though I loved writing, I decided to make money instead.  That’s why I went into hi-tech.  It turned out that I loved technology as well, and I thrived in that environment for a time. During my technology career, I wrote songs and poems and dabbled every now and again with writing stories, but there wasn’t enough time to do a full novel.  Finally, I reached a point where I had to make a choice: either finish out my career in technology or return to my first love ––writing.  I chose writing, and it was the best decision I’ve ever made.

 

Many aspiring writers come from a variety of educational and career backgrounds, from journalism and a Bachelor’s in English to marketing and a Bachelor’s in Economics. What advice do you have for writers coming from non-literary backgrounds?

Probably to accept the 10,000-hour rule.  When you are accomplished in one field and, as part of that field or because of some innate ability, you write well, you believe the transition to writing fiction will be easy.  But it’s actually like any profession ( well, okay, maybe harder).  You need to learn your craft and it takes a good ten thousand hours to get to a place where you can write a competent novel.  Along the way, be kind to yourself.  Writing a novel is the most difficult thing you will ever do and it will change you for the better if you are patience and stick with it.

 

What advice do you have for writers overall?

Write the first draft of any scene quickly so you get all of the core emotion in it.  Then edit the scene at least five times to flesh it out.  I even use this Five Time Rule with my students and all agree it works well.

 

Which writers have influenced you the most? Which books/poems?

I love Milan Kundera, Walker Percy, Thomas Pynchon, Mary Oliver, Audre Lorde, Kay Ryan, and Alice Walker.  I’ve read all of their books and would say they’ve influenced me the most.  I particularly like The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

 

Your prose strikes me as very poetic. Would you say that writing as a poet has affected your novel writing? How?

Poetry has had a huge impact on my novels mostly at the sentence level.  There are times when I will spend hours on a sentence (really) just to make sure that it is poetic enough.  I don’t do that all of the time, but there are places in novels where poetic language feels right, and when it does, I use it either as part of the prose or by adding an explicit piece of poetry or a song lyric.

 

Dan in The Beauty of the Fall seems to be partially based on your past as a technology executive, at least in regards to his career. You also reference many real Fortune 500 companies and several are clearly influenced by real companies (Peach and PhotoPhotobook come to mind). How did you handle the delicate balance between the “reality” in your novel and the fiction?

I rarely use real life incidents in my books, but I do draw on my expertise or the expertise of my friends or colleagues. I find that my best writing comes when I develop characters who in one way of another cross boundaries that I haven’t crossed in my own life.  In The Beauty of the Fall, it was important for Dan to have a lot of technology and management expertise, so I did draw on my time in tech to shape that aspect of his character.  Also, with Willow, I spent a year on the Board of Directors of a Domestic Violence non-profit so I could accurately develop her character.

 

Conversationworks involves many technological and societal leaps in order to thrive. Do you think that such feats are achievable in today’s world?

Well, the technology isn’t available today to build Conversationworks, but it will be in say twenty or thirty years.  With that said, the world we live in is so polarized that we certainly could use Conversationworks today. One of the reasons I chose to end the book on a hopeful note is because I’m firmly convinced we need something like Conversationworks to help move the human race forward.

 

The Beauty of the Fall deals with many controversial issues, including violence against women, self-harm, and ethics in business and technology. Was it difficult to write about these subjects? How did you navigate the tricky obstacle of depicting the heavy truth of these issues while still making the novel palatable for readers?

I’ve always been drawn to the big questions in life, so no, writing about these things was not difficult.  In many ways, I feel one of my roles as a writer is to shed light on difficult topics and to do it in a way that resonates with readers.  With that said, it is tricky to get the balance right.  Because Conversationworks was designed to facilitate difficult conversations, I was able to use it as the primary vehicle for some of the more difficult conversations in the book. In that sense, The Beauty of the Fall provided me with a unique opportunity to go a little more into heavy truth.

 

Finally, what do you think is the biggest issue facing the writing/publishing industry today? Should we be more concerned about the business issues, such as profitability of books and the e-book versus paper book debate, or social worries, such as representation in the writers and topics we print?

Well, the short answer is both.  In general, it’s harder and harder for a writer to make a living as a writer. Most of the writers I know have other jobs because they don’t make enough to support themselves or their families. So what happens is they look for ways to get their book sales up and that often means compromising their art.  In general, much like Conversationworks revolutionized technology, there’s a need for a revolution in the publishing business, one that helps empower writers to create more art during a difficult time in the history of the human race and compensates them appropriately for doing so.

I want to thank Marcello once again for taking time for this interview. You can learn more about Rich Marcello on his website and buy his novels through Amazon.

Also remember that the first $25,000 in profits from The Beauty of the Fall will be donated to the domestic violence organization Bridges. For more information and to donate, please visit the donation page.

What are your thoughts on Marcello’s advice? Do you know of any writers I should interview or books I should review? Drop a line in the comments or e-mail me at thewritersscrapbin@gmail.com.

 

Designed by Stephanie Hoogstad circa 2011

Official Writer’s Scrap Bin Facebook Page

I am happy to announce that I have created an official Facebook page for The Writer’s Scrap Bin. It’s pretty sparse right now but I’ll be using the page to connect with readers, make announcements, and, of course, provide links to new blog posts.

Readers can use the Facebook page to message The Writer’s Scrap Bin directly if they do not wish to e-mail or leave a comment on individual blog posts. Have any suggestions for future blog posts or have a cool story you’d like to share with other writers? You can do that, too. More than anything else, I want the Facebook page to encourage a stronger community and more connection among my readers. After all, I started this blog to help and connect with other writers.

Here’s the link, which you can also find on this blog’s “Writing Resources” page: www.facebook.com/thewritersscrapbin.

I hope to see many faces, both new and old, on the page.

Have any suggestions for what I should add to the Facebook page? Other social media outlets on which you think I should create an account for this site? Feel free to contact me through the comments section, an e-mail to thewritersscrapbin@gmail.com, and now Facebook.

 

Designed by Stephanie Hoogstad circa 2011

July Monthly Newsletter Giveaway

Happy Friday, everyone! It’s almost the weekend and almost July. Where did the time go? (To the boiling summer heat, I suppose.) To celebrate another month arriving, I’m going to tell you about July’s newsletter giveaway.

As I said earlier this week, I have started a newsletter for The Writer’s Scrap Bin called The Scrapbook. In it you will find early access to announcements and posts, exclusive content that isn’t on the blog, and more. Today I want to focus on a particular feature of the newsletter, the free monthly giveaways.

These giveaways will be anything from free copies of my work to free critiques of your works-in-progress. Only readers who sign up for the newsletter will know how to gain access to these freebies, so be sure to register using this link.

July’s giveaway is a PDF copy of my essay, “Get Off of My Cloud: Imagery, Hatred of Nature, and Ahab’s God Complex in Chapter 108 of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick“. This short essay focuses on the chapter of Moby-Dick titled “Ahab and the Carpenter” and offers an extension of Stephen C. Ausband’s paper on Ahab’s hatred of nature by arguing that this “misophusism” is a result of Ahab’s god complex.

The essay was first printed in the UC Davis Prized Writing Anthology, 2012-2013.  While this collection was supposed to be uploaded onto the Prized Writing website after about a year or so of the paper publication, no digital copy seems to have been made available since the 2010-2011 edition. This fact plus the lack of availability of this book outside of the physical UC Davis Bookstore have influenced me to provide free copies to readers who subscribe to the newsletter.

If you wish to partake in this month’s giveaway, please sign up for The Scrapbook before August 1st. You will get your first newsletter e-mail within a week from signing up, which will give you instruction on how to obtain the July giveaway. Even if you do not get to the additional instructions until after August 1st, I will still honor the free giveaway for the month in which you signed up.

On the last day of each month I will announce the new giveaway for the next month in a post on The Writer’s Scrap Bin. Each giveaway will feature a different product, service, or bonus. The more the blog and newsletter grow, the better the giveaways will become, so please encourage your writing friends to read this blog, register for e-mail notifications regarding blog posts, and sign up for The Scrapbook.

Questions? Suggestions for future giveaways? Contact me at thewritersscrapbin@gmail.com and I will return your e-mail as soon as possible.

 

Designed by Stephanie Hoogstad circa 2011

Behind the Logo: The Backstory

I’m sure you’ve noticed that I finish all my posts with the same logo, a wolf encircled by my name and the words “moonlit imagination.” I’m also guessing that you might have wondered why I do that and where it came from.

The history behind it isn’t really complicated or extraordinary. My high school offered Yearbook as an elective and I took it my junior and senior years. This elective, along with compiling and selling the school’s yearbook, taught us about graphic design and layout. One of the assignments we got was to design business cards for ourselves. I came up with a handful of designs and this logo was my favorite.

My logo, slightly enlarged

The howling wolf represents my dual nature as a lone wolf but also a pack animal. Wolves are also strong, majestic, and misunderstood, much like writers often are. The words encircle the wolf in order to follow the same visual path created by the full moon at which the wolf howls. “Moonlit Imagination” is a slogan I gave a potential freelancing business long ago because I am a nocturnal being and my best work is done at night. The “S” and “H” are just my initials. You can probably figure out why my name is there.

After all these years I still have a file of each of the business cards and logos, and after all these years this logo is still my favorite.

When I first started writing posts for this blog, I felt like they were incomplete even with images and a sort of “conclusion” at the end. I didn’t like the white space underneath the last of the text. I had been looking for a way to use this logo for a while and I figured that, in addition to making business cards, I could use it as my signature at the bottom of my posts. So far it seems to be working fairly well.

As I’ve been looking into using VistaPrint to make some business cards, I realized that this logo would look good on other products as well: shirts, tote bags, hats, etc. This realization gave me an idea but I want to run it by my readers before I make a decision.

You probably know that running a quality blog isn’t always free. Between the money for the domain and the time spent writing, it does burn a small hole in your pocket before it truly lifts off. My most prominent sources of income are Swagbucks and my book reviews from Fiverr, but I’m still looking for more ways to raise money. I’ve placed a couple ads on this blog but I don’t want to overwhelm my readers and I’m still working to build up my writing, editing, and book review freelance jobs. I have also entered some writing contests and plan to focus more on getting published but we all know that will take some time and a lot of submissions.

My idea is to offer you, my readers, the chance to buy some merchandise with my logo on it. This will be accomplished either through an online store or, preferably, with pledges through an account on Patreon. I will also be offering these products from time to time as free monthly giveaways for my newsletter subscribers.

First, however, I would like you to answer this poll.

If merchandise with my logo (pictured at the end of the post) were available, would you buy it and/or pledge a monthly donation to this blog?
×

 

Mind you, this idea may or may not come to fruition. I want to see how well my readers receive it before giving it a try. Thank you for providing your opinion on this matter.

If you have any comments or suggestions about this idea, please leave them in the comments section below.

 

Designed by Stephanie Hoogstad circa 2011

The Scrapbook: Official Writer’s Scrap Bin Newsletter

Do you enjoy diving into The Writer’s Scrap Bin? Want access to exclusive content? Then sign up for my official newsletter, The Scrapbook.

The Scrapbook will provide you with updates, announcements, and writing tips before they’re available to the general public. Some editions will even include articles and interviews not published on The Writer’s Scrap Bin. In addition, newsletter subscribers will be eligible for monthly giveaways, ranging from PDF copies of my work to complementary critiquing sessions for works-in-progress.

If you would like to sign up for The Scrapbook, please follow this link and provide us with your e-mail address.

(Your e-mail address will only be used to send you the newsletter. My readers’ safety and comfort is my and my team’s number one priority. We will never violate your privacy by giving away or selling your information or misuse it in any other matter. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact me at thewritersscrapbin@gmail.com.)

As the blog grows, so will The Scrapbook and the quality and variety of the monthly giveaways. Please help by signing up for the newsletter and spreading the word to other interested writers and readers.

I look forward to hearing from you.

 

Designed by Stephanie Hoogstad circa 2011

Disney’s Grown Up: Introductions

Today I’m introducing (yet another) new series of posts to this blog, “Disney’s Grown Up”. This series is a bit different from my other posts. It leans heavily on the “distractions” aspect of this blog and will consist of all my random thoughts about Disney movies, Disneyland, pretty much everything Disney. I’m a born-and-raised Californian who’s loved Disney her entire life and has a mind for creative writing and literary criticism, so these posts will be both passionate and a bit crazy.

My mom and I are proof that you’re never too old for some fun.

I call this series “Disney’s Grown Up” because the topics discussed won’t be your typical childhood Disney conversations. (It’s also named for one of my poems I shared back in May, “Wendy Darling’s Grown Up”.) This series will be for the intelligent, hardcore Disney fanatics.

From tips for exploring the parks to in-depth analyses of the latest movies, you’ll get a taste of the entire fandom from an adult’s perspective. Of course, I’m still going to be making “Let It Go” and “Do You Wanna Build a Snowman” jokes every now and then. It’s pretty much required. Nevertheless, the whole experience will be both fun and intellectually-stimulating.

Some of the topics you can look forward to are Emma Watson’s Beauty and the Beast and the French Revolution, Frozen from the perspective of someone with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and some of the lesser-known (and perhaps darker) history and rumors surrounding Walt Disney. Best of all, in late October/early November I’ll report to you the wonders that await at Disneyland during Halloween and Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party.

I encourage all my fellow fanatics to send me their ideas for posts and their thoughts on the topics I discuss, both in the comments here and by email to thewritersscrapbin@gmail.com.

And if you’re looking to go to the Disneyland Resort but aren’t sure how to best enjoy the park, look up me up on Fiverr and I can help you navigate the wonderful (albeit stressful) experience.

 

Designed by Stephanie Hoogstad circa 2011

Writing Inspiration: Where Do Writers Get Their Ideas?

Magic Beyond Words
Magic Beyond Words, TV movie about J.K. Rowling’s earlier life and the creation of Harry Potter up to the film release of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

Originally released by Lifetime, image retrieved from IMDb

Nothing is more mystifying than inspiration. Inspiration for all art–paintings, sculpture, film, writing–seems to come from nowhere. We’ve all read books, stories, and poems which make us wonder how the writer could have possibly thought to write them in the first place. The origins of our favorite books captivate us. I can’t tell you how often I watch Magic Beyond Words: The J.K. Rowling Story. We want to learn more about our favorite writers’ inspiration in the hopes that they could help us find our own.

I won’t pretend to speak for all writers. We may claim to know where other writers get their ideas but we don’t. Honestly, we don’t always know the source of our ideas.

There’s only one thing I can say with any confidence: if they can find inspiration, so can you. As proof, let me tell you about my own experience with finding inspiration.

I seem to get my ideas from the most random places. As an undergrad, my mind drifted during class much more often than I am willing to admit. I doodled in the margins of my notebook, worked on essays from other classes, and listened to my professors just enough to know when I needed to jot something down. As I zoned, I would retreat into my imagination, allowing myself to become submersed in elaborate worlds. Sometimes I would leave class with a plot, other times with new character histories, and others with an entire scene written.

Sitting through lectures, at the movies, taking walks, I find inspiration whenever I can let my mind drift from the present.

Find isn’t the right word. I don’t actively look for inspiration. In fact, writing inspiration alludes me when I attempt to chase it down. The ideas must come to me. They find me, not the other way around.

External conditions aside, inspiration finds me most when I’m reading or watching TV and movies. I’m not talking solely about fiction. Academic articles, news reports, documentaries, fiction and nonfiction alike inspire me when I’m reading/watching it. Why? It’s all thanks to the “what if” impulse.

What if the Confederacy had won the Civil War?

What if the Four Horsemen became American politicians?

What if the Roswell UFO and Kelly’s “Little Green Men” were connected by more than the “supposed alien sighting” factor?

This impulse isn’t limited to “what if” questions or to what I watch and read. Why, who, and how, what I hear and what I live, they all spark my imagination.

Why might aliens have such large eyes?

How did so many branches of my family end up in California?

What if the legend about Lemurians in Mount Shasta isn’t a legend? (Check out this link if you haven’t heard this story. It’s humorous, ridiculous, and intriguing all at once.)

Natural writing inspiration
It’s hard not to be inspired by beauty like this, and I can see why people think there’s something mythical happening in that mountain.

Sunrise on Mount Shasta, picture by Michael Zanger, retrieved from Mount Shasta Wikipedia entry

Inspiration comes from everything and nothing. What inspires a writer once may not inspire him/her again. That which annoyed a writer once may become the catalyst for his/her next novel. You never know what could spark your imagination. All you can do is read, watch, and experience everything to the fullest in the hopes that something, no matter how obscure, will catch your attention and send inspiration your way.

I’ll write more on what inspires me in future posts. In the meantime, where does your writing inspiration originate? Discuss it in the comments or email me and you might be featured in an installment of “Writing Inspiration”.

 

Stephanie's Logo
Designed by Stephanie Hoogstad circa 2011

 

Writers on Writing: Ernest Hemingway

Quote retrieved from The Guardian

Many, if not most, writers love to talk about writing. Their writing process, what they think about today’s literature, their thoughts on the literary world, odds are you can get a writer to discuss at least one of these. Thanks to the Internet we now have virtually unlimited access to their words of wisdom. In my “Writers on Writing” series, I will give my thoughts on one of these writers and one or more of their quotes on writing. Today I’ll be looking at one of the most praised American writers: Ernest Hemingway.

Hemingway famously (maybe infamously) gave the advice to “write drunk, edit sober.” There’s no secret or debate behind Hemingway’s status as a heavy-weight drinker. A champion, really. But are we to take his advice literally? Should we get drunk–or just drink–to write and wait until we sober up to edit?

General consensus points to the literal. Even the article in The Guardian from which I got this quote takes it at face value. If that’s how you choose to take it, you’ll find that people are somewhat divided on the accuracy of the quote. The common thread among most of the analysis is that drinking may help relinquish inhibitions to a point, which can help writers to not censor themselves and be more creative. However, there is a point when drunk is too drunk and your writing will turn out like horse manure. I think the most intriguing take on this angle comes from this study, if you wish to look into it further.

My take on Hemingway’s advice is quite different. For personal but non-religious reasons, I don’t drink. It’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility but I don’t see myself drinking in the near future. What, then, do I get from Hemingway’s advice?

Let’s look at the first half, “write drunk.” As I stated before, the benefits of writing drunk seem to be a lack of inhibition and enhanced creativity. In that case, I equate “write drunk” to “write semiconscious” or, from my own experience, “write half-asleep.”

I don’t have any studies or scientific evidence to support this interpretation. I can’t even speak for other writers. However, my writing seems to come most freely when I’m not entirely conscious. I have discovered that my writing is most productive when I first wake up (even if I sleep in) and around 10:00-11:30 p.m, not long before I go to bed.

I’m normally too tired to read or focus on much of anything but I can write with minimal distractions at those times. Some people might argue that there’s not much going on that can take away my attention and that’s why I’m more productive. They may be right. Still, I don’t have as consistent of luck when I just isolate myself from all external stimuli. I also have to admit that there are noises echoing throughout my neighborhood at any time of day, which detracts from this theory. (By “noises” I mean a motorcycle speeding by the house at 1:00 a.m., someone’s dying car starting up around 2:00 a.m., and dogs and birds sounding off at all hours.)

One of my biggest problems with writing is my inhibition stunting my creativity. I have voices in my head that cause me to doubt myself and my work constantly. The more awake I am, the louder those voices become. My sleepy state silences these inhibitions enough that I can get about a solid hour of writing in before I start wondering if it’s utter garbage. In that way, “semiconscious/half-asleep writing” is my form of “drunk writing” without as strong a possibility of memory loss.

The second half of the quote is rather self-explanatory when examined from this perspective. If “write drunk” is “write semiconscious,” “edit sober” must be “edit conscious.” Of course, it’s probably best to be sober when you edit as well. You’ll have your full faculties at your disposal. You’ll also look at your work with a more objective eye. You won’t have to (entirely) shut up your inner critic at this point and it will finally have its say. You’ll remember the rules of grammar–or be able to research anything you’ve forgotten–well enough to know when you should and should not break them. The more sober and conscious you are, the better you will edit without totally destroying your work.

Ernest Hemingway dust jacket photo for first edition of For Whom the Bell Tolls, picture by Lloyd Arnold, retrieved from Ernest Hemingway Wikipedia Entry

Hemingway was a great writer but relied too heavily on alcohol. Let’s face it, he was an alcoholic. It doesn’t take away from his work but he may more have written well despite being drunk rather than because of it.

We don’t all have to get drunk in order to write well. Any writers who do drink shouldn’t get too drunk if they plan on writing. People end up regretting drunk texting. Can you imagine drunk writing? Instead, find under what conditions your inhibitions are lowered. Is it when you’re a little tipsy? Tired? Comfortable? So stressed and crunched for time that you simply can’t stop and give heed to your inner critic? Once you figure that out, use it. You may be surprised at how much your productivity and the quality of your writing increases. Just remember to listen to constructive feedback once you start editing.

Update 11/25/2022: This article and other pieces of my writing, from The Writer’s Scrap Bin articles to original stories and poetry can be found on Vocal.

Designed by Stephanie Hoogstad circa 2011

Stephanie’s Master’s Degree Adventures: Introduction

As you might know from the “About” page, I started a postgraduate program in creative writing this past September. For months I’ve been frantically keeping up with deadlines, reading feedback, and making friends with fellow writers from around the world. Along the way I have realized that this opportunity, although stressful, is the best thing to have happened to me as both a person and a writer. I can’t imagine what my life would be like right now without it. Then I realized that other writers, both established and aspiring, could benefit from my new insights. And thus starts “Stephanie’s Master’s Degree Adventures.”

The best introduction to these adventures, I believe, would be a description of the program. There are a lot of details that I can’t cover here, but here are the highlights:

  • It’s online distance learning, so you don’t have to move to attend.
  • It’s through the University of Edinburgh, the sixth oldest university in the English-speaking world. Fun fact: Edinburgh was once home to renowned authors J.M. Barrie, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Robert Louis Stevenson, and is the current residence of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling.
  • It’s a three-year, part-time program, which leaves room for work, family, and other commitments.
  • The first two years of the program involve a mixture of literary study and creative practice. The final year focuses on the dissertation portfolio.
  • The final year incorporates a biennial online colloquium called “Virtually, The Business,” which includes information on the publishing business. Sometimes the staff arranges similar presentations for the first and second years, too.
  • Most importantly, the program directors and personal tutors are published authors and poets.

That’s about all that I can provide in this first post, but you can learn about the program by following this link. For more information about the university overall, be sure to visit the University of Edinburgh’s homepage.

I realize that these straight-up facts may not be very helpful right now (unless they’ve helped the program peak your interest). They may not even be all that interesting. However, tune in to future installments of “Stephanie’s Master’s Degree Adventures” where I will give you my advice for successfully applying to a master’s program, tips for surviving grad school rejection, and the most important lessons I learn during the program.

For those of you who are already in a Master’s program or will be starting one soon, e-mail me your stories and wisdom and I will try to include them in my posts.

 

Designed by Stephanie Hoogstad circa 2011

Welcome to The Writer’s Scrap Bin

This year has certainly begun differently than I had expected, than I suppose most people had expected. Political turmoil, social upheaval, violence, all to a degree even greater than our usual level of awareness. Everyone is at each other’s throats, verbally and physically, and neither the left nor the right is innocent of this accusation. It’s as if the Lamb has opened the first of the seven seals and the Apocalypse has commenced. (Pardon the Christian reference; I am not Christian myself but I have studied the Bible as literature and the Book of Revelation is becoming more and more appropriate.)

Now, more than ever, people of all backgrounds and affiliations need an escape. No matter our political views, our religions, our gender identity, our sexuality, our race, or our nationality, we all need the written word. Whether we are trying to hide from the world with Lestat’s latest exploits or we’re diving head-first into the abyss with The New York Times, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, society needs them all at hand so that we may keep our sanity intact and the facts straight.

Writing in this tumultuous climate is not that easy. News distracts us and makes us quake, either with fear or with rage. Reporters must tread lightly, lest they incur the wrath and censorship of authority figures. Fiction writers cannot discuss politics on Twitter without their novels being called into question and, in some cases, having people threaten to burn them. It’s enough to make anyone want to bury their heads in the sand and ignore the world being engulfed by flames.

I can’t guarantee that you’ll be able to escape the world here. I don’t want you to  use this blog as an excuse to put off writing. However, if you want to take a break and recharge with some constructive procrastination, dive right in.

I want all writers, experienced and novice, to relax and rejuvenate before returning to their deadlines. You can read my thoughts on writing, hot topics of the writing world, and the funny anecdotes or success stories behind famous authors and poets. You can even tell me what you want this blog to talk about (see the contact page).

Whether you need advice, support, or a little distraction from the task at hand, we welcome you with open arms. So come, explore this site and make yourself at home. Read more about this blog and who I am on the “about” page, and peruse the writing resources.

Keep an eye out for my next post, in which I will discuss the main theme driving this blog: writing for yourself first.

 

My personal logo, Designed by Stephanie Hoogstad circa 2011