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Archive for the ‘Creativity’ Category

A year or so ago, like many other stressed-out adults searching for a bubble of calm in a turbulent world, I turned to a solution that was trending through social media: coloring. It was a fairly good solution, too. Coloring, for however long I chose to enjoy it, provided a period of quiet meditation combined with guided creativity. After a tempestuous day of corporate politics and political upheaval, I could look forward to spending an hour, head down, blending colors across mandalas and designs with whatever palette suited my whim. I could listen to music or to the birds outside in the wisteria or to the simple, basic sound of pencil and paper. It was a refuge, a Fortress of Coloring Solitude.

But when my father died, I stopped. (more…)

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The problem with good books is that they show me how much I still must improve, to elevate my writing from “good” to “great.”

News of the World, by Paulette Jiles, is one such book. Damn.

An aging veteran travels the backroads in post-Civil War Texas, reading newspaper articles to townsfolk who either can’t read or don’t have access to papers from the big cities. He’s asked to take with him a young girl, captured by the Kiowa when she was six, and bring her back to her relatives near San Antonio. (more…)

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Psst. . .

C’mere.

I’ve got a secret.

Promise not to tell? (more…)

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Bad diarist! No biscuit!

Back during The Event, I once again started a journal. I’ve kept a journal, off and on, for most of my life (though it’s definitely been more off than on). Like many diarists, I pick up my journal in times of strife and pain, writing each day (or more often) to rant, moan, analyze, introspect, and claw my way back toward something that resembles sanity. As the drama subsides, however, my journalistic fervor wanes in response; I am simply not compelled to catalogue the minutiae of my days.

And that is the point at which I begin to feel a sense of failure. (more…)

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I’d heard of them long before I saw one in the wild. Rare, elusive, they were things of power and legend. Sure, I saw them in movies, but I knew those were fakes; we all did.

The C-note. The Benjamin. One hundred smackeroos.

I was nine years old when I saw my first one.

We were at Tiburon Tommie’s, the Chinese restaurant of my youth, a place where the drinks menu was long and fixed, and the food menu was short and subject to change. (more…)

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Two weeks ago, I tried an experiment.

As some of you know, in addition to this blog I have a Facebook page for my writing, which feeds through to my Twitter account. (I don’t like Twitter, but I’m not convinced it’s useless.) Posts here also go to my LinkedIn profile, to Google+, and to Tumblr.

I don’t have too many readers here—hundreds, but not thousands—and membership on my Facebook page is . . . modest, if you catch my drift . . . but I figured that this situation was the perfect foundation for a small experiment.

In short, I ran an ad. (more…)

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Going back over early notes for this novel, I realized that this project has been rattling around in my head for over a decade.

The first outline I wrote up has a note on the top: Tabled Jan 2004.

Initially, this was very depressing. (more…)

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