The Weekend Redirect: How I Cured My Anxiety by Leo the Nerdy Lion

Leo the Nerdy Lion writes about a subject near and dear to my heart – crippling anxiety. I found this post to be extremely helpful and I hope you do as well.

I strongly suggest this article for everyone whose mind suddenly turns in on itself and Ouroboros-like starts to devour its own tail.

SOURCE: How I Cured My Anxiety

The Weekend Redirect: Defeats by Cristian Mihai

I wrote a little bit ago about writing despite whatever life throws at you. Life intervenes, and sometimes in an extremely brusk manner.

This post on Cristian Mihai’s blog goes into better detail in a more eloquent (and less goofy) manner. Read it and learn, peeps!

Source: Defeats by Cristian Mihai

The Worst Good Writing Advice I’ve Received So Far

There are many rules about writing prose fiction. Any creative writing course will drill those rules into you. But don’t be fooled. These “rules” are merely guidelines that help you focus your prose. But they aren’t commandments. I think there is only one real rule so far as prose construction goes:

Rules about writing should be followed, unless they shouldn’t.

Continue reading “The Worst Good Writing Advice I’ve Received So Far”

Word Count: Struggling to Find My Rhythm Again

The consistently excellent J.C. Cauthon (J.C.’s for life, yo!) writes about my own Achilles heal: getting into the rhythm of writing.

Specifically, she writes about trying to find the groove of writing again. You know how it is: thousands of ideas, mere minutes of free time. Life intervenes. A move half-way across the country is intervening in mine. But once you start down the dark side of not writing, forever will it…

Damn, I am SUCH a nerd.

Continue reading “Word Count: Struggling to Find My Rhythm Again”

In Defense of Poetry: “Oh My Heart”

This week, we visit P.L. Thomas’ excellent site “The Becoming Radical.

In this post, Thomas discusses the need for poetry in education, and how poetry and fiction seem to be falling by the wayside in favor of testing scores needed to justify school funding.

The testing requirements alone are evil, but the cutting out of poetry from the curriculum is a travesty. Poetry is an essential to education as well as life. But I’ll shut up about it because Thomas puts it far better than I can.

In Defense of Poetry: “Oh My Heart”

plthomasedd's avatardr. p.l. (paul) thomas

“No, no. You’ve got something the test and machines will never be able to measure: you’re artistic. That’s one of the tragedies of our times, that no machine has ever been built that can recognize that quality, appreciate it, foster it, sympathize with it.”

Paul Proteus to his wife Anita in Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano

“So much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens” is, essentially, a grammatical sentence in the English language. While the syntax is somewhat out of the norm, the diction is accessible to small children—the hardest word likely being “depends.” But “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams is much more than a sentence; it is a poem:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

A relatively simple English language sentence shaped into purposeful lines and stanzas becomes poetry. And like…

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