I have this romanticized image of what it means to be a productive writer. I’m in a locked room, alone, with the moonlight filtering through a giant window and alighting the spines of ancient tomes beside my work desk. The computer monitor glows. Drone music plays through big headphones. I’m wearing nothing but a big […]
I spent most of my early 20s in bars and strange houses. I slept on dirty floors in cold rooms and in strange beds surrounded with red mirrors. I’ve stumbled in six-inch platform heels more times than i care to remember, and have kissed many people who probably shouldn’t breed. I became ‘Nameless’, the girl who could […]
Everyone knows that discipline is required to achieve great success, and also that we all probably need more of it. It’s the secret ingredient that is usually comprised of bitterness and self-loathing. We push ourselves by decrying our flesh as weak and our brains as stupid. We bully ourselves to force our bodies into a […]
Someone put up a picture on Instagram of a quote from one of my stories in Ecstatic Inferno. And my primal brain knew that it was my writing, but in a way I couldn’t accept it, because the words that I had written were so far from my current state. It was as if I […]
it was 2 years ago when I decided to really get my life together, because I realized it was either save myself or burn. In the beginning, I was miserable mostly 9 days out of 10. This is demonstrable because I coded my emotions in a spreadsheet and gave them numerical values. There were days […]
I I knew it was you again when I saw the glitter coming out of my mouth flecked with blood and spit. I knew it was you who broke my face in the mirror, and stretched my hips into the shape of a Gothic castle. Told me I was the kind of ugly that killed […]
Cynicism is easy – I realize that now – because I used to look at the world in disdain with its McDonalds, mall, and unhappy marriages and just see shit piled on top of shit. I saw a gray world spattered with a dawn like blood, a beautiful sky that we didn’t deserve. Is this […]
This is a post about how safety is an illusion and we’re all going to die. The other day I asked on Facebook if I should apply to Clarion West’s writing workshop and I got a pretty loud resounding no from everyone for various reasons – that the average writer at Clarion didn’t get published, […]
Every-time someone asks how they can improve their writing, I see the same answers: Join a critique group, read “writing how-to” books, find a writing buddy, join an online writing community. The problem is that most of these are investments into social groups, and the people that I see most involved in social groups are […]
What kind of writer are you, and what do you have to change or improve to be where you want to be? Wherever you are in your writing career, self-reflection and the ability to change course is always a useful vehicle for improvement. I ran across some notes I’d written to myself a few years, […]
