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I'm putting episodes 8.5 and 8.6 together, in part because I am having a devil of a time writing something for the prompt for episode 8.5. That episode talks about breaking the rules of writing, and it made me realize that I never really learned the "rules" for writing. I've never taken a class on writing fiction; all of the instruction I've ever received with regards to writing has been related to writing academic papers, non-fiction persuasion or position papers, essentially. I've had some experience in writing documents for work, things like standard operating procedures (SOPs) and minutes from various meetings, but none of that explains how best to handle point of view or whether you should move from one character's thoughts to another. I've obviously read a lot of fiction in my life, and so I have an idea of what I think works and what doesn't, but I also, embarrassingly, have to say that I don't pay super close attention to what - or rath...

Side characters are the subject of Episode 8.4, which is definitely something I could use help with. I usually have a decent idea of my main characters, but everybody else tends to just show up on their own, and I don't know too much about them until they start taking over the narrative. It's something that I could definitely afford to work on a bit more, so that I can get a better handle on who is in the stories I write, at least to begin with. What happens after they show up, well, that tends to be less under my control than would probably be considered healthy. Writing prompt: The Hero of the Most Boring Story Ever—your job is to make it interesting. (I'm going to cheat a little bit with regards to the "most boring story ever" aspect - I have a meditation app, Calm.com, that has sleep stories which are deliberately written to be the kind of thing that will help a person fall asleep. I'll riff on one of those.) I'm also just going to remind you all that ...

Pets! I love reading about how animals interact with characters in stories, but I'm so bad with it myself. I know the way I interact with my cats is not necessarily the way the average person interacts with their pets, and it makes me nervous to write characters who have pets or service animals or other animals that they interact with on the regular, because who knows how "wrong" I'm getting it. But meh, let's give it a go. Writing prompt: Write a human interacting with an alien, and the alien has a conspicuous companion animal who is critically important to the alien’s life. Steve was nervous, as usual, while entering their new ship. They were never particularly comfortable around others who were not of their species, or their planet, and a spaceship just exacerbated not only the strangeness of the situation, but also highlighted all the ways the sentient races didn't truly understand each other. It was their third spaceship since they had begun their travels...

 Episode 2 is all about the Campbellian monomyth/Hero of a Thousand Faces, which is one of those things that always sounded vaguely interesting from a distance. Even just listening to the beginning of this episode, though, it's sounding so much like a prescription for a story (at least, that's how way too many people look at it or treat it), and that kind of prescription has never felt organic or, frankly, interesting to me. This is probably why I was never a huge fan of literary criticism - so much of it seems to be focusing on labeling the different pieces of a story to fit into some kind of formula, and it just takes so much joy out of the experience. No wonder I fled academia. Writing prompt: Take Goldilocks and the Three Bears, apply the Campbellian Monomyth, and give us a short story. Babe opened the door wearily, slumping into his home just ahead of his two brothers. All three had been pulling extra hours at the mines lately, because money was tight, and Christmas was c...

(What? Two posts in one day? I know! Don't get used to it.) I'm starting something new now that 31 stories is winding down. I'm going through old episodes of the podcast Writing Excuses  and listening to one episode at a time, then following the writing prompt given at the end of each episode. I had listened to the podcast regularly for a long time, but like so many other podcasts, I've fallen behind to the point of ridiculousness. (I'm not the best at keeping on top of things with regards to podcasts, but I'm also very fond of being complete in my listening habits, which makes for an interesting combination - I'm sitting at about 40 months' behind on most of my podcasts, for reference.) To start this thing, episode 8.1 , "Microcasting," has this writing prompt: What does SFPA stand for? (It figures that the first one I pick is one that's the hosts being smart asses, but what can I do?) The old-fashioned phone rang on the wooden desk next t...

I'm drafting this up now, on the 29th, though I plan on posting after the end of the month. I want to get some thoughts down about my experience with the 31 stories in 31 days challenge, because it has been enlightening. First, I want to shout out to the team that created the challenge, and the community on Discord that was incredibly supportive and enthusiastic throughout the entire experience. The team put out prompts every day (sometimes multiple prompts), worked on giveaways, engaged the community members to discuss what was going well, what wasn't, and being overall incredibly encouraging for all of us. I don't know how many people actually managed to hit 31 stories - I know I didn't, but I also figured pretty early on that writing more days than I didn't each week was what I needed to get things going for my brain. I have been having a rough time with regards to my mental health of late. 2020 was not kind to any of us, and the combination of that, some physic...