14 May 2012 by Jacqui Murray

10 Things My Blog Taught Me

When I started this blog three years and 586 posts ago, I wasn’t sure where to take it. I knew I wanted to connect with other writers so I used that as the theme. Now, thanks to the 430,000+ people who have visited, I know much more about the ‘why’. Yes, it’s about getting to know kindred souls, but there is so much more I’ve gotten from blogging. Like these: How to write We... read more

14 May 2012 by Paul Servini

Those Were The Days

There were days—and they weren’t so long ago—when writing held no fears for me. I’d just arrived in a new town and joined a writing group to get to know people. Having never written before I caught the bug and soon started a blog for which I wrote flash fiction. I started to various writing challenges and posting them on my blog. People started to notice and even appreciate my... read more

13 May 2012 by Jodi Cleghorn

Form and Genre Challenge #15

“The Hard Sci-Fi Challenge” For submission the week ending Sunday, 20th May. Challenge: To write in the hard sci-fi genre Form: Open Word Count: 3500 words Submission Tips Please ensure your story is clearly labelled ‘FGC’ along with the challenge number and the story name in the title of your blog post. Example: [FGC #15] Science and Nothing But the Science. Note the word count at... read more

13 May 2012 by Jodi Cleghorn

Form and Genre Challenge #14 Submissions

“The First Person POV Challenge” Challenge: To write in the first person point of view. Genre: Open Word Count: 1500 words Judges: Paul Anderson & Jodi Cleghorn   First Person POV Challengers   1. Rebecca Fyfe 2. Tiel Aisha Ansari 3. Kate Sherrod 4. Storm Dweller 5. Jody Moller 6. JM Merchant 7. Brinda Banerjee 8. Carolyn Wagner 9. Annie... read more

12 May 2012 by Adam Byatt

PROMPTed #15 The Power of Flight

PROMPTed is a weekly collection of writing prompts to inspire your writing week. The prompts are loosely grouped under a common theme and include a random line prompt, a photograph, a song/music video, a sensory suggestion and a famous quote. Our guest programmer for the month of May is the the multi-talented Adam Byatt. For the month of May I started with music as the basis for PROMPTed. I chose 4 songs... read more

11 May 2012 by Jessica Bockman

In Examination of Fear

A car slips off a jack and falls, pinning a child underneath. The mother lifts the car so the child can escape. A mother allows her 9-year-old to ride his bicycle up and down the driveway, but won’t leave the house herself. The link between these two scenarios? It isn’t me. I’ve never lived it, never written it, and find it hard to imagine. I feel no impulse, outside of inertia, to lock... read more

10 May 2012 by Tony Noland

Apostrophe apostate

I’m writing this on an old laptop, a 2004-vintage Dell running Win-XP. It only has 2GB of RAM because I upgraded it in 2008. The screen is slow to come up to full brightness and the CPU is so old, I can’t even find benchmarks for it. Based on my closest proximal values, though, it has about 1% of the raw processing power of the current generation of laptop CPUs. None of this is terrible... read more

10 May 2012 by Jim Bronyaur

I fear fear

To talk about fear is something I greatly fear. To have the idea of sharing my greatest fear, no matter what it may be, is actually in some ways my greatest fear within itself. I cannot begin to get into the details of the past year of my personal life, which coincides with my business and writing life. To say things have done a 180 would be an understatement. I’m not sure how many spins my life has... read more