Category Archives: General Thoughts

When Did You Know You Wanted To Be A Writer?

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So here’s the thing: I haven’t always wanted to be a writer. I haven’t been writing as long as I can remember. I bring this up because I often hear writers asked some variation of: “When did you know you wanted to be a writer.”

Yeah – that question, or something similar, always seems to come up in interviews of authors and the answer often goes along the lines of “Always.” This makes me feel weird, because that wouldn’t be my answer. I wasn’t even sure what my answer would be.

This post was going to be a set of mini-reviews about the new line of comic titles from Monkeybrain comics, but a funny thing happened. When I started writing that post I suddenly discovered my answer to this ubiquitous question. I hope you’ll forgive the hippie navel-gazing sound of this (and everything that follows) but here it is. My answer:

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I Won A Little Something

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So one of the things that I’ve learned over the last few months is that there are a lot of writers out here on the internet. Twitter seems particularly full of them. The flash fiction challenges at terribleminds.com are great a great way to meet a small slice of this great population of authors and I do try my best to read and comment on as many of the challenge takers’ entries as possible – though I’ve been a little lax in this the last few weeks.

During these explorations of my fellow writers’ webplaces I started noticing that there is a community of them who just love flash fiction and micro fiction. They love it so much they’ve started little weekly micro-fiction writing contests. For example there are: #MenageMondays hosted over at “Defantly Literate” ( http://www.caramichaels.com ), the #55WordChallenge hosted at “Jezri’s Nightmares” ( http://www.lisamccourthollar.com/ ) and #ThursThreads hosted at “The Weird, the Wild, & the Wicked” ( http://siobhanmuir.blogspot.kr/ ). There are many more as well.

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Something I’ve Learned About Me, A New Goal, and Inspiration For Any Writer

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One great thing about being in the early stages of learning anything is how fast you can improve. I’m pretty damn certain that every day over the past several months I have become a better writer and more likely to succeed in the business of writing. I’m equally sure that there will come days in the future where I will feel like I’m not getting better, or making progress. Those times, or plateaus, are commonly discussed in education theory and I believe they apply to most things in our lives. They can frustrate, but the secret at those times is to just keep pushing forward, maybe try to change-up some routines, and don’t stop putting in the time because you will break through the plateau eventually.

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