Some bloggers reel me in—usually with a strong literary voice and brutal honesty. I'm a sucker for poetic confession. We all struggle inside ourselves, and I appreciate a writer who can fly that flag and call it fiction or essay or Dear Diary... MrHushHush is one such blogger, so when I saw he was looking for …
Dear Diary…
Some people can't think of anything to write. I don't have that problem. I can always, ALWAYS throw some words down on a page. Probably a result of hours spent freewriting with my students, if you put on a timer and tell me to write, I'll fill pages and pages of stream-of-consciousness. Some people start …
A Writing Exercise on Mood Creation
Two canoes. With a rope I drag one behind me and return to the place. The empty canoe yaws and straggles and hampers so I have to relearn my paddle. Last time the water was serrated, chopped into spades by homeless and invisible gusts. The sudden rain made the most fragile bubbles when it struck …
Fiction: The Colonel’s Last Wish
In the bombed-out shell of a Starbucks cafe, he sat at a buckling and tilted table. What the colonel wouldn't give for a green-smocked barista right now. A US Army truck painted over with his familiar insignia passed by, likely headed to the dump. Halfheartedly, he returned salute, then covered his nose. The dead Americans …
My Muse Experience
Anne Lamott calls it her broccoli. Stephen King calls it his beast. My beast was asleep. I tried prodding him, kicking him, calling him bad names. No roars. No lightning bolts of creativity. Just me, slapping words on a page with the precision of a toddler, becoming more and more certain I was wasting my …
The Most Dangerous Thing We Do
Once this kid—my passenger—grabbed the steering wheel and jerked it hard over while I was driving. Not just a little tug, mind you, but a full-on we-gonna-die! yank. The kind that elicited a blood-curdling scream and a shouted sermon. A 19-year old preaching car safety to a 15-year-old. This kid was all charm and immortality …
What Novel-Creation Feels Like, in Pictures
via What it feels like to write a book #writing #writerslife #amwriting
Last Touch
A tire spun, the one not furrowed by speed and thrust. Smoke wheezed from the buckled steel hood. Engine guts, half-erupted and splattered with oil, steamed in glossy, iridescent blackness. Beside his twitching foot lay an unwrapped breakfast sandwich. The smells of sausage, cologne, and sharp copper ghosted the car, floated out the broken windows, …
A Tale of Two Writing Gigs
Yesterday I had two writing gigs. TWO! The first one was in a library where the security guards pack heat, and there are two of them patrolling the aisles. It's a library where you get buzzed into the restroom and there find lurking an odor more corrupt than King Tut's tomb or my son's gym …
2017 in the Rear View Mirror
2017. Crushed it. Really and truly. Those of you who know me know I beat myself up at regular intervals. I raise self-flagellation to an art form. My friends tell me I'm too hard on myself. If there is no enemy within, the enemy outside can do me no harm. I like to think I have an …
KL Griffiths 