"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." Carl Jung Atomic Habits by James Clear pulled back the curtain on my unconscious mind and revealed the old man who pulls levers and pushes my buttons and tells me not to mind him at all. That old …
Continue reading I am What I Daily Do, Not What I Wish Were True
I had a dry spell for several months, so it felt especially good to have my flash story "A Far Fall" longlisted by Reflex Fiction. I woke up to the lovely surprise of seeing it in print today. You can read it here. (I hope you will!) Interested in subbing to a free flash fiction …
Even if I have all the ingredients, I feel this uncontrollable urge to substitute things. It's not always easy to follow a recipe, but— can we agree— it's less risky? There's a frontiersman in me that doesn't want to take a well-worn path, even to chocolate cake. Where's the fun (or artistry) in that? My …
Continue reading Spontaneous 10: Outlines, Like Recipes, Are Negotiable
I've been participating in the #1000wordsofsummer campaign. I did it earlier this summer, too. I don't count these words, here on the blog. I could; some might, but the words I really need are fiction ones. I do not poo on anyone's idea of hard. It's different for everyone. For me, it's the blank page. …
But almost no one wants to write. Even writers don't always want to. Let's define a writer, shall we? Because I've met people who write my socks off, yet they don't consider themselves "writers" because they've never been published. (Nevermind the fact that they've not actually submitted anything!) Any person who writes regularly is a …
My short story "Turn a Blind Eye" will be published by AM Ink Publishing in their upcoming horror collection The Half That You See. The book takes its name from a quote attributed to Edgar Allen Poe: Believe nothing you hear and only one half that you see. Have you ever been misquoted? So was …
Continue reading Turning Friends Into Villains: a Writer’s Right
In my first novel (I just began #3), I have a character say something like, you can know a lot about a person by the books he reads. My character said this because I believe this. Not that everything my characters say are sentiments with which I agree. Except the villains. I agree with everything …
A tide of writerly emails swamps my inbox each day. Everyone has advice on how to write and how to write better and how not-to-give-up-when-everyone-hates-your-work and here's some literary flash fiction. Here's some atrocious flash fiction from somebody you accidentally followed. Here's a Ted Talk. Here's some poetry. Here's this new author, that new agent. …
What every writer needs: a smart, honest, critical reader. Or in a perfect world, a posse of smart-honest-criticals. Let's face it. If you have an Einsteinian friend, but he only heaps praise upon your work and doesn't share what could be better, how does that help? If you have an Eeyore-type who honestly sees prickles …
In Spontaneous 5 I mentioned spending upwards of seven (it was actually more like ten) hours on my first page. Well, you can see the fruit of that labor and even vote anonymously whether or not you'd keep reading my work HERE. This is me, begging you. I'm not asking for strokes. Vote your conscience. …
Continue reading An Invitation to FLOG This Writer AND…I Got Shot
KL Griffiths 