From whiskey river: It was almost dark on an early summer eve, and the forest was never more enchanting than now, at dusk. At dusk the mountain begins to withdraw its force back into itself and become quiescent. If you too can become quiescent, so still that you can’t think of your name, you can [...]

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So, bottom line: yes, at around 12:30 this afternoon I bounded across the 3,000-word mark in the 2010 Write Your A** Off Write-a-Thon. I’d gotten up around 6:30am, heated water in the teakettle, sat down at my desk and by 7:30 — after incidental stuff like selecting the day’s background music — begun to write. [...]

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Remember The Querulous Squirrel’s 100-stories-in-100-days challenge? Ambitious, wot? Supremely well executed, eh? Okay, now start with a similar premise: Write a story a day for an entire month. Saturdays and Sundays included. Holidays, too. No limit on word count. Just write a complete story each day. Simple to say, hard to execute, right? Just as [...]

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The other day, Moonrat replied to a question about the acceptability of collections of “linked” short stories: stories united by a common theme, cast of characters, whatever. Along the way, she wondered what the state of short fiction in general might be, in these days when writers seem so focused on books.* (The comments surprised [...]

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Centuries after the Eastern Orthodox Church began celebrating the Epiphany, the Roman Catholic Church decided to start doing so too. But for some reason, the Western Church really latched on to this image of the Persian priests bringing gifts of frankincense, myrrh, and gold to the infant Jesus, guided from their homeland of Iran by [...]

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I had occasion recently to hunt down a story by James Thurber which I hadn’t read in *counting*… uh, many years. But the first time I “read” it, I didn’t actually read it: I heard it, read aloud, by my seventh-grade English teacher. The story itself has nothing to do with Christmas or even winter [...]

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From whiskey river: The Story, Around the Corner is not turning the way you thought it would turn, gently, in a little spiral loop, the way a child draws the tail of a pig. What came out of your mouth, a riff of common talk. As a sudden weather shift on a beach, sky looming [...]

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Marta was wondering a few days ago about writerly magic numbers: specific quantifiable targets which writers hope to achieve within some given time period. She’s doing NaNoWriMo, so of course over her head looms the magic 50,000-words-in-a-November target. But she asked what other writers might choose to be satisfied with: N pages or words per [...]

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[Found this image here.] From whiskey river (highlighted portion): The Difficult Simplicity of Certain Contemplations Tapping a tarot card with her dusky finger, the woman tells me sit with your emptiness, in time answers will come. She says I know them all and only must remember. My friend tells me I must decide what is [...]

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Can you write a ghost story in no more than 124 characters? Stuart Neville, author of The Twelve (which I reviewed on The Book Book the other day), is running a little contest. The occasion? That book’s publication tomorrow in the US, called here The Ghosts of Belfast. Following is a brief description of the [...]

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