Got Cartridge?

            I just arrived home from Office Depot, where I spent a horrifying amount of money.

On what, you ask?

On an expletive-deleted toner cartridge, among other things.

Surely, this is a fixed racket. Surely the Mob controls the printer cartridge industry, starting with its prices. I mean, are they filled with gold bullion?

Here’s the other miserable inevitability: A writer is forced to consider the work that requires these tools, while she stands in line to pay for the unaesthetic plastic box with carcinogenic filling, and to wonder: What does this mean?

Is the reality an act of folk heroism, to be clucked over by future generations? Brave artist! She stood in line dozens of times to buy expensive, carcinogenic plastic boxes!

            No matter (she tells herself, grimly): other writers have to do this, too.

At least, no author I know admits to sending a Personal Shopper on these rounds.

I bring up the subject precisely because it is so unpleasant, so expensive, and so No Exit—unless you take everything to a copy-and-print center, which will cost you an even bigger fortune.

And the kicker, first and last, is that acquiring this stuff feels so utterly divorced from what the stuff serves: Enduring Art, and other big-deal concepts.

(Don’t tubes of paint or blocks of clay or wood or marble seem more fitted to a Vision, than charcoal-dust-leaking cartridges?)

The items we’re talking about generally come from big box stores, staffed mostly by people I will not invite legal retribution by describing. They (the items) also happen to be necessary to any office, including those of all the day jobs I’ve worked over the past many years while making new writing.

That group of jobs was diverse. But they all needed printer cartridges, paper, binders, clips, staplers, sheet protectors, pens and pencils, markers, those colored sticky things—it was one of the few reasons I liked working in those places.

In reality, I truly love office supplies. But these days, no longer buttressed by a day job’s paycheck, that love sours when time comes to pay for the high-ticket items. And lately, they’re all high-ticket.

Odder still: all this gritty physicality, given that the world’s going electronic.

Bottom line, nonetheless? To keep working, you need your tools. Simple as that.

Even if the whole experience feels like getting treated for a recurring illness.

Which when you think about it, may not be the most inaccurate analogy around.

Joan Frank is the author of five books of fiction, and a recent essay collection called Because You Have To: A Writing Life, just nominated for the ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award in Nonfiction. Joan holds an MFA in creative fiction from Warren Wilson College, is a MacDowell Colony Fellow, Pushcart Prize nominee, winner of the ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award in Short Fiction, Richard Sullivan Prize, Dana Award, and is the recipient of grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, and Sonoma Arts Council. A two-time nominee for the Northern California Book Award in Fiction and San Francisco Library Literary Laureate, Joan has taught creative writing at San Francisco State University, and continues to teach and edit in private consultation. Joan also regularly reviews literary fiction for the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review. She lives in Northern California.

Site: http://www.joanfrank.org/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/joan.frank.9?fref=ts

Following Through

I look at life as a series of follow-throughs. Ever since birth, I’ve had an interest in doing the next thing and the next. I’ve seen so many people stop because “everything seems so difficult”, yet for me it’s just the next thing to do. Doing nothing is as difficult as doing something. Both are valuable, and both need to be honored.

 

Along these lines, we promise ourselves that we’ll do things (our bucket lists), and we promise others the same. The primary reason I see these things not completed is the lack of follow-through. How long does it take to make that phone call? How much does it really cost to take that class? If nothing else, read a book on the subject, try things out slowly, working your way up to say, jumping from an airplane.

 

When I tell someone I’m going to do something, I know I’m going to follow through with it. It’s how I’ve created my belief system. I know that if I don’t follow through that it won’t get done. I’ll carry the baggage of non-completion with me everywhere. Maybe I’ll feel guilty. Whatever it was, will haunt me. It will give me a reason to avoid someone, which takes more energy (and is less rewarding) as addressing them. It separates me from my plan of my own life.

 

If I can refuse to follow through on my promise to others, then perhaps I can do the same with myself. I don’t like that idea at all. Life is important. The older I get, the more I recognize that now is the time to take the next step, to write that novel, jump out of that plane, climb that tree, or make that pottery. We must live our lives as though we mean it, as though life is meaningful. I can’t think of any better way than to follow through for yourself as well as others.

Terry Persun writes in many genres, including historical fiction, mainstream, literary, and science fiction/fantasy. He is a Pushcart nominee. His latest poetry collection is “And Now This”. His novels, “Wolf’s Rite” and “Cathedral of Dreams” were ForeWord magazine Book of the Year finalists in the science fiction category, and his novel “Sweet Song” won a Silver IPPY Award. His latest science fiction space opera is, “Hear No Evil”, his latest fantasy is “Doublesight”, his latest mainstream/literary novel is “Ten Months in Wonderland”.

Site: http://www.TerryPersun.wix.com/terrypersun

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TerryPersun?ref=tn_tnmn

Twitter: https://twitter.com/tpersun

Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/terrypersun/boards/

One is Silver and the Other, Gold

            People write a lot about books piling up in their homes. The tone they generally take is one of abashed pride: semi-pretending to be embarrassed or annoyed with themselves, but in fact proud to demonstrate that they love books so much they are drowning in them. That’s touching and real; I’m happy these people continue to cherish reading, and to showcase that passion.

But I’m thinking these days about the sheer weight of belongings—of stuff, as the late, brilliant George Carlin famously called it.

A year ago we talked, at dinner, with a couple of old friends who disclosed they’d been given the solemn duty of dismantling the home of a friend who’d died. The deceased man had requested this task of them in his will. He’d had an excellent career; he had liked his life. I don’t remember what he did, nor of what he died, but it doesn’t matter here.

What matters is that our friends went through his things and felt very sad. What good was the framed diploma, certificates of professionalism, photos, records, mementos? The man had no family, and no one wanted his stuff.

The same thing occurred when my husband and I had to clean out the home of his aging, widowed mother, who had to enter an assisted care facility in northern England, where she’s lived all her life. We had to throw out most of her things, which (for practical reasons) neither of her sons could keep.

These have been sobering considerations for us, even in what we consider the middle of life.

I used to feel that the serious writer was obliged to assemble a world-class library. Susan Sontag was my model: entire rooms of her New York home were filled with books, grouped by genre. Now I believe that we owe it to each other and to subsequent generations to keep the books moving. Get them into libraries and used bookstores. Offer them at garage sales.

Of course it’s important to hold onto titles whose voices you need to feel near to hand, as if they were food. (They are.)  And of course it’s important to read new works constantly, to digest what’s being offered out there by new and emerging writers.

But I now also believe it’s urgent, not just for reasons of space but for reasons of living lightly on the earth, to keep the tidal flow of books moving—like a blood supply cycled back into the world, after it’s replenished you.

Joan Frank is the author of five books of fiction, and a recent essay collection called Because You Have To: A Writing Life, just nominated for the ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award in Nonfiction. Joan holds an MFA in creative fiction from Warren Wilson College, is a MacDowell Colony Fellow, Pushcart Prize nominee, winner of the ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award in Short Fiction, Richard Sullivan Prize, Dana Award, and is the recipient of grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, and Sonoma Arts Council. A two-time nominee for the Northern California Book Award in Fiction and San Francisco Library Literary Laureate, Joan has taught creative writing at San Francisco State University, and continues to teach and edit in private consultation. Joan also regularly reviews literary fiction for the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review. She lives in Northern California.

Site: http://www.joanfrank.org/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/joan.frank.9?fref=ts

Should I Read My Reviews?

            It’s an endearing question, especially from writers whose first book is on the brink of publication. Yet the question also strikes me as disingenuous (if not intentionally so).

I sense that the question is being asked in an epistemological sense: that is, to gather knowledge. I sense that the questioner wants to hear opinions, but not really to adopt any of them.

Because who is anyone kidding? Writers work like Trojans at making a book, work like Trojans to get someone to like it and accept it and publish it, and then work like Trojans to do everything on earth to help publicize it. Media of all makes and models chop to bits anyone’s ability to concentrate on much of anything for more than five minutes. Therefore, any words from anyone, anywhere about our beloved book are going to take on, shall we say, a rather urgent significance.

Also, there’s practical husbandry to consider: we’ll need to cull the good parts, for quotation on our websites and jacket-flaps.

If reviews are good, tant mieux, as the canny French say. So much the better. Go ahead: be blinded by them temporarily. Become flooded by performance anxiety (how can I follow my own act?). Or conversely, let your ego balloon up to the size of a Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade float. It will all settle down again in a stunningly short time, and you’ll find yourself right back at the desk, filled with confusion, hopefulness, and self-doubt, same as always. And then at some point (exactly when, you’re unable in retrospect to pinpoint), you’ll be caught up in an interesting line on the page or screen, some thread or description that will, thank merciful heaven, lead you back into the work at hand.

If reviews are mixed or lousy or downright unfair, tant pis. Too bad. Go ahead and do whatever you must. Drink, eat an entire box of doughnuts, swim miles, run miles, cry, bury your face in your partner’s neck or your dog’s neck. Then: in an amazingly short amount of time? Yes. Right back at the desk, with the (gingerly resuming) dreams.

There’s a deep satisfaction, finally, in the razing of both states—elation, despair—replaced at last by the supreme relief of regaining invisibility, silence, and peace, working on the next project.

Astonishingly, you find you needed that, and wanted it back, most of all.

Joan Frank is the author of five books of fiction, and a recent essay collection called Because You Have To: A Writing Life, just nominated for the ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award in Nonfiction. Joan holds an MFA in creative fiction from Warren Wilson College, is a MacDowell Colony Fellow, Pushcart Prize nominee, winner of the ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award in Short Fiction, Richard Sullivan Prize, Dana Award, and is the recipient of grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, and Sonoma Arts Council. A two-time nominee for the Northern California Book Award in Fiction and San Francisco Library Literary Laureate, Joan has taught creative writing at San Francisco State University, and continues to teach and edit in private consultation. Joan also regularly reviews literary fiction for the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review. She lives in Northern California.

Site: http://www.joanfrank.org/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/joan.frank.9?fref=ts

And Now, a Word from Art’s Sponsor—Your Body

          Here’s a bracing reminder, by way of a New Year’s meditation—not a scolding, but rather a call to clarity and exhilaration:

Nothing gets done, fellow artist, but that it gets done by your body.

That includes every speck of thought, dreaming, planning. That includes every speck of perception and memory, and all those amazing, disturbing images that tiptoe shyly into the secret clearing in the secret forest of the writing mind.

Therefore, we can’t live like idiots anymore.

If you have to ask what that means, you’re still very young—either chronologically or developmentally.

It means, writing friends, we must pay attention to our heads and faces and necks, our clavicles, chests, bellies, arms and legs and feet! Lungs, hearts, veins, livers, guts!

Our dear bones. Our joints. Our patient, faithful, for-the-most-part-long-suffering and enduring, sturdy bodies.

Resolve to treat yours like royalty, going forward. Put in high-grade, clean fuel. Give it plenty of vitamins, rest, and vitalizing recreation. Go gently on (or make a wide end run around) alcohol, sugar, drugs.

The above reminders may seem insultingly obvious. But you’d be amazed (or maybe not) at their willful repudiation by many who have absolutely taken what they consider a daily blood oath, to make good and abiding work.

If you degrade the instrument, if you treat it carelessly or unkindly, what’ve you got?

Blighted pages. Or no pages.

Not only does the body—containing the precious precious brain—fuel and drive (via memory, impulse, and articulation) your work. It dwells in the world, and thereby infuses your work with lifegiving authority. It schleps around. It sees and listens. It knows the score (even, often, when you don’t). Its experience every waking minute gives unimpeachable form and dimension to your stories.

Somehow, writers get lax about remembering this as we grow up and learn to navigate outrageous fortune, as we try to figure things out. But we most of us were once, even for a little while, someone’s darling baby, fed and cossetted, bathed gently and wrapped in a warm towel and vigorously rubbed until we shone.

We have to reprise that kind of prizing—if I may—of the instrument.

            The instrument.

Paraphrasing Keats: That’s all we know on earth, and for an artist’s intents, all we need to know.

Carry on, then, this new year, in health—and in joy for the privilege of possessing artistic purpose. Be someone, per Henry James, on whom nothing is lost.

Joan Frank is the author of five books of fiction, and a recent essay collection called Because You Have To: A Writing Life, just nominated for the ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award in Nonfiction. Joan holds an MFA in creative fiction from Warren Wilson College, is a MacDowell Colony Fellow, Pushcart Prize nominee, winner of the ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award in Short Fiction, Richard Sullivan Prize, Dana Award, and is the recipient of grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, and Sonoma Arts Council. A two-time nominee for the Northern California Book Award in Fiction and San Francisco Library Literary Laureate, Joan has taught creative writing at San Francisco State University, and continues to teach and edit in private consultation. Joan also regularly reviews literary fiction for the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review. She lives in Northern California.

Site: http://www.joanfrank.org/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/joan.frank.9?fref=ts

Your Heart Book

I was going to dinner with a delightful man, a True Literary Believer with no time for cynicism or discouragement. He’s a fulltime, loving husband and father—but that doesn’t stop his writing, operating an online magazine, or giving workshops and readings. Moreover, he writes a daily blog. All his work appears devoted to helping writers.

I wanted to offer this admirable fellow a gift—to show him essentially who I am; to show him what my writer’s heart—and all the products that issue from it—is made of.

A heart-book.

Certainly, I wanted to show off. I wanted to impress. But finally, I wanted my friend to hold in his hands the ultimate jewel of my artist’s life, that colors and drives everything I do and stand for.

The heart-book contains our spiritual and artistic DNA. It’s two parents in one, progenitor of soul and personality and voice and vision. A finite concentrate.

I thought hard about it, and decided that the book-of-all-books would (for me, for a million reasons) have to be the late, beloved William Maxwell’s slender novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow.

I reserved a copy at my local bookstore. And once I’d collected the revered little volume and began my drive to the restaurant, a slow, internal joy began to break.

Why? Because it occurred to me that most readers (and especially writers) each have a heart-book—likely without even knowing it or stopping to think about it. Each of us, I think, carries deep within a crucial few books that power our inmost beings.

I decided (since I’m boss of this notion for the moment) that people should be allowed to name a heart-book for the life of childhood, too.

“You hear a big bang in childhood,” noted my dear friend, author and teacher Thaisa Frank (no relation). And that certainly applies to the big bang of early reading, when we are so raw and undefended that stories explode like supernovas in our souls, creating galaxies that twinkle and spin there ever after. Mine would be a three-way tie (and I know that’s cheating, but remember, I’m temporary boss), for Charlotte’s Web, Little Women, and maybe To Kill a Mockingbird.

And the fruit of this reasoning? It leads quickly and logically to one voluptuous, shamelessly personal question to ask of friends and family (besides how spicy you like your curry).

What’s your heart-book?

Joan Frank is the author of five books of fiction, and a recent essay collection called Because You Have To: A Writing Life, just nominated for the ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award in Nonfiction. Joan holds an MFA in creative fiction from Warren Wilson College, is a MacDowell Colony Fellow, Pushcart Prize nominee, winner of the ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award in Short Fiction, Richard Sullivan Prize, Dana Award, and is the recipient of grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, and Sonoma Arts Council. A two-time nominee for the Northern California Book Award in Fiction and San Francisco Library Literary Laureate, Joan has taught creative writing at San Francisco State University, and continues to teach and edit in private consultation. Joan also regularly reviews literary fiction for the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review. She lives in Northern California.

Site: http://www.joanfrank.org/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/joan.frank.9?fref=ts

Thoughts on Meditation

Since I was in my early 20s, I’ve meditated regularly. For years, I sat and meditated for at least an hour a day, sometimes repeating that several times a day. I have tried many types of meditations, so many that I don’t remember the names of most of them. Empty your mind meditations, guided meditations, drum journeys, conscious dreaming, so many of these things are similar in that they take you into an altered state. Some take you deeper than others, or into different realms, if I may suggest.

 

Meditation is like dreaming, both daydreams and night dreams, like spacing out, as it’s called. It’s like going into the zone, whether hiking, running, playing music, painting, or writing. Meditation has a lot of sides to it, and I’ve read about, researched, and tried many of them. Shamanism is a form of meditation in many ways. And, like several of the other forms of meditation, a shamanic state can take you places you cannot go when fully conscious.

 

Walking between two worlds insinuates that you can be in the conscious, practical world at the same time you operate in an altered state. You balance between the two. You shift back and forth depending on what’s happening and where you want your next move to originate from.

 

I think we all travel this route whether we have meditated for years or not. I don’t think we can get away from living in two places at once. Our creative minds are always working, always pushing us in one direction or another, whether you call it a gut feeling, a hunch, or a gift from your higher self—or the word of God for that matter.

 

And, since we live in both worlds, I’d like to suggest that we attempt to try to balance our time between the two (or three or four) worlds, that we try to allow things to happen, step into an altered state to see the meanings behind our lives, and allow all aspects of ourselves to find their ways forward.

 

That’s what I try to do every day. I alter my language between we and I because I believe that we are all in this together, we all have the opportunity to know more, understand more, and to be guided by a higher source whatever we call it. I personally find that meditation helps me stay in touch with that other source. And no matter what type of meditation I perform, I feel closer to who I really am, and who I can be.

Terry Persun writes in many genres, including historical fiction, mainstream, literary, and science fiction/fantasy. He is a Pushcart nominee. His latest poetry collection is “And Now This”. His novels, “Wolf’s Rite” and “Cathedral of Dreams” were ForeWord magazine Book of the Year finalists in the science fiction category, and his novel “Sweet Song” won a Silver IPPY Award. His latest science fiction space opera is, “Hear No Evil”, his latest fantasy is “Doublesight”, his latest mainstream/literary novel is “Ten Months in Wonderland”.

Site: http://www.TerryPersun.wix.com/terrypersun

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TerryPersun?ref=tn_tnmn

Twitter: https://twitter.com/tpersun

Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/terrypersun/boards/

Write the Next One

You’ve done it! You’ve written a novel. You’ve made several passes, revised it, shown it to beta readers, and made more adjustments. Maybe you’ve even handed it to a book doctor and made a few final, surgical tweaks. At last, time to find representation. So you researched agents who were interested in your genre, honed your query letter, and began sending out emails. Wonderful! Marvelous!

It’s time to write the next one.

But, wait! The energy that it took to find appropriate agents and finalize the query letter ate up all your normal writing time. And, wow, it was quite a slog those last few months finalizing the manuscript. You deserve a break, right? It will be nice to have your mornings for a while. Maybe you can start working out again, lose those five pounds you put on toward the end of the novel writing, when nothing mattered but finishing up the final draft.

Thus the Break From Writing begins. A few weeks slip into a few months and still you haven’t started a new project. Maybe you’ve played around with a few ideas, but nothing has come together quite yet, nothing into which you can really sink your teeth.

I’ve seen it happen before, to friends, colleagues, even me. You have a list of Agents You Haven’t Heard Back From Yet and every one of them represents hope that this will be the Big Break and you can sit back and start writing sequels. And so the writing stops and the waiting begins, even if you aren’t quite aware that you’re waiting.

How long has it been since your last project ended?

Now more than ever it’s important to work on the next novel. Nothing reduces the sting of a rejection email more than having transferred your emotions to a new, active project. When you’re really invested in your novel, writing that novel is all that matters.  Think of it like dating again after a breakup. It’s time to move on.

But it’s tough, you say. Starting a new novel takes thought and research. Maybe you want to create a bunch of new character profiles, outline the first act, or investigate more about the setting of your next story. You’ve been doing that stuff and all of it takes time.

Here’s the secret: You don’t need all that stuff to start writing a new novel. No one says you need to begin on page one and move head to page two. Do you have scene ideas? Write them. Ideas for dialogue? Jot them down. A particularly compelling description buzzing through your brain? Capture it on paper. But start! Make an investment in something new.

Here’s what I do when maybe I’m not ready to start writing the next novel, but I need to get going: I write a high-level summary, scene by scene. I start with a new scene, write anywhere from a paragraph to a few pages on what it’s about, then I write the next one, and the next. If I have ideas for dialogue, I add them. Sometimes an unexpected idea occurs to me later in the process, so I’ll go back and revise old scene summaries. In a way it’s like writing the next book without the writing part.

I’ve used this method to jump start the process and successfully get the next project going. Even if it’s not how you normally like to work, it feels great. And if you have research to do or character profiles to flesh out, it doesn’t mean you can’t do them simultaneously.

Trust me, it’s not a waste of time.

Writing breaks that last weeks and months and maybe years. That is a waste of time.

Brian Mercer is the author of the supernatural YA novel, Aftersight (Astraea Press, 2013). He is also co-author with Robert Bruce of Mastering Astral Projection: 90-Day Guide to Out-of-body (Llewellyn, 2004) and The Mastering Astral Projection CD Companion (Llewellyn, 2007). A board member of the Pacific Northwest Writers Association and senior editor at Author Magazine, he lives in Seattle with his wife, Sara, and their three cats.

Site: http://www.brianmercerbooks.com/

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/BriMercer

Twitter: @BriMercer

Why NaNoWriMo is So Damn Irritating

            In case you don’t already know, NaNoWriMo is the moniker for National Novel Writing Month. It takes place every November and challenges writers to complete 50,000 words of a new novel during the month November.

Every year, as November rolls around and I hear my writing friends gear up for it, I grow irritated. Why, I think, wait until November to write? If writing is a passion, if this is something you really want to do, why not just write!

There is a fallacy that in order to write a novel you need long, contiguous stretches of time devoted to the muse in order to complete a book-length project. People dream of renting a cabin in the woods or a farm house in Italy so they might sit behind a desk, uninterrupted for days at a time, writing. But that’s not the way to pile on the pages.

I discovered this the hard way early on in my writing career. At the time I was working as a consultant with a flexible schedule. Under the contract, instead of working eight hours a day, I had the option of working nine hours, thereby getting a day off every two weeks. Perfect, I thought. I’ll have an entire day every two weeks to write uninterrupted for an entire day!

Instead of rolling into work at eight o’clock each morning, I’d roll in at seven, work an extra hour each day, and have my glorious writing day off. However, what I discovered is that it is very difficult to be productive every moment for an entire day. There were meals to eat, bathroom and stretch breaks to have, and occasional errands to run. Oh, I’d manage to write ten to twelve decent quality pages, but it wasn’t much output after two weeks of waiting.

Then an idea occurred to me. What if I returned to my old work schedule, without the day off? But what if I still came in to work an hour early each morning, however instead of working that first hour I’d spend it writing. Usually, no one was at the office that early anyway, so I could write one hour every day uninterrupted.

What I discovered is, when you write every day, especially the same time every day, you can really build momentum. It’s like having a daily appointment with your muse. Not only was I writing two and often three pages every day, it was good quality stuff. Suddenly my writing took off. It was as if I wasn’t so much writing as I was transcribing an inner voice. Often I couldn’t type fast enough to capture everything that was coming in and the creative ideas and plot twists that I was coming up with were way better than what I’d originally outlined.

Now, at the end of two weeks, instead of having ten to twelve pages to show for it, I’d have twenty to thirty pages, and the writing was way better than it had been on those full days off!

NaNoWriMo is a crutch. Ignore it. Do you want to write? Then write! Usually, all NaNoWriMo will get you in the end are pages of writing hacked and slashed onto the page, low-quality writing that will require months and months of edits and rewrites before they are in a state to show another human being.

What’s stopping you from going to work one hour early, finding some quiet spot, and writing?

Brian Mercer is the author of the supernatural YA novel, Aftersight (Astraea Press, 2013). He is also co-author with Robert Bruce of Mastering Astral Projection: 90-Day Guide to Out-of-body (Llewellyn, 2004) and The Mastering Astral Projection CD Companion (Llewellyn, 2007). A board member of the Pacific Northwest Writers Association and senior editor at Author Magazine, he lives in Seattle with his wife, Sara, and their three cats.

Site: http://www.brianmercerbooks.com/

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/BriMercer

Twitter: @BriMercer

 

Not Just For Writers

I’ve been reading the blog posts on this blog now since its beginning. Since I upload everything here, I get to read the material first. One think I’ve noticed about these posts is that even though many of them focus on writing and writers, they have a much broader reach. These posts are not just for writers, they are for artists of any kind, and that includes scientists and accountants that are creative in their respective jobs.

Unfortunately, we humans often separate the arts and the sciences as though they are different. They aren’t. They use different skills (sometimes), but both are creative. Without numbers we’d never have evolved to where we are. Without science we’d never understand our world, let alone be able to design and build products to make our lives easier. And without writers and painters and musicians many of us would lose track of our emotions or interest in beauty.

When I talk with a design engineer for my day job, I can’t help but notice that he or she gets just as excited about the project being worked on as I do when I talk about my latest writing project. And they use the same language I do, sometimes explaining how “it just came to me” or “when I finally figure it out.” Everyone I’ve ever met is a creative person in one way or another. And every person I’ve ever met is equally practical. They may choose to spend most of their waking hours one place rather than another, but it’s all there.

So, as you read these posts and share them with your friends, think of those people you don’t always consider as creative types. Include them. They’ll find themselves in these posts just as I’ve found myself in editorials written in technical journals over the years. We are a broader and more expansive race than any of us knows.

Terry Persun is an award winning author and a #1 Amazon bestseller. He is also a Pushcart nominee. His mainstream novel, “Wolf’s Rite”, was a Star of Washington award winner, a POW! Award winner, and a ForeWord magazine Book of the Year finalist. His science fiction novel, “Cathedral of Dreams”, was also a ForeWord magazine Book of the Year finalists. And his historical novel, “Sweet Song”, won a Silver IPPY Award for best regional fiction. His latest novel, “Doublesight”, is book one of his new fantasy series. His latest poetry collection is “And Now This”. Terry writes in many genres, including historical fiction, mainstream, literary, and science fiction/fantasy.

Site: http://www.TerryPersun.wix.com/terrypersun

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TerryPersun?ref=tn_tnmn

Twitter: https://twitter.com/tpersun

Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/terrypersun/boards/