the.book.chat link-up, short stroies

The link-up this week for the.book.chat is about short stories.  I don't read many short stories (although I would like to write one!), but when I do read them I enjoy them.  And I recently read a phenomenal one called The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu.  I heard about it from the Books on the Nightstand podcast (if you listen to podcasts, check this one out!). This story is available for free online through Suvudu, from when it appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine.  Even if you don't like Fantasy/SciFi, you should read this short story, it's only about 12 pages long but it is very touching and you might want to keep some tissues nearby!  I'm always amazed at how much an author can get through in such a short story, and this one has it all.  In keeping the theme with short stories, I'll keep this post short!

Head over to this link-up and join in!

Compose Yourself writing link-up!

We're back again with another creative writing link-up, Compose Yourself.  Nikki over and Travels with Pen and Paper started this link up and I hope some of you out there will join in!

This week's prompt was a bit harder for me to get into and I wasn't sure where my composition was going at times, but I feel like it all wraped up ok.  Now I think maybe I could've gone a different way with it, but too late for that now.  Maybe I'll change it up in the future to see if I could take it in a different direction, that could be fun, right?  Anyway, here is the prompt:

This has to do with writing from different senses. Have a sound, smell, or taste lead the way.

And now, for my submission:

Silence.  Pure white silence.  The feeling of nothing as soon as you step out into the falling snow.  Big flakes everywhere to mask all the sounds around you, you can’t even hear the traffic on the road just down the hill.  The peacefulness of a heavy snowfall is like no other.  The impact of the silence hits you immediately and wholly consumes you.  All thoughts leave your head.  No more worry or concern, just pure emptiness in the white landscape.  You soon forget why you even stepped outside and what your next step was going to be.  The silence takes over and the snow is mesmerizing.  Taking one more breath to enjoy the new found clarity in your mind, you look down and see the trash bag in your hand, and remember that you stepped outside for this purpose.  As you are brought back to reality you look around to observe all the things that were silenced by the snow storm.  The dog happily jumping in and out of the snow bank, and the snow falling off of a weighted down tree branch.  Taking just one more moment to recognize how silent it is and allowing your mind to be cleared one more time.

I'm pretty excited for the prompt next week and will happily do some "research" on a subject this week.  Maybe even I can get RoB in on the action! The prompt for next week is the appropriately named stalker prompt :) I love this because I feel like I do it in my head all the time:

Go to a coffee shop, park, anywhere you can people watch for a while. Craft a story around your observations. I.e. you see someone, why are they there? What do they look like? Are they happy, sad, mad? Are they alone, meeting someone? What’s their back story?  Or where are they going from there?

I hope some more of you will join in, and remember to link up over at Nikki's blog!

New Year, New Location...Now from Kentucky!

So many new things!

We made it to Kentucky, and it took us 7 days! You can see RoB's recap of day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4, day 5, day 6, and day 7.  It was a great drive especially because we were able to take our time and enjoy ourselves, we also didn't hit any bad weather, yay!

A couple new things I would like to do while I'm here in Kentucky, some of which have to do with my blog!  The first thing I've noticed is that you can't really rely on yelp or urbanspoon the way we used to in California.  There just aren't enough users, leaving us with too small a sample size.  In order to try and help this I plan to join both yelp and urbanspoon and review places I go, in hopes of making it more worthwhile in the future.  I also plan to talk about all kinds of fun Kentucky things like that (but only the good places :) here, on my blog!

One other thing I'd like to do more of is book reviews and other book/writing topics.  I love to read, and I read a lot.  I also used to be more involved with librarything early reviewers and hope to get back into that.  I recently joined the website book blogs and even though I will mostly use that as a way for me to find good blogs to read, I'd also like some of those members to stop by here and see what I have to say! Lastly, I hope to revisit my NaNoWriMo story, the whole point of it for me was to have a good starting place, which I think I do...

1% of My Day

I had a great 7th grade English teacher, Ms. Fouts, who told us that everyday we should spend at least 1% of our day reading.  On the first day of class she derived for us that 14.4 minutes is 1% of our day.  So everyday in her class we read for at least 14.4 minutes.  Since then I've always tried to keep that mentality, and I've tried to devote at least 1% of my day to reading.

Now I'm going to try and use another 1% of everyday to write, here, on my blog.  I'm also going to try to blog at about the same time everyday and avoid blogging from work (this will be really hard for me).  I think if I just come up with a topic for the day and write about that instead of trying to remember everything I've done lately that I want to share.  And only writing for 14.4 (ok I'm rounding up to 15) minutes should keep things short and sweet!

I was also inspired because my sister mentioned something similar on her blog.  She is a photographer, but also a great writer (much better than me) and recently decided she was going to write more on her blog, instead of just posting pictures.  And then there is always the bf's blog that I'm trying to keep up with...

This should be an interesting experiment!