Missing Myself: Scattered Thoughts on Reading and Homeschooling

I’m not sure exactly what I want to write about today.

Cover of I Miss You When I Blink

I could write about the book I just read: I Miss You When I Blink by Mary Laura Philpott. I don’t read personal essays as often as I should. In college, I went on a 8-week, life-changing study abroad, hiking all over England and writing personal essays. It’s the genre I still feel the most comfortable writing in. Yet I rarely turn to books of essays for pleasure. I can’t explain why this is, except that when I read, I tend to be more plot driven than I am when I write.

I picked upĀ I Miss You When I Blink because it was recommended on Modern Mrs. Darcy’s Summer Reading Guide and I was trying to expand my reading beyond my usual non-fiction or speculative fiction.

Continue reading “Missing Myself: Scattered Thoughts on Reading and Homeschooling”

Truly Fantastic Fiction: A Review of Writers of the Future Vol 36

Cover for Writers of the Future volume 36

 Either I’m getting better at reading short stories, or the Writers of the Future contest for 2019 had truly epic submissions, because I found almost every story in volume 36 compelling. I am not usually a short story reader, but I am trying to become one to expose myself to more ideas in my limited reading time. Volumes like this give me great motivation to continue in that endeavor.

Notes on individual stories, attempting to be spoiler free:

Continue reading “Truly Fantastic Fiction: A Review of Writers of the Future Vol 36”

Writing Goals for the Post-Pandemic World

black and white dartboard
Photo by Engin Akyurt on Pexels.com

In January 2020 I set myself some writing writing goals. Let’s look at how I was doing on those before, you know, that thing happened.

Continue reading “Writing Goals for the Post-Pandemic World”

Finding Motivation to Write During Hard Times with 4thewords

Well hello again.

Like many others, my writing productivity has suffered during the pandemic. I went from having mornings free of kids to pursue my writing (and physical therapy) to suddenly supervising four kids learning at home. (Stop me if you’ve heard this one.) It was stressful and many times it was all I could do to get the kids through their school work in the morning and spend the rest of the day on the couch, obsessively reading Google News and Facebook.

4thewords Logo

After a month or two, I started building a foundation that allowed me to come out of hibernation. Honestly, I was forced to. I had agreed in February to write a blog post due in June, and my deadline was fast approaching. I had to find some way to come out of my funk and get some kind of work done.

Continue reading “Finding Motivation to Write During Hard Times with 4thewords”

Writing Lessons from Reading Ray Bradbury

Observations from reading a collection of stories by a science fiction master

Confession: I haven’t read short stories since graduating from college.

This is probably not much of a shock to you. Unless you are a writing professional, you probably don’t read short fiction either. Novels really are the prevailing art of the day. But I’ve been trying to get back into them because they let you see a whole idea very quickly. I will never be able to read as many books as I wish I could, especially since I read so many genres. But with short stories, I can at least get a taste of what an author is like.

A great tool for this has been the LeVar Burton Reads podcast. I recommend it to everyone. It’s like Reading Rainbow but for grownups! And the vast majority of the stories fall into the SFF genre, so I’m getting exposed to a lot of authors I wouldn’t have time for otherwise.

But I set a goal to read one whole collection by a classic SFF author this winter. I wanted to really understand what one author was about without having to spend a year reading their whole backlist. I picked Ray Bradbury merely because I was looking for authors who had written about time travel, and his story “A Sound of Thunder” is, as far as I know, the origin of the butterfly effect as used in fiction.

Well, turns out most of his other stories are not about time travel, but I did enjoy reading A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories by Ray Bradbury. Some of my observations from the collection:

Continue reading “Writing Lessons from Reading Ray Bradbury”