Welcome, Brave Writers.
O Writers! Do you Suffer from Writer's-Block? The Fiction-Writing Directorate can Help!
Our Exhortations will Inspire you; our Exercises will Strengthen you; and the Ancient Art of Shiva Nata will Enlighten you.
Read! Write! Flourish!
Or Else.
Subsiste statim sermonem et scribe.
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By Lida, on June 7th, 2010%
Angry Monster
Darlings! May I introduce you to this fierce beast? Willie Hewes drew him for me, and what an angry creature he is.
He is the voice of Failure. He is the voice of This Is Why Not. He is the voice of all the reasons why I should not write; indeed, he is the voice of why I should not do anything at all.
“You insipid slut!” he shouts. “No one wants to read anything written by a harlot like you! Don’t even bother!” He lists all the ways in which I am doing it wrong, all the ways I doom . . . → Read More: Concerning Monsters
By Lida, on May 27th, 2010%
Lida
Darlings!
Thank you so much for participating in our Survey. The results are simply delicious, and will be tremendously useful to us.
Almost three-quarters of you wish to write every day: yet you don’t.
Almost half of you don’t write each day because you believe you are lazy; a similar number fear that others will laugh at you.
Half?
My goodness. Those are some weighty issues, darlings, even without the zombies, even without grouping similar responses together.
Our free e-mail course will help. I’ll tell you more as it develops.
I promised we’d pick a winner: our Random Selection Device has chosen Ms. Lipten to receive a . . . → Read More: Survey Results
By Lida, on May 20th, 2010%
Lida
Darlings! Thank you so much for your responses to our Survey! With your fabulous input, our upcoming Course will be even more magnificent than we imagined. We truly are listening!
For example, a startlingly large number of you aren’t writing because you fear being eaten by zombies. O, Darlings, we can help you with that, and are already working on a new zombie module for the Course.
If you haven’t taken the Survey yet, I would be absolutely thrilled if you’d do it! It only takes a few moments, and you might win a lovely prize.
Your Exercise
In all the excitement of the . . . → Read More: Training Exercise #27: Comfort
By Lida, on May 18th, 2010%
Lida
Darlings! O, Darlings. I trust you read Ethelie’s post yesterday? It is no doubt impolitic of me to speak out, but I fear I must disagree with her. O, she will be so cross with me!
All this talk of discipline, of iron will! Of steam and trains and engines! Of gears and machine-like precision and reliability! One commenter dreams of building a poetry robot!
The imagery, my darlings, simply does not work for me. Ethelie’s soul may be made of steam and steel and gears; mine is made of different stuff. And thus I shall re-envision things. Ethelie may be my . . . → Read More: An Exhortation on Adoration
By Lida, on April 23rd, 2010%
In Part One of this tale, Our Heroes learned of their Urgent Need for a Manifesto (lest their Web-Site license be revoked!), and traveled Bravely to the Manifesto Mines of Kazakhstan. Upon arrival, they found themselves Surrounded by angry Miners with Rifles!
Lida
Darlings! Now I can tell you what happened next!
Ethelie viciously shoved me out from the shelter of my precious zeppelin, toward the glowering miners. At first I assumed this was her vengeance for the time I caused her laudanum addiction to overcome her, and I cried out against her. “Stop shrieking,” she whispered, though I could barely hear . . . → Read More: On the Creation of the Manifesto, Part II
By Lida, on April 1st, 2010%
Lida
Darlings! I’m back from Majorca. It was absolutely divine, and I’m now rested, restored, reinvigorated, and ready for a new challenge.
Oh, yes, Ethelie was still a bit frowny when I got back, but luckily I had a plate of Boggins’s Ma’s Biscuits to give her as a peace offering, and we have now resolved our differences. After all, we’re both deeply committed to the Directorate’s goal of helping writers write — does it matter if that lofty goal is achieved via punishment or via delicious, delicious pie?
No, it does not!
Our April Challenge:
How scrumptious is it that just when I was . . . → Read More: I Dare You!
By Lida, on March 19th, 2010%
Lida
You lovely, lovely writers!
Your exercise for today is very simple: take the weekend off. Yes, the whole weekend! You’ve worked so hard, accomplished so much: and now it is time to rest.
Since finishing my epic poem about President Polk, I’ve become painfully aware of the need to recuperate and regenerate my creative energies. I naively thought that I could just plunge right in to my next project, but instead I found myself simply playing solitaire today! No matter what I tried, I could not bring myself to start work on my exciting new project.
Finally, I realized I’d forgotten to rest! . . . → Read More: Training Exercise #25: Rejuvenation
By Lida, on March 18th, 2010%
O what a glorious, glorious day this is! After hours of feverish effort this afternoon, I’ve completed my epic poem about President James K. Polk! I’m weary and exhilarated and terribly, terribly proud. O, yes, it’s a first draft, and the metre sags in spots, and I might well have glossed over some of my research (or did President Polk really have a pet pterodactyl??), but I can fix all that later. For now, it is enough to rejoice in completion!
My friends, I am not ashamed to tell you that I wept as I wrote the stanzas about President Polk’s death . . . → Read More: Training Exercise #24: Celebration!
By Lida, on March 16th, 2010%
Lida
Beautiful, beautiful writers! I’ve had the most astonishing week. Let me tell you all about it!
After spending several blissful hours with my Muse and my epic poem about President Polk, I decided to repeat Training Exercise #23 several times, for I am a firm believer in training exercises. I sought out the virile embrace of the Beastmaster, and did my best to improve my skills.
I felt as if I was making terrific progress! Everything was going swimmingly — when the door crashed open. It was Ethelie, and she was Very Unhappy. Oh, bother, just thinking about it makes me Capitalize . . . → Read More: An Exhortation: On Finding Your Voice
By Lida, on March 9th, 2010%
Hello again, beauties!
I hope you enjoyed your pie yesterday; I certainly did. I had a delicious slice of chocolate meringue pie, myself, and afterwards, spent almost an hour on my epic poem about President Polk. Wonderful!
As I completed the stanza about President Polk overseeing the groundbreaking for the Washington Monument (such a tragedy, that he never lived to see it thrusting mightily against the sky!), however, my thoughts strayed to the Beastmaster. Though he is himself nearly as bestial as the creatures for whom he cares, should he not also have pie? Indeed he should! So I hurried off to his . . . → Read More: Training Exercise #23: Permission to Be Very Bad
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