Poems Are Just Flakes of Skin

Searching for Rude A poem Mind your manners. Every decent lady knows to mind her manners, The mother says as she wipes the corner of her mouth With a dainty napkin of linen. Mind your manners, she says after the almost discreet belch. Mind your manners, she says as her daughters reach For…

If by aren’t allowed, you mean you forbid it then who are you to forbid? If by write you mean think, tell stories, try to understand, to recreate you in a way that isn’t such a jackass, I’m sorry but you can only be improved and you’re missing out. The…

“My heart aches,” he says as if that will change her mind. He quotes Keats, memorizes it the way others memorize song lyrics, Drunk, but not on hemlock or an opiate. Drunk One minute and the next. Keats is not pretentious enough a poet to impress Someone who sings with…

Reaching out This week I reached out to another woman even though I was afraid to. If you don’t know, I’m actually technically an introvert. Reaching out is hard for me. But it wasn’t about me being an introvert. I was afraid to reach out to her because I’ve started…

Without knowing the backstory, we wouldn’t know the emotional goals of the character, the why for their tangible goals. Instead we’d be reading and thinking, yeah, he wants this. So what? To listen to the podcast click here or here. https://open.spotify.com/episode/7snLeiY6plAE8aCTy9V2p7

Sometimes you can’t catch any breaks. Sometimes you might have the worst train robbery in history with the smallest take ever. And sometimes you die and become an amusement park dummy. It sounds like an episode of Supernatural or the X-Files, but it’s actually true. Join us at Dude, No…

Every week, we’re sending out a quick round-up of what we talked about and some cool links to check out to help all of us become better writers. Here we go! On the podcast, we talked about writing exceptional characters and backstory. https://livinghappy.substack.com/p/writing-exceptional-characters-part And we dug a little deeper about the three uses…

Right before my mom died and was in a hospital in New Hampshire, she asked for some vanilla soft-serve ice cream. She was terribly weak, terribly shaky. She was seeing her beloved brother who was already dead and occasionally calling out to him. They brought her that ice cream and…