Tag: Inspiration
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Inspiration: Crafting
This has been a great year for my hobbies, and I cannot recall a time when I was happier, though I am sure the California weather helps too. For the last 20 years, my hobbies have been: writing and singleplayer videogames, with an occassional side of programming and D&D. Both of those primary timesinks are…
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Inspiration: Detective Noir
Ever since reading The Maltese Falcon in Undergrad, I loved the idea of detective noir. The 1930s novel and its film adaptation with Humphrey Bogart (1941) is often considered the beginning of or at least the solidification of the noir genre. Noir is a work of aesthetics as many genres are and often includes gangsters,…
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Tarot to Start the Year
There is a lot of misinformation about tarot in the world. I know people who think it can tell the future, and I know others who think the cards are influenced by Satan. But tarot, like so many things in life, only has as much power as people put into it. Shortly before Covid, I…
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Inspiration: Fairy Tale
During November’s month-long rush to write a 50,000 novel, I often pick a book to read to inspire my writing. Last year it was Patrick Rothfuss. This year is Stephen King’s Fairy Tale. The book was recommended to me because of my interest in the merging of the supernatural and mundane, and since it touches…
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A Playlist for Teeth&Dreams
Music plays an important role in my writing by giving me ideas and setting a tone, so in recent years I create a playlist for each new project. My current NaNoWriMo project, Of Teeth and Dreams, now also has a working playlist. Currently sitting at just over an hour, the occassional jarring combination of indie…
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Inspiration: Terry Pratchett
Leave a surprise for your readers in every paragraph. This writing advice was gifted to me during my undergraduate creative writing fellowship, but I did not understand it until I started reading Terry Pratchett. His writing is brilliant, hilarious, and unique. I originally discovered Pratchett because of Good Omens, a clever and humorous take on…
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Inspiration: Neil Gaiman
I have admired Neil Gaiman for a long time, partly because we have similar hair and partly because while he was with Amanda Palmer, they presented as a sucessful artistic power couple that could do anything. Who doesn’t wish to be that? Oh, and he was a pretty good writer too. Gaiman’s works have also…
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Writing Habits
Words haunt the dreams of authors, asleep or awake. They are finnicky, sassy, and beautiful. So I want to share a little about how I capture them. Where: My favorite place to go, especially when starting a new project, is a cafe. Recently that place has been Peet’s: great coffee and room to wade into…
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Inspiration: Flannery O’Connor
Anyone who has ever taken a Creative Writing course knows the name Flannery O’Connor. She is known for her unique descriptions, gothic style tinged with absurdism, and stories that generally paint unflattering portraits of American life in the south. Ten years after first being introduced to her in undergrad, I read her collection, “A Good…
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The 3 Best Parts of Graphic Novels
I love graphic novels. Comic books are just another one of those nerdy things that have become more mainstream with the expansion of independant publishers and the wider circulation of Manga and Anime. Graphic Novels hit different. The visuals and color tell a story in a way that books and television can’t. The still frames…
Grant Pearson 