Mental Purgatory

I thought I would use this post to discuss writing tactics based upon my own writing from last week. The piece has already seen another two revisions since then and will likely have another two before I’m confident in submitting it but it still can offer enough points of discussion. Anyways, let’s get down to [...]

This piece serves to explain why Wednesday has come and gone and I have yet to put a piece online for my Wednesday blog posting. Well, the truth of the matter is, that I’ve been busy!
The university I attend has gotten rather, 1984/Big Brother, in its policies, conceiving them behind closed doors and then forcing [...]

I have a poster of Martin Luther King in my room that says “Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” I also have one of Malcolm X which says “Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.”
For good [...]

As promised, I’m offering a glimpse into my own work this week so you can judge if I walk the walk as much as I talk the talk. This piece is based on the ideas presented in my Sunday piece. It’s around its fourth draft and will likely undergo two more before I’m fully happy with it. The last two paragraphs will likely be thrown out and the ending will be revised. They are from a version of the piece that started as nonfiction, and I think I’m going to redo them to make it a purely fictional piece. All comments are welcome of course. Next week I will do a discussion on revision based upon this piece with examples to help you with your own writing….

So I’m breaking the mold here to do one of those 25 things about you posts that have been going around on Facebook. I didn’t want to do it on there since I wouldn’t know who to tag and feel awkward trying to target people to do it for. I thought it would be a neat challenge to try and as an after note, it’s a pretty tough activity. I started struggling at the end but think I was finally able to pull through. Anyways, here’s my list!

1. I am a person of extremes. Most of the time I’m either very happy or very sad.
2. I hate being alone and I hate being in groups. I live for one on one interaction.
3. If I wasn’t in computer science, I would probably have been an English major.
4. I had never had alcohol before three weeks ago, and I’ve never had coffee.
5. I love R&B music, Tony Rich is my favorite artist by a long shot.
6. …

With Valentine’s Day so close by, I felt like it was a good time to tackle love in my blog. Yes, no small topic of conversation. To start it off, I wanted to bring up this quote by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his book Love in the Time of Cholera:

With her Florentino Ariza learned what he had already experienced many times without realizing it: that one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them. Alone in the midst of the crowd on the pier, he said to himself in a flash of anger: “My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse.”

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So I feel like I’ve got a reputation now of apologizing more than anything else. So today, I’m not gonna. The post is late because it’s late. Deal with it . Haha sorry, I’m just playing, let’s get down to business.

One of the interesting concepts that’s been discussed a lot lately in my writing groups is the notion of controlling the pace of your piece. Sometimes your writing will be moving WAY too quick and it leaves the reader confused and a little overwhelmed. By slowing the pace down some, you can build further suspense and give the reader more bearing. However, it’s a difficult balance as if you swing too far in the other direction, you’re going to bore your reader into passing on your writing for something a little more lively. So how can we find the compromise?

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This message is again, inspired by the movie Yes Man, similar to my earlier post about its inspirations in my writing. However, it’s most recent inspiration came from my LA interviews.

While interviewing candidates for the position of learning assistant at my school, each candidate shocked me. When they came into the room, my partner and I would offer the candidates tea. Now the surprising part is that in every case, the candidates ACCEPTED.

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So I’m not going to be able to post today, it’s been a hectic day, but I’d like to stick to my regiment (and Sunday will have a post, I promise). However, I’ve fortunately been working on a pet project related to Creative Writing and so, I’m going to talk about that here.

The project is Try Creative Writing, which is a collective for creative writing. I got the idea from writing this blog, and figured that if I’m going to commentate on the writing process, maybe I should build a site around that. Hence, Try Creative Writing. The site won’t be complete until this weekend, but in the meantime, I thought I’d talk about what’s there.

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Now before you get all excited and think this blog is going to be the unveiling of my new girlfriend (which doesn’t exist), contain yourself. That hand up there… is mine. Yes, I’m a man (trust me, I checked after seeing that picture) and yes, that is in fact nail polish. And that’s precisely why [...]