By Ryex

Just a quick note from your friendly neighborhood bookworm/indie author

if you use kindle for the majority of your library, they will be shutting down the function that allows you to download your files and transfer them via USB on the 26th of February. Which doesn't sound like a huge deal, but this also means that if a book is taken off Amazon for any reason—like it being banned—they can scrape it off your kindle as well. So maybe backup your library?

Trouble

He’d wanted the persimmons and asked her for them, but when she gave him the brown paper bag, brimming over, he was taken aback. Did he really need that many ? Still, he brought them home to his wife, and soon there were persimmons ripening on the kitchen counters, lining the windowsills. Each day, growing more and more succulent until the air was thick and sweet with their scent. At breakfast, he’d break one open with his spoon—the skin supple and ready to give—stir it into his hot cereal. Indescribable, the taste. And a texture he might have described as sea creature meets manna from heaven. When he ate one, he thought of her. And when he saw her, he thought of the persimmons. When her arm brushed, just barely, against his, did he imagine they both felt the same quickening? In myth, fruit is usually the beginning of disaster. And the way they made themselves so obvious— an almost audible orange against the white walls— made him wish he’d never asked her for them, didn’t have to smell them sugaring the air with ruin, as he sat there, face lowered to the bowl, spooning the soft pulp into his mouth.

Bonfire Opera : Poems. -- Danusha Laméris.

why is being creative immediately associated with shame. “yeah i’m a writer but i’ve never published anything.” “yeah i’m an artist but i’ve never sold a piece.” why do we always feel the need to immediately discount the great achievement that is creating something from nothing. give yourself some credit. you made something and that’s what matters

slow down for your disabled friends. thats like a bare minimum kindness that we shouldnt have to ask for. i love that youre so quirky and walking fast is a cool personality trait to you and all that but i bet you can count your physically disabled friends on less than one hand

Just finished a book in which some characters spent a lot of time on horses, and whenever they dismounted after riding all day, they were described as sinking to the floor because their legs can’t carry them anymore, or hobbling towards the nearest chair and collapsing onto it with their whole body aching. It was so ridiculous it took me out of the story every time. These are characters who live with horses and ride nearly every day. They should be fine. They’re good riders, there’s no reason for their legs to be painfully cramped after a day on the saddle. I feel like the author was trying to add realism but only went riding a few times and felt horribly stiff and sore afterwards and assumed that’s just how you feel after a day’s ride no matter what. I promise it’s not!! Your characters should be the kind of good-tired you feel after any other type of satisfying workout your muscles are used to. Drawing on your own experience to write characters that live very different lives is such a bad bet. Maybe someone did tell her it would no longer be so painful if she just kept practising and she dismissed it as obvious horse propaganda

Failing and Flying

Jack Gilbert. Refusing Heaven, 2005.

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew. It’s the same when love comes to an end, or the marriage fails and people say they knew it was a mistake, that everybody said it would never work. That she was old enough to know better. But anything worth doing is worth doing badly.

Like being there by that summer ocean on the other side of the island while love was fading out of her, the stars burning so extravagantly those nights that anyone could tell you they would never last.

Every morning she was asleep in my bed like a visitation, the gentleness in her like antelope standing in the dawn mist.

Each afternoon I watched her coming back through the hot stony field after swimming, the sea light behind her and the huge sky on the other side of that. Listened to her while we ate lunch. How can they say the marriage failed? Like the people who came back from Provence (when it was Provence) and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.

I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph.

Thinking

Don't you wish they would stop, all the thoughts swirling around in your head, bees in a hive, dancers tapping their way across the stage? I should rake the leaves in the carport, buy Christmas lights. Was there really life on Mars? What will I cook for dinner? I walk up the driveway, put out the garbage bins. I should stop using plastic bags, visit my friend whose husband just left her for the Swedish nanny. I wish I hadn't said Patrick's painting looked "ominous." Maybe that's why he hasn't called. Does the car need oil again? There's a hole in the ozone the size of Texas and everything seems to be speeding up. Come, let's stand by the window and look out at the light on the field. Let's watch how the clouds cover the sun and almost nothing stirs in the grass.

The Moons of August, Danusha Laméris

idk thinking about how sometimes you have to show up for people you aren't that close to, because sometimes you're just the person who's there. sometimes you invite a new friend to a party and end up having to sit with them through a panic attack. sometimes you run into an acquaintance on their worst day and they need to talk about what happened. sometimes someone is crying in a stairwell and you're the only one around to ask if they're okay. and none of this is "trauma dumping" or whatever the fuck it's just being there for people because you're the one in the room with them.

WHY YOU SHOULD WRITE HORRIBLY:

1. You’ll never write anything if you don’t

i want to coin a phrase that's the opposite of writer's block. call it the muse's fire hydrant. thirty thousand story ideas are being beamed directly into your brain and if you don't write them all at once you will die.