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Terror Week Day Four: Locking Up Your Inner Karen

Earlier in the week I asked you what you feared as writers. You told me you were scared of judgement, of not succeeding, and of taking “too long” to pick up the tools. These are the terrors tha...

Some Things Aren't Too Good to be True.

I once had a relationship that was like a nuclear fallout. There was absurdly delicious sex around every corner so the paintings were skew. The furniture was out of place. There were clothes on the...

BlackHippyChick Day: Run-On Sentences

You’ve seen it before, probably in my writing — The writer has forgotten that readers need to take a breath while reading, so they have written a sentence that takes up an entire paragraph, and...

Terror Week Day Three: Writing is the Best Cure for Writer's Block

My mentor believed that poetry and verse were entirely different things. He saw poetry as inspiration set down on paper from the highest point of your creative instinct. Verse was the technical, so...

When all the toys are put away, sadists must face themselves in the mirror.

“I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then.”” –Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

...

Terror Week Day Two: Separating David from Goliath

Life is simple when David and Goliath are two separate people. David can simply pick up a pebble and unleash a pointed assault. Easy.

More often, though, David and Goliath are the oppressors ...

This is Terror Week! Day One: Overcoming Fear

Most industries require workers to learn facts and formulate strategies based on those facts. Writing is an entirely different matter. It certainly puts you in touch with facts and strategies, but ...

Literary Device Week Day Five: Anaphora

Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities may well have the most beautiful first paragraph ever written:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it wa...

2024-08-31 08:53:26 +0000 UTC View Post

Questions to Ask in Pre-Scene Negotiation

This is not intended to be an exhaustive list, but rather a list of questions you might not have thought to ask.

How much nudity are you comfortable with? Which items of clothing must...

Literary Device Week Day Four: Assonance and Dissonance

If you’ve watched Romeo and Juliet, one passage probably plays out loudly in your head:

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name.
Or i...

2024-08-30 03:41:53 +0000 UTC View Post

We're the Hidden People

My kink is a secret. I spend a great deal of my life hiding. I keep my toys in unidentifiable boxes and don’t open my Fetlife window in polite company. I dodge references to one of the most impor...

Literary Device Week Day Three: Symbolism

In Lord of the Flies, a group of stranded boys use a conch shell like a talking stick. The boy with the conch is allowed to speak, and everyone else is required to listen. Once he’s finished, he ...

It's BlackHippyChick Day! Today we're doing active and passive sentences.

Writing is like watercolours. The more you dilute your sentences with extraneous words, the weaker their impact. We spend a great deal of time trying to remove words that contribute nothing to our ...

Literary Devices Week Day Two: Devices for Dialogue

Are you with ABC? Because I think they’re a fake news network, a terrible network, and I think it’s disgraceful that I came here in good spirit. I love the Black population of this ...

2024-08-27 08:13:09 +0000 UTC View Post

It’s Literary Device Week!

I know it sounds boring, but I’m terrifically excited about this one. A literary device is the accelerator pedal of your car. Without it, you won’t get very far, but if you put foot, you can ra...

Reading Week Day Six McSweeney's Internet Tendency

McSweeney's Internet Tendency is the Paris Review of comedy and satire writing. They basically reject every submission they receive. I have three rejections to my name thus far, but I intend to ear...

I Will Never Give a Good Handjob

I trust my math abilities more than my handjob talents, and I can barely do long division. My first boyfriend gave me a little technical knowledge, but I’m still te...

Felony cyberstalking

Felony cyberstalking can include up to five years in prison. Under federal law, cyberstalking is punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine of $250,000. A defendant convicted of felony har...

I Hereby Declare Wednesdays "Black Hippy Chick Day

@BlackHippyChick is working on basic grammar or style, and since everyone needs to do the same thing, we'll be cover...

Reading Week Day Four: Salman Rushdie and Marquez

Midnight's Children is one of the most awarded novels in history. Salman Rushdie writes magical realism, but this particular book is far more accessible than most in the genre. People often recomme...

Reading Week Day Five: Crow

In the past we’ve spoken about universality in literature: the themes and emotions that all humans have experienced, and how we, as writers, must turn them into something new. Everyone has loved,...

Domineering Doms Lack One Magical Ingredient: Dominance

A dom once hurt me so badly it felt as though my organs were being flayed. My legs crumpled and, for a while, I couldn’t breathe. His response? “That’s one way to kill the mood.”

&nbs...

Week Six Day Three: Sipho Sepamla

During the apartheid era, Black writers were gagged from publishing prose. To get around the gag, those writers began covering political themes through poetry. This didn't make it effective 2024-08-22 07:03:58 +0000 UTC View Post