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Not only is the reference to herding cats accurate in the sense that my characters (or more precisely my MC) where being unruly, but I also find it a slightly funny (though completely inside) joke since my MC is called Kat. But I decided to suck it up and put on my big girl pants and let her do what she wants. In the process of letting go of who or what I thought my MC should be the strangest thing happened. I am not only probably just one more editorial pass away from publishing book one in the series, I got about 1300 words into book two in about an hour and have sketched out the general path of a 5 book series in the little notebook I call my brain. I say sketched out because I am not by any stretch of the imagination a person who likes or ever uses the word outline.  So I am calling my quickly scribbled notes anything but an outline. They are just brief paragraphs of things I don't want to forget to include in each book. Please don't be pedantic (aka accurate) and insist I ...

Today's offering is from an article by Apoorva Mandavilli from the NYT, found HERE .

I made another blackout poem. This one is based on NYT opinion piece by Jemelle Bouie about what's happening in Portland. The entire article can be found here .

Based on the O Bheal 5 words for July 14-21: lace lip steal ice familiar

Finished Poem: How I got there:

For a long time now I have been doing daily (or almost daily) poems based on random words. I got the idea originally from a poetry contest which offered 5 random words for you to use. I found it on twitter so I turned it onto a personal challenge to write a poem based on those 5 words that would fit in a tweet (back when they were 140 characters long). I'm so weird I found the challenge to be loads of fun. Eventually I moved to using an app which generated 6 random words, and I would handwrite a poem (of any length) in a journal I kept just for this purpose. That worked fine for years, but I found the writing/revising process rather messy when done with regular pen and paper - as a result my poetry journal became a lot of crossed out words, words written over other words, and arrows indicating how something should be moved from point A to B. There was also the added factor of wanting to post said poems online (instagram, twitter, a blog???) but in a photo/word art format. Since th...

Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered by Austin Kleon My rating: 5 of 5 stars It's taken me almost a month to write this review. And I feel like I'm still trying to wrap my head around this book - in a good way, not a bad one. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I am attempting to implement and follow the advice within it. But, I keep bumping up against this internal wall I have about sharing things in progress. For reasons that would probably require a psychologist to decipher I have an aversion to showing/discussing anything from a work in progress to my plans for next month (or even tomorrow). I'd rather just do it and then share the result; having hidden all the messy meandering between the beginning and the end. However, I'm sure that the admonitions in Show Your Work are right and true and good, not only because they feel that way, but also because I know I enjoy finding out about the people and the process behind the writers I like. I e...