Desert Pond

Author: Erica

  • Writer’s Bump

    I have writer’s bump. Yes, I said “bump” not “block”. I might actually have bumps, now that I think about it. First, there’s a bump – a callous, really – developing at the base of my right hand from where my wrist tends to sit on the keyboard as I type or on the desktop when I use the mouse. Maybe it’s my badge of courage for having taken on so many writing projects I can’t see straight. Which leads me to my second bump – a big hill of writing in front of me that I climb and climb but seems to be growing.

    Don’t get me wrong. I’ll take bumps over blocks any day.

  • Spitting Out Posts

    I haven’t posted to my blog in so long I nearly forgot I even had a blog. I’ve seen some very nice, simple but effective blog posts lately on other sites and I think it’s time I squeeze in a few of those. Can’t guarantee they’ll be effective – or even entertaining – but if I focus on just writing and not word count, I’ll at least get back to blogging.

    You’ll notice my previous posts are a bit lengthy. I don’t think of myself as a talker, but when it comes to writing, I can go on and on. In fact, you should see some of the posts I’ve left in forum threads. I’ve nearly taken up the page which must frustrate a few folks. Today’s message: there’s nothing wrong with short and sweet. I suppose that’s what Twitter is trying to tell us.

  • I Heart New York City

    Today, after only 3 and one half hours of sleep, I climbed aboard a plane in Phoenix and dozed my way to NYC’s JFK International Airport. Tomorrow, I’ll be attending an all day meeting, but tonight I have nothing to do but keep myself occupied. After grabbing a cab at the airport and strapping on my seatbelt (a tip I’ve learned when being in a cab in NYC to keep from sliding left to right and right to left when the cabbie takes a sudden, jarring turn to fling the cab from one lane of the freeway to another), I watch, amazed, out the window at the buzzing mass that is New York City.

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  • Writing Contests Worth Your Time

    Yesterday, while doing some additional research on how to further develop a career in writing, I came across a question about a writing competition in a forum.  Competitions?  They have writing competitions?  I guess I should have realized that, but truly it hadn’t crossed my mind.  I ran off to my favorite search engine (hello Google!) and found several interesting, high quality competitions worth considering.

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  • Creative Writing Idea

    My goal is to start writing again and to keep me on track I’ve developed a list of daily writing tasks that I’ve been following pretty religiously.  Although hard to call it a task because it’s more fun than work, one of those steps is to write short pieces of creative writing fiction for a writer’s blog called Extreme Writing.

    Creative writing describes all of the writing that doesn’t fit in the category of articles, non-fiction, and textbooks.  You get to break the rules in creative writing and come up with poems, short stories, or long novels.  Break the rules.  One has so many rules to follow in every day life that creative writing is like the wild west where I get to be in charge.  If I want to say “off with their heads”, I can do so, and if I want to do it without writing a complete sentence because that’s what makes sense for the piece, then – ta da – I can.

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